From NFTs to work/life balance and how Automated Creative help brands stop guessing and start growing: Tom Ollerton appears as a guest on Performance Marketing World’s Attention Seekers podcast

Tom recently appeared on Performance Marketing World’s Attention Seekers podcast hosted by Lucy Shelley to discuss what’s overrated and underrated in the industry, talk about what makes him an attention seeker, and how Automated Creative shun best practice (and why). Here are a few things we’ve learned.

What are some of the most exciting trends in the marketing world today? 

The rise of NFTs (non fungible tokens) and the way they give artists more freedom to connect directly with their audience are some of the most interesting changes. For creators who want to cut out the middleman, NFTs give them so much more flexibility and lots of new opportunities to sell their work. After all, bands are performance marketers - each performance or track played is advertising other work by the artist encouraging the listener to find out more.

What’s overrated in marketing? 

It’s got to be the metaverse.

By investing in Oculus, Meta are trying to get us all drawn into the promise of the metaverse as a completely new environment and experience. They are sending the message that we will all live in the metaverse, and will interact in it thanks to their headset. But, isn’t the metaverse just the internet?

Whether you’re playing a computer game and update your avatar online, or setting yourself up for a video call, this is all virtual interaction - i.e. the metaverse.

Meta are trying to get people excited about something that’s already been there for years. That’s why the “metaverse” - in that sense - is overrated.

And what’s underrated? 

Marketers don’t pay enough attention to work/life balance. However, we believe that making this a priority is key to doing great work.

At Automated Creative, some rules around work/life balance are:

  • It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Work hard to protect the wellbeing of everyone in the team and the results will follow.

  • Think of the clever ways in which you can respect each other’s time, from no-meeting Fridays to any other ways to be mindful of how everyone works and performs at their best.

  • Choose your place to do your best work. If you need to work with people, come into the office. But, if you need to isolate yourself and work on a slide deck, do what makes the most sense for you.

What about best practice and work we’re proud of? 

It may sound controversial, but best practice is the practice of copying others. If everyone is copying best practice, then everyone is doing the same thing, and no one stands out - and that’s what marketing is all about.

Automated Creative bring together performance marketing and market research instead. This means producing lots of ads to test hypotheses for brands, then optimising them over time based on the audience’s feedback. 

The most important data you can have from your consumers is what they’re reacting to in the moment. With our proprietary technology, we’re able to test visual and written cues and find the absolute best way to target our clients’ target audiences.

Some of the work we’re most proud of is with Reckitt: campaigns for Durex, Vanish, Nurofen for Children and more. With the infant formula Enfamil, we found out that what mums really want to see is… dads! Dads in ads was certainly not what best practice would have suggested, but it turned out to be the way to catch the brand’s target audience’s attention.

You can listen to the full podcast with Performance Marketing World here.

And check out our work in more detail here.

 
Automated Creative