101: Legacy vendors are lying, content vs journalism, the failing NYT, how to sell anything
Welcome to issue #101.
While it's great to be back in Boston (winners of the worst traffic in the US, congrats!) I had an incredible trip last week to Sweden speaking to the Stockholm Marketing Association (read their event recap), and exploring the Swedish Lapland.
If heading up to the northern parts of arctic Scandinavia isn't on your bucket list... may I suggest you add it, ASAP. A magical experience and one that will leave you with frozen eyelashes.
In this edition #101 of The World's Best Newsletter:
1. Should content marketers think like journalists? My answer.
2. Your responsibility in events & ABM are rather similar
3. Why our data visualizations fail
4. The failing NYT is better than ever
5. Your legacy software vendors are lying to you
6. How to sell just about anything
7. Quote of the week
1. Should content marketers think like journalists?
Eh, the answer is somewhere in the middle, I say.
Content marketing was first lauded as the future of marketing (“the only marketing left”) in 2008. It was positioned as an opportunity for marketers to serve their audiences as journalists do.
So content marketers frequently hear the advice that they should think like journalists.
I don’t disagree — but I don’t think we should take this guidance at face value. It’s more nuanced than that.
Thank you to Melanie Deziel for helping me flesh out some good advice here, and you should also read Jill Golden's take against the phrase "Brand Journalism."
2. Your responsibility in events & ABM are rather similar
I weighed in on this Certain blog post on what's to come for event marketing in 2019:
“Attendees make time to travel to events in order to pick their heads up from day-to-day work and discover the narratives that shape their realities back in the office. That brings a level of expectation with it. I believe brands have a responsibility to these attendees to continue to push the agenda of their industries."
And, spoiler alert, the same thinking applies to account-based marketing. Read this post from Engagio on what's to come in 2019:
"How you engage a target account indicates the quality of your thinking, the value you bring to the table, and the forthcoming experience a buyer will have doing business with you. (You know what they say about first impressions.) ABM is where thought leadership should be brought to bear."
3. Why our data visualizations fail
I'm all about the trend of using of surveys and research to give marketing messages some validity, some credence and basis in fact.
My tenure at an analyst firm especially helped me appreciate the adage "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
That's why I appreciate this piece from Tricia Aanderud so much (h/t to Tamsen Webster and Chris Penn) Read how many of us f*ck up charts and graphs, and how to make them more effective.
Long story short: Too often we fail to consider what question the audience was asking.
4. The failing NYT is better than ever
Score one for journalism. Kind of.
Recently, Buzzfeed laid off 15% of its work force, McClatchy offered buyouts to 10% of its staff, Gannett (USA Today + many others) is laying off reporters around the country, Vice Media cut its media division by 10%, and Verizon Media Group (Yahoo, TechCrunch and HuffPost) is undergoing a 10% cut...
But the New York Times is hiring more journalists than ever, reporting revenue growth, and looking to grow their subscription business to 10 million by 2025.
Why? How? A focus on quality content to appeal to advertisers:
“Our appeal to subscribers – and to the world’s leading advertisers – depends more than anything on the quality of our journalism. That is why we have increased, rather than cut back, our investment in our newsroom and opinion departments. We want to accelerate our digital growth further, so in 2019, we will direct fresh investment into journalism, product and marketing." - Mark Thompson, president and CEO of the New York Times Company
5. Your legacy software vendors are lying to you
I so appreciate this perspective from Kelly Goetsch, chief product officer at commercetools...
Every day I hear of some vendor claiming to be "modernizing" their old product in support of some new technology trend (cloud, headless, microservices, etc)... Having spent my career working for software vendors, I'd like to explain why these modernization efforts don't and can't work.
... please don't believe that your 20+ year old commerce platform is suddenly "microservices" because you saw it on a press release.
Burn.
6. How to sell just about anything
What makes things cool? This Atlantic piece from Derek Thompson in 2017 reminds us
"...to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising."
Read on.
7. Quote of the week
"What people are paid is a reflection of their value to the company, and who the company values."
- Natasha Lamb, director of equity research and shareholder engagement at Arjuna Capital, told to the Washington Post via Broadsheet.
Bonus: A study of companies in the wake of a Danish law requiring employers to report gender pay gaps found that, over five years, the companies that had to disclose the information were able to shrink their gaps, while the wage disparities of those that did not stayed in place.
Thanks, as always for reading. I hope it's been delicious food for thought, and if you're still hungry, you can read past issues here.
Best,
Katie
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