5 key principles for all marketers

Contagious magazine and creative agency Devilfish last week co-hosted a breakfast for forward-thinking marketers in London entitled 'punching above your weight' which encompassed inspiring talks from heavyweights both client side and agency, and luckily for those of us on the other side of the world they wrote all about it here.

There were several great case studies talked about including the likes of Method and mobile start up GiffGaff , but for me, the most inspiring aspect of the talks stemmed from the simple but altogether crucial 5 principles that creative agency Devilfish hold themselves to:

• Be bold
• Make friends
• Keep talking (and listening)
• Make a difference
• Spend less
• Think harder

Many agencies have a core proposition which can govern work output such as Naked's 'everything communicates', Mediacoms 'people first, better results' or BWM's 'challenge, change, grow' but underneath all of these there should be guiding ideals such as these 5 principles which will add more discipline, positivity and direction to what we do.

It's already clear that some of the award winning work that has been created in recent times has met with at least some, if not all of these principles:

Be bold (aka change the status quo)

• Old Spice - the original ad itself (aka talking straight to viewer, continuous shot) as well as the latest 24 hour video bonanza shows us how the future of advertising may look...
• Pepsi Refresh - leaving behind a 23 year Superbowl advertising tradition to focus money entirely on a social media project
• Twelpforce - Best Buy's customer service goes Twitter crazy and responds to all tech questions not just related to Best Buy and it's products

Make friends (build yourself a community or following)

• Starbucks recently became the first brand to achieve 10 million Facebook Fans reportedly worth $1.8 million in potential revenue 
• Again, Twelpforce via customer service and building a strong community following they positively impacted brand health and sales

Keep talking (and listening)

• Gatorade recently launched their social media command centre which houses some amazing bespoke systems and softwares tracking every mention of Gatorade on the social web, their truly understanding that consumer knowledge is power
• Greenpeace has recently shown the value of their continuous social strategy. They have an impressively comprehensive approach such as using Vimeo as a back up when Youtube removes their videos and singling out companies one at a time to launch the most effective plan of attack and impact

Make a difference

• Forbes recently compiled a list of the most innovative CSR programs by brands in recent times which included amazingly simple campaigns such as Tide's 'Loads of hope' which started after Hurricane Katrina and offered to do victims laundry for free as well as the recent Levi's 'Go Forth' idea around urban regeneration

Spend less

• A recent campaign for breast cancer awareness in Poland focused on broadening their communications towards men to educate them about how to feel breasts correctly to identify lumps. They used the insight that men who appreciate breasts may spend more time on porn sites so they housed their campaign on one! They only spent 1,300 Euros and educated 175,000 men in one week

Think harder

• All of the above campaign examples represent people thinking a bit harder about the objectives and the solutions rather than jumping to the 'tried and tested' or obvious answers and should be celebrated for doing so.

Now lets all put these principles into action!