This is the latest in a marketoon series with Baynote called “Intent to Buy” that parodies the state of e-commerce personalization. The series spotlights the top challenges that marketers face in online experience. Baynote is offering a signed print of this cartoon to every comment or cartoon suggestion posted at the Baynote blog over the next week (by 3/21; U.S. addresses only).

The Kony video famously generated 70 million views last week. It left many marketers thinking of the “viral video” as a silver bullet. If a viral video could raise so much awareness of an Ugandan warlord, then maybe a viral video could raise awareness of a brand’s single minded proposition.

Marketers often add viral videos to marketing plans as if “viral” is as predictable as the circulation in a coupon drop or the number of samples in a sampling event. What marketers forget is that no one can create a viral video. We can only create quality content that may or may not go viral.

Kevin Allocca from YouTube recently shared that every minute, 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. An infinitesimally small number of those videos “go viral”. While he notes some of the tactics that can lead to viral videos (such as the role of “tastemakers”, which was a big factor in the Kony video), we never know in advance what video will catch on. For every “double rainbow” or “ultimate dog tease” that spread like wildfire, there are countless videos that don’t.

On Friday, I gave a talk on the topic of “Content Worth Sharing: What Marketers Can Learn From Cartoons” at an online conference put on by MarketingProfs (for those of you who didn’t make it, I posted my talk and notes). My main message was that continuity trumps virality. Rather than chase the elusive viral video, commit to ongoing content to grow your audience over time.

One of the greatest viral marketing success stories is Orabrush. They make a tongue scraper to fight bad breadth. It’s not the most exciting product category, but their YouTube channel has been viewed 46 million times. They credit their success, not to a single viral video, but to an ongoing commitment to quality content, such as the weekly webisode series, “Diary of a Dirty Tongue”.

Their main advice: “everyone is on a rampage to figure out how to make their viral video. To gain a loyal following, create a steady stream of content; it’s not enough to be a one-hit wonder”.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

I gave a 30-minute talk today at the MarketingProfs conference on Content Marketing. In case you missed it, they’ve archived the talk here. I’ve also posted my slides and notes below.

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I am both a cartoonist and a career marketer. I run a studio called Marketoon Studios that brings the two together. We create content marketing campaigns with cartoons for businesses like the Wall Street Journal, Unilever, and Kronos.

I also draw a weekly marketing cartoon that lampoons some of the things that marketers do, inspired from my marketing career at General Mills, Nestle, and method.

As a cartoonist and marketer, I learned that there is a lot to learn from the simple cartoon. Cartoons are “content worth sharing”. Today I want to talk about 5 lessons marketers can learn from cartoons, and I’m going to use cartoons to do it. These lessons are relevant no matter how you communicate with your audience. I’ll use case studies along the way too.

Why is “content worth sharing” important?

First, marketing has to be “worth sharing”.

A lot of brands approach marketing like this cartoon. All marketers want to be shared. But sharing is more than a “Like” button. You have to have something worth sharing. Rather than chase “Facebook Likes” or followers, be a brand worth following in the first place. This relates to all aspects of the brand experience.

Second is the role of content in marketing.

With the podium of social media, brands are becoming publishers. Seth Godin has said that content marketing is the only marketing that’s left. But content can’t operate the same way as traditional marketing communication. It can’t pitch features and benefits. There is no more captive audience. Don Draper is no longer in charge.

There is a difference between earned media and paid media. Content marketing is earned media. You have to earn it.

Like many of you, I fell in love with cartoons as a kid, stretching silly putty across the Sunday paper. Cartoons are an amazing medium. They convey a lot of meaning in a small space. Cartoons are easy to share. I heard cartoons described as the highest involvement devices ever created. There is a tremendous amount of power in the humble cartoon. What other form of communication gets tacked up on refrigerator doors and cubicle walls?

10 years ago, when I left Harvard Business School where I had a student cartoon strip, I started emailing cartoons to my friends. This was before blogging, Facebook, and Twitter. I set up a simple email newsletter and a static HTML website and committed to emailing one cartoon every week. That cartoon has grown by word of mouth to reach 100,000 marketers a week.

Along the way, I learned everything I needed to know about content marketing. Just by growing that audience and watching how other cartoonists developed their audiences.

Here are 5 lessons, inspired by cartoons and cartoonists. I’m going to focus mostly on web cartoonists, because I think of them as “lead users” for how to connect with an audience online.

Most brands think that to become big, they need to appeal to everyone. Or that content marketing has to be relevant to everyone.

When I worked at General Mills, the CMO Mark Addicks joked that every brief that crossed his desk seemed written for “women, ages 18-49, with a pulse”.

It is better to be deeply meaningful to the few, than blandly appealing to the many. This is true for marketing in general, but is particularly true for content marketing.

This is xkcd, the most popular web comic on earth. Yet you won’t understand many of the jokes if you’re not a Unix programmer.

This specific cartoon is not funny unless you know that “Sudo” is a Unix command that temporarily grants godlike powers to a programmer.

I shared this cartoon at a conference once. Out of 200 people, 10 laughed. But 1 of the 10 was wearing a t-shirt with that exact cartoon printed on it.

XKCD has nearly a million unique visitors a day.

You don’t need to read this one in detail, but look at the string of numbers in the panel at the bottom left. It’s a code showing a longitude, latitude, date, and time.

At that longitude, latitude, date, and time, several thousand people showed up in a park near Boston. Look at the rapture of the faces in the bottom right. That’s the power of creating content for a niche.

Randall Munroe knows that niche. He is that niche.

As marketers, we are not always our audience. But we can still know the niche.

Matt Groening, long before the Simpson’s, started a weekly cartoon called “Life in Hell” (which he still draws, incidentally. It features a one-eared rabbit named Bongo, who is a prototype of Bart Simpson.

To research what kids think about, Matt Groening started dumpster diving next to schools. He filled up a garage with student notebooks, and rifled through them for material. He didn’t just rely on his memory, he went dumpster diving to make sure he knew the niche.

Marketers should all know our niche audiences that well.

I saw the importance of knowing a niche when I worked at an upstart consumer brand called method. We didn’t have enough money to appeal to everyone. So we focused on niche audiences. We didn’t have the reach of Procter & Gamble, but we had fans like Nathan.

Nathan started a dedicated blog about Method: “One Man’s Unsupressed Lust For All Things Method”. He updates it several times a week and gets several comments per post.

It’s the power of knowing a niche. You know you’re meaningful when your audience creates content marketing on your behalf.

The second big lesson is related. It’s not about you. It’s about your audience.

It’s amazing how many brands forget this. This cartoon shows how many brands talk: “But enough about me. What about you? What do you think of me?”

Heavy-handed product placement is not content marketing.

Cartoons have been used to shill. But today this overt product placement seems as ridiculous as this 1962 cartoon of the Flintstones selling Winston’s cigarettes. Don Draper is no longer in charge. That kind of marketing feels phony.

Content marketing has to pass the bedtime story test. Most brand storytelling doesn’t.

Remember Ralphie in A Christmas Story. He listens to his favorite show, LIttle Orphan Annie, and waits for weeks for his Secret Society Decoder ring. He cracks the code, only to discover that the message says, “Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine”.

Don’t be an Ovaltine. Content marketing should be more than a crummy commercial.

Yet it’s amazing how many Facebook pages look like this.

The New Yorker learned this lesson. In the late 90′s, New Yorker cartoons were perceived as elitist and unapproachable. Readers didn’t get a lot of the jokes. The cartoons didn’t represent the audience. One of the New Yorker cartoonists, Bruce Eric Kaplan, was also a writer for Seinfeld. He wrote an episode about how none of the characters could understand the cartoons.

A couple years later, The New Yorker created the caption contest. It is about the reader. It is credited with some of the success of the New Yorker magazine as whole. It sparked fanatical interest from the audience, including Roger Ebert, who submitted captions to over a 100 cartoons. The cartoons aren’t about the New Yorker. They are about the reader.

Since the New Yorker launched the caption contest 6 years ago, they’ve received 1.7 million entries. This is 1.7 million high-touch interactions with the New Yorker audience.

Nike followed this example with Chalkbot. They invented a robot that sprays chalk on the surface of a road. They sent it to the Tour de France. Rather than spray Nike swooshes, they rigged it to spray messages of cancer inspiration and support sent by readers. It then sent a satellite photo of that message on the actual route of the tour de France.

It’s not about the bike. It’s about you.

It’s not about you and your business. It’s about the audience.

Betabrand is a startup clothing brand that gets this. They have a program called Model Citizen, where anyone can be a Betabrand model, just by taking a picture of themselves wearing Betabrand. Someone skydived into Burning Man wearing Betabrand. When you send in a picture, they send you a link to a personalized version of the Betabrand site with you as the model.

It’s not about you. It’s about the audience.

Many marketers think of content marketing as the viral video. They chase viral.

You can’t create a viral video. You create quality content that may or may not go viral.

What this mindset creates is social media ghost towns. Brands lose interest in content marketing if things don’t go viral right away. The internet is filled with social media ghost towns.

Content marketing is a commitment. Continuity is more important.

Cartoons are classic case studies in continuity. Few other forms of content sustain the cadence of daily or weekly updates.

Garry Trudeau once compared daily newspaper comics to a public utility that delivers its service so regularly that any interruption is seen as some kind of major systems failure. That’s a goal for content marketing – that your audience complains if it’s not there.

One of my favorite cartoonists is Scott C, who created a series called Great Showdowns. Every weekday, he releases a new great showdown. Here are two, from the Big Lebowski and the Titanic. He doesn’t bank on one going viral. He commits to a series, which grows an audience over time. You want to see what he comes up with next.

Think of content marketing as series with a regular cadence.

This is how Orabrush became the most widely viewed YouTube Channel. They market a tongue scraper to fight bad breath. Not the most exciting product category in the world. But look at the video views: nearly 46 million. Yes, some of their individual videos went viral. But their secret was continuity.

They committed to a Diary of a Dirty Tongue, a weekly video episode. It wasn’t by being a one-hit wonder. It was through continuity.

This is an expression, courtesy of gapingvoid cartoonist Hugh Macleod. He calls social objects “the hard currency of the internet”.

It helps to think of content marketing as the creation of social objects. We’re creating objects that are the reason for people to socialize, something for people to share meaningfully with each other. With each other, not with the business.

Cartoons are social objects. People tear them out and stick them on the fridge or their cubicle wall. Hugh calls his cartoons “cube grenades” because they are conversation starters.

Many marketers confuse the medium with the message.

You don’t even need social media to create social objects. But it helps.

When I lived in the UK a few years ago, I came across a smoothie brand called innocent that was wearing woolen hats on shelf.

I eventually discovered that innocent had commissioned woolen hats from its audience. Their audience knitted woolen hats. Every bottle sold with a woolen hat earned money for a charity called Age Concern, which helped keep the elderly warm in the winter.

Many of the hats were knitted by the elderly. The hat was a social object. The best marketing creates social objects.

The early days of content marketing were about quantity and content farms. Marketers tried to break through the clutter by sending out more.

You don’t break through the clutter by adding to it. You break through the clutter by creating something remarkable.

This cartoon shows a brand breaking through the clutter created by heavily funded brands. This is the power of earned media versus paid media. The key word is “earned”. You have to earn it.

Marc Johns is a cartoonist of exceptional quality. His cartoons are of such quality that his audience not only buys framed prints, they have his cartoons tattooed on their skin. His site shows dozens of people who have tattooed his cartoons on their skin.

The lesson is to create content so powerful that it passes the tattoo test.

I love this quote, “Advertising is a Tax for Unremarkable Thinking”. You could paraphrase it as “unremarkable content”. This is a quote from the founder of Geek Squad.

The Geek Squad is a brand that passes the tattoo test.

Another brand that passed the tattoo test is BMW. They are one of the early pioneers of content marketing and they set an extremely high bar. In the late 90s, they commissioned short films from Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie, with creative license to do anything they wanted with the story, as long as it starred the driver of a BMW.

The films were of such high quality that they were viewed 100 million times. They launched Clive Owen’s career. A Vanity Fair magazine with a DVD of the films sold out. BMW sales grew by 12% on the back of the films.

These are the 5 lessons I wanted to share from cartooning.

Pinterest is the talk of the marketing town. It’s the fastest growing social network, stars a highly engaged high-income audience, and is driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MySpace combined.

As brands jump on the Pinsanity bandwagon, remember the lesson from every social network that preceded it. What’s more important than the platform is what we’re asking our audiences to share. It’s not about the network. It’s about the content. More than ever, brands need a plan for content worth sharing.

I like the WholeFoods approach to Pinterest, profiled in this Mashable article recently.

“To make a lasting connection, the goal is not to promote the shampoos, strawberries and steaks that are sold in the actual stores but to communicate the lifestyle that the Whole Foods team aspires to — an appropriate ambition, given that Pinterest has often been likened to a digital inspiration board. And by creating an aspirational lifestyle, Whole Foods can convert casual pinners into brand enthusiasts and, hopefully, customers … And because the point of Pinterest isn’t to push products, but to help people explore and deepen their interests, consumers don’t feel like they’re being marketed to.”

What I find most interesting about Pinterest is the focus on visual content. As a cartoonist, I’m obviously a believer in the power of visual storytelling (and was excited to discover how many of my cartoons are already being shared on Pinterest.)

Pinterest has helped validate the next stage with Marketoonist. I’ve been growing Marketoonist into a content marketing studio to help brands create visual content worth sharing (like this Kronos cartoon series featured in CMI last week). I’m starting to expand with New Yorker and nationally syndicated cartoonists and look forward to sharing more detail in the coming weeks.

If you’re interested in more on the idea of content worth sharing, I’m speaking Friday 3/9 at 1:00 EST at the MarketingProfs Conference on Content Marketing (a free online event). My topic is “Content Worth Sharing: What Marketers Can Learn From Cartoons”. I hope to see some of you there!

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Design thinking is regularly talked about in business, but design is often relegated to a supporting role.

Two years ago, I spent a couple days at IDEO, seeing their approach to design thinking first hand. IDEO pioneered much of what the business world knows about design thinking.

IDEO calls it human-centered design. In contrast, many organizations follow heritage-centered design.

I once attended a brainstorm for a 120-year-old brand of baking flour. We had a room of talented cross-functional thinkers, but every idea we came up with was declared off limits. We couldn’t create new SKUs, change the packaging, change the formula, experiment with the brand, create marketing promotions, or change any other dimension we could imagine.

Too often marketers limit themselves by not questioning constraints. Some constraints are essential. Yet too many constraints can create tunnel vision. This is particularly true for brands that have a long heritage.

I love the classic IDEO case study on Nightline, where they completely re-imagine the shopping cart using design thinking. It always inspires me to think about other products and categories that can be similarly re-imagined.

But it requires thinking of design as more than the package burst.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

This cartoon is inspired by one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, showing two panels of a dog owner scolding his pet to stay out of the garbage. The first panel illustrates “what we say to dogs”. The second panel shows “what they hear”, with every word (except the dog’s name) replaced by “blah blah blah”.

Consumers have this same type of selective hearing. They are increasingly equipped to tune out marketing messaging in every medium, particularly classic television advertising. A Deloitte study showed that 86% of television viewers regularly fast-forwarded ads.

Some advertisers respond to this phenomenon by designing ads to be watched at 12 times normal speed (featuring lingering shots of brands, logos, and characters).

I think a better takeaway is to create advertising so good that viewers choose to watch.

Last month, TiVo hosted the Third Annual “Battle of the Consumer Electronics Brands at CES”. They tracked second-by-second fast-forward rates for different brands. TiVo SVP Tara Maitra framed the winners this way, “In the age of on-demand television viewing it’s not necessarily the consumer technology brand who runs the most ads that’s the winner in terms of capturing eyeballs — it’s the one who finds a better way to keep consumers from picking up the remote and moving on to other content.”

In other words, increasing the quality of the content is more important than increasing the media spend. It raises the bar on advertising to create better quality content, content that passes the “fast forward test”.

I think marketers need to regularly ask themselves if their marketing passes the “fast-forward test”. Because that’s the evaluation that consumers are making, remote in hand.

(Marketoonist Tuesday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Tuesday, an extra day because of the US holiday. Thanks!)

On a related note, I wanted to share that I’m giving a talk next month at Digital Marketing World, put on by MarketingProfs. It’s a free virtual conference, so you’re all invited on March 9 at 1:00 EST (and to register now). My talk is titled “Content Worth Sharing: What Marketers Can Learn From Cartoons“. It will include a 30-minute cartoon-packed talk, an interview with Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of Content Rules) and some Q&A chat. Hope to see you there!

(Thanks to my wife Tallie for suggesting that the Larson cartoon would make a funny commentary on advertising clutter).

This is the latest in a marketoon series with Baynote called “Intent to Buy” that parodies the state of e-commerce personalization. The series spotlights the top challenges that marketers face in online experience. Baynote is offering a signed print of this cartoon to every comment or cartoon suggestion posted at the Baynote blog over the next week (by 2/22; U.S. addresses only).

Few topics generate as many deer-in-headlights looks from marketers as social media ROI. It’s hard to know what to measure and it’s tricky to tie social media efforts directly to business results. A recent survey from the Chartered Institute of Marketers showed that very few marketers can measure the effectiveness of social media. Nearly a third describe social media as not at all effective.

Some marketers challenge the very idea of measuring social media ROI as antiquated, similar to asking the ROI of having telephones in the office.

Yet social media won’t be taken seriously by finance directors as long as the answer is to dodge the question.

I liked this distinction from Hal Thomas in a recent Mashable article: “Social media is the vehicle, not the destination. You can’t just ask, ‘What’s the ROI of social media?’ You have to ask, ‘What’s the ROI of specific activities that we engage in via social media?”

A good place to start thinking about the ROI of specific social media activities is Olivier Blanchard’s comprehensive book, Social Media ROI. Olivier follows a philosophy that “ROI is 100% media-agnostic” and shows how to draw conclusions from the social media metrics that are there.

“Forgetting to tie the easy numbers to something of substance can send your program down the wrong measurement path. Measurement, analysis, and reporting therefore require context: A single metric, taken at random, is as relevant or worthless as one chooses to make it. But as part of a greater whole, supported by a plethora of data points telling their piece of a bigger story, that piece of data can be meaningful and find its true value.”

I’m interested to hear how you think about ROI for social media programs.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

I started sketching this cartoon weeks ago after hearing that Carnival offered a voucher for 30% off future cruises to passengers of the Costa Condordia. Coincidentally this was before last week’s dramatic blunders of Susan G Komen for the Cure.

PR crises are nothing new. The field of crisis management originated with the environmental and industrial disasters of the 1980′s (Exxon Valdez, Tylenol). But they are more acute than ever thanks to social media. How a brand handles itself in a crisis is a far greater litmus test of what the brand stands for than any mission statement it writes or marketing plan it executes.

Most brands won’t face a PR disaster at the same scale of a sinking ship or rebuke from Senators. But every brand does face crisis: an ad that offends, a product malfunction, a spokesperson caught in an infidelity scandal.

Brand teams should spend time thinking about how they would handle a crisis, large or small. Marketers can’t plan for every single thing that could go wrong, but they should establish ground rules. And make sure that they have the right team in place. Waiting until a crisis happens is too late.

I like the perspective of Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals. In an Inc. magazine column last year, he detailed how 37signals handled a product disaster, mainly by being human.

“I’ve been a customer of companies that don’t know how to respond to a crisis. These outfits don’t own up to the problem. They hedge, they tiptoe, they get their PR departments to issue abstract nonapology apologies.”

“People don’t judge you on the basis of your mistakes—they judge you on the manner in which you own up to them. In my experience, most companies do a terrible job of taking blame. They lob press releases. Or they apologize for the inconvenience. Resist that temptation and say you’re sorry like you’re apologizing to a friend. Be good—and your customers will be good right back to you.”

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

This is the latest in a marketoon series with Baynote called “Intent to Buy” that parodies the state of e-commerce personalization. The series spotlights the top challenges that marketers face in online experience. Baynote is offering a signed print of this cartoon to every comment or cartoon suggestion posted at the Baynote blog over the next week (by 2/8; U.S. addresses only).