This week's idea
From Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad:
"Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable."
It's a brutal line. And most people in our industry hate it.
But I haven't been able to stop thinking about it lately, especially when AI can produce infinite content, ads, and sameness at scale with near-zero cost.
Sometimes I feel like we're asking the wrong questions half the time. It's probably more useful to ask whether any of it actually needs to exist at all.
Storytime
Years ago, I ran a campaign for Gotcha4Life, a mental health foundation focused on men.
The problem was real and devastating. In Australia, 2,384 men take their own lives every year.
Seven. Every. Single. Day.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australian males aged 15–49.
The cruel irony is that many of them might have been saved if they'd simply felt able to speak.
But they didn't. Because culture told them not to.
I'm sure you've heard these terms before:
"Real men don't ask for help."
"Man up."
"Boys don't cry."
Boys Don't Cry. The Cure. 1979. You already know it. A lyric so embedded in culture that most people don't even hear it anymore, they just hum along.
Our ECD cracked it.
"What if we changed one word?"
Not the melody. Not the production. Not the iconic guitar riff billions of people already had stored somewhere in their nervous system.
Just one word.
Boys do cry.
We got Robert Smith, Dallas Woods, academic researchers, media companies, PR firms, non-profit organisations, Mental Health Ambassadors and production houses all behind the cause.
We didn't have a massive media budget, and we didn't need one.
We released it, and it went viral instantly.
Within 8 weeks of releasing a new version of the song, over 40,000 people had been referred from boysdocry.com.au to beyondblue.com.au to seek help.
We'll never know if the campaign saved a life. But the referrals suggest it did.
That's what happens when the idea is the marketing.
Instead of buying attention, we earned it.
By producing something real, wrapped in 40 years of cultural memory that already carries the emotion for us.
Sure, some people will read this and go "That's great, but I work for a Fintech startup or a Multi-National FMCG Company, so this doesn't apply to me".
I'm here to tell you...it does.
Before any work goes to clients, I ask one question of the team:
"Is this idea earning attention, or buying it?"
If the honest answer is buying, we go again. There's nothing to stop you from doing the same thing.
Spend should amplify something remarkable. Not compensate for something that isn't.
I'm not suggesting we have to try to win awards each time, but surely in this economy, we need to make it count? The best campaigns I've ever seen didn't succeed because of the media plan. They succeeded because they were meaningfully different.
The case study film is HERE if you're interested.
Thank you and see you next week!
-Murph