I promised myself I wouldn’t do it.

System1’s Andrew Tindall had words for Australia’s naughty marketers

I started writing a regular column for Mumbrella in January and, so far, I’ve resisted the temptation. I’ve taken potshots at BrewDog. I’ve questioned Tourism Australia. I’ve cast judgement on SXSW Sydney. I’ve even offered views on capital gains tax reform. But I’ve avoided, for the love of all that is holy, being dragged into the pit of despair, self-loathing and self-regard that is the debate around modern marketing theory.

And yet, after sitting through last week’s excellent and entertaining keynote at Mumbrella360 by Andrew Tindall of System1, I can’t help myself. So here we go.

Tindall made the case for the compounding power of creativity, with a particular focus on what he called high-attention channels. In practice, that meant the big, glorious, still-kicking beast of linear free-to-air television. And, annoying as it is for someone like me to admit, he had a point. A few of them in fact.

Memory matters. Repetition works. Distinctive assets need time. Big emotionally-rich creative ideas work hardest when they are repeated, recognised and properly funded for years on high attention channels. Our industry’s endless temptation to refresh, optimise, tweak and abandon creative platforms can be utterly self-defeating. As is the modern fetish for trying to hijack empty internet culture moments.

There’s a reason so many of us over the age of 40 still have sticky ads, jingles and brand campaigns lodged in our brains from the peak TV decades of the 80s and 90s. We were marinated in consistency and emotional creativity (served up with lots of what Tindall cleverly called showmanship).

But as I walked away from Carriageworks, I realised something had gone unsaid. The whole conversation was about brands already flying at altitude. None of it was about achieving lift-off. Little of was discussed would be much use for brands still trying to get off the runway.

The panel that followed Andrew Tindall’s talk made that even clearer. Alongside Tindall and Tim Burrowes were senior marketers from LG, Uber Eats and SharkNinja. Big marketing brains, no question. But not a panel of brands rummaging down the back of the sofa to find their first media budget.

LG and Uber are comfortably operating at stratospheric altitudes. SharkNinja may sound like a brand invented by a seven-year-old, but it’s also a multi-billion-dollar global........

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