When Daft Punk set out to write and record their fourth and final studio album ‘Random.Access.Memories’, they had one thing on their minds. To create one of the most original, creative, best sounding albums of all time. Their thinking was simple - if we want to create something new that nobody has ever heard before then we need to make music that doesn’t exist yet. No plug-ins, no samples, no stock - everything original, everything unique. 

Released in 2013 Random.Access.Memories received widespread critical acclaim, it topped the US Billboard 200, was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, topped the charts in twenty other countries, won 3 grammys including Album of the Year, Best Dance/Electronica Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classica and was ranked number 295 on the Rolling Stone list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Not bad.

Much like Random.Access.Memories, the job of B2B advertising is to be creative, original and memorable. Yet in the hope of creating something original the first place most B2B brands turn to are stock libraries full of largely conventional, familiar, uncreative and uninventive images with no sense of ownership or originality. The result -  Adverts that blend in when they need to stand out and are forgettable when they need to be memorable.

If your ambition as a brand is to genuinely stand out, be noticed by your customers and be the envy of your competitors - then beware of the comfort of convention. Like most things in life - the potency and meaning of a communication is directly correlated to the cost or effort put into it. Or to quote Rory Sutherland, “It is difficult to produce good advertising, but advertising is only good because it is difficult to produce.”

The fallacy that originality and creativity are expensive is also not true - big problems are not always solved with big budgets. In fact I find the reverse to be true - “We have no money, we’ll have to think” - and powerful creative can be 10 to 20 times more sales effective than mediocre creative.

B2B brands have become so obsessed with not losing that they’ve forgotten how to win. They’ve become accustomed to keeping up with the joneses - striped lawn, picket fence, pruned hedge - every house the same. The good news is that in the land of the bland you don’t have to do much to be creative, to stand out, to be original. We need to be more daft, we need to be more punk - because the benefits are there for you - if you want them.

Source

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/case-studies/images/pdfs/Cashing_In_Whitepaper_FINAL.pdf