We’ve all experienced it. We create a campaign we’re sure will bring success to our client, but nope. We have to adjust course and go in a different direction. Or, we get a wild idea, shoot from the hip, hope…and it works. As much as we think we know, we keep finding we’re not as smart as we think we were. You could say we don’t know anything.
That’s what physicist Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics theorized in1926. "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle" states that we can't be certain of anything because the very act of looking at something changes its nature.
If that includes me, then what about all of you who’ve taken my advice, used a technique I’ve espoused and made a client happy? It still doesn’t guarantee that it will work every time for every client.
Well…those of you who have read more than a few of my 241 articles on creating commercials will notice that I will seemingly contradict myself from one article to the next. One article might describe a technique and another might advocate one that takes the opposite approach.
But Heisenberg’s principle does allow for probabilities.
Choosing a marketing approach comes down to experience and intuition, which will help you narrow your choices down to probable ones. The techniques, which I’ve used with actual advertisers running actual broadcast schedules all work. But the choice of technique depends on the:
- client
- marketing objective
- inventory
- media mix
- time of year
- budget
- station audience
- weather
and…gut feeling.
Yes, sometimes I just go with my gut, and so should you. That doesn’t mean being lazy and cranking out a typical advertising message. It still means telling an effective story that draws in potential customers. The more commercial creation techniques you have in your collection, the better feeling you’ll have for which one might work best in any particular circumstance.
So – learn lots of successful techniques, absorb as much as you can about the decision criteria listed above and rely on your increasingly accurate intuition. If you achieve success for your client, congrats. If not, be prepared to go back to your collection for another commercial approach that has a better probability of bringing results.
You can be uncertain, but still make probable choices to bring your client success. That’s a principle that works.
Want to expand your universe of commercial possibilities to get better results for clients? Email me. Details to follow.
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