Brits Battle to Conquer Black Friday

Until recently in the UK, Black Friday referred exclusively to the Friday before Christmas, when everyone boozed until blacking out.

That changed in 2016, when a UK-based subsidiary of Walmart tried to import the Yanks' version of Black Friday.

It didn't quite take.

Brits' brick-and-mortar shopping on Black Friday has proven so tepid traditional retailers like John Lewis, Primark, Oasis, and Argos have downplayed the yearly shop-a-thon, or bagged it altogether (ASDA since 2016 went out of business).

The winners of the UK's version Black Friday?

Amazon and Alibaba.

To compete with these online giants, UK retailers need to get serious about web selling, says digital marketer Simon Williams. He urges them to:

• Prepare their websites for a bevy of shoppers
• Identify the most profitable social platforms and use them to promote discounts
• Make videos a key part of social content
• Create a dedicated hashtag, and
• Simplify the online buying process

Lack of preparedness is costly, Williams notes. Last year, John Lewis lost £75,000 in online sales when its website crashed for 60 seconds.

BLACK FRIDAY BONUS: Check out Simon Williams' extraordinary infographic, The Winners and Losers in the Battle of Black Friday.

Corporate Wedding Planners Strike Back

An "aspirational" ad campaign of the late 1960s proclaimed, "You've come a long way, baby."

It took event planners a while to catch up.

But they assuredly have, as made clear by Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover's 200-page Experiential Marketing: Secrets, Strategies, and Success Stories from the World's Greatest Brands.

No longer "corporate wedding planners," experiential marketers in the 2010s have become marketing kingpins—the drivers and integrators of all the marketing "silos."

"Live experiences have ignited a marketing revolution in which brands around the world have committed to upgrading their marketing strategies, budgets, and platforms," Smith and Hanover write. "And that revolution has driven a much-needed evolution of the marketing channels and silos used by brands for 50 years."

The heart of the book lies in Chapter Four, "Anatomy of an Experiential Marketing Campaign," where the authors describe the 11 "Experiential Pillars" underpinning the channel.

"As with a great recipe in which the ingredients are blended together to create a unique flavor, these pillars work together to optimize engagement and will allow you to achieve the brand-building, value-creating, clutter-braking power of experiential marketing," they write.

They base the chapter not on hard knocks or gut feelings, but an analysis of the 1,000+ winners of the Ex Awards, the annual awards competition for live events they've produced since 2002. And the events they consider take not one form, but many, from PR stunts, in-store events and road shows, to trade shows, user conferences and sales meetings.

Reading Experiential Marketing tempted me to update my recent post, "My 5 All-Time Favorite Books on Marketing," because the book has the same quality as the "mind-blowing game-changers" I listed there.

No matter how much you've dabbled in event production, the authors give you a palpable sense while you're reading the book that you're on a path of discovery; that you're like one of those "Pioneers of Television" who's in at the inception of a powerful new medium with a yet-understood capacity to build large audiences and fundamentally reshape worldviews.

Buy it. Read it.


You've come a long way baby! by JustAnotherJester

Is Your Content Fat and Soggy?

Is your content fat and soggy?

A story memo can cure it.

Professional writers use story memos to pitch ideas to editors and producers.

The brief memos answer five questions:

• Why does the story matter?
• What's the point?
• Why is the story being told?
• What does the story say about the world?
• What's the story about in a single word?

With answers to these questions, a theme emerges. That focuses the story, makes telling it easier, and serves readers a tasty treat.

Fat and soggy's fine, if you want to appear "content rich" to boobs, bosses and bots.

But crisp and thin converts customers.

Wasting Away

Not every artist is an addict, and certainly not every addict is an artist.

—Steven Pressfield

Getting wasted has wasted many an artist.

The list is long.

Scott Fitzgerald. Dylan Thomas. Jack Kerouac. Jackson Pollack. David Smith. Errol Flynn. Marilyn Monroe. Oliver Reed. Lenny Bruce. John Belushi. Chris Farley. Janice Joplin. Elvis Presley. Jerry Garcia. Amy Winehouse. And more.

Novelist Steven Pressfield thinks the path of addiction comes easily, but not inevitably, to the artist.

She can choose to get wasted; or she can choose to work.

"There are two ways to know if you’re taking the addict’s path or the artist’s," Pressfield says. "One, the artist’s way requires work. We have to sweat to find surcease of pain. And two, the artist’s imperative is to maintain self-sovereignty, not abdicate it. Her heart may surrender momentarily in order to hear heaven’s music, but her feet remain planted here on earth, where she will do the work to bring that song to human ears."

Work obsesses the most unlikely of artists, Jimmy Buffet.

According to his editor, Terry McDonell, Buffet has always worked—never for money, but "only because it was good for Jimmy Buffet."

It's why he's a success, with:

• Over 30 albums (8 Gold, 9 Platinum)
• Three New York Times best sellers
• A branded-merchandise company with $1.5 billion in annual sales
• 7 hotels, including Margaritaville, a 17-story resort hotel in Miami (8 more are underway, including one in Grand Cayman) 
• A family resort in Orlando with hotels, a 12-acre water park, and 1,200 homes
• 67 themed restaurants
• A Norwegian Cruise Line offering named Margaritaville at Sea
• A satellite radio channel
• A suite of mobile games and videos
• One of America’s fastest-growing craft beers
• A line of branded liquors, and
• A line of branded groceries, including iced tea, frozen shrimp, and tortilla chips

PS: With Jimmy Buffet's buy-in and enough financial backing, I plan to open the first Margaritaville-themed nursing home, Wasting Away, in Q4 2017. Call me now, to invest.

NOTE: This post does not constitute an offer to participate in any investment.

Thanks

Opportunity.

Teachers.

Wife.

Children.

Grandchild.

Immigrants.

First Amendment.