Comedian Ron White has done well with the tag line “You Can't Fix Stupid ”. While funny on the surface, what stupid is he referring to? Is he referring to people? Processes? Actions? In business, this is an all too familiar and frustrating sentiment. That is why I was excited by a refreshing blog called “It’s Time to Embrace Stupidity” by the Chairman of Razerfish, Clark Kokich.

Kokick is referring to the need to understand that you have to make mistakes to make progress. In a tremendously quickly changing world, moving forward is more important than being mistake free. He reflects that in advertising, it is important to have a perfect message and perfect creative before making huge traditional media buys. But no more.

Trekk has long believed in the Voltaire quote “The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good.” It is often morphed into Perfection is the Enemy of Excellence, of Greatness and of Progress. What does this mean? It means that the only true way to achieve excellence is to incrementally improve a process, a skill, a tool… or a campaign. These ideas are embodied in the message that Trekk calls Launch and Learn.

The Gilligan Effect 

How many of you have been part of a marketing or advertising campaign that simply did not work? Even though you had an objective, great creative, good offer and a measureable call to action, it did not get the desired results.  Did you throw out the entire idea and never try it again? This is what my partner MJ calls the Gilligan effect. The castaways come up with a novel way off the island and by the end of the episode, Gilligan messes up the outcome. But rather than analyze what worked and what didn’t, they never try that idea again. Sound familiar?

Trekk promotes testing, measuring and continuously improving campaigns with the use of technology for marketing automation.With the rapidly changing transformation from analog broadcast media to digital one-to-one media, trying out new ideas is paramount. Even though each effort will not be perfect, you learn something with each step. So stupidity has its advantages. You do get smarter with experience.

Fad or Future?

We are at the point where we are no longer calling it social media. It is just another media, another cross-media. The integration of social networking tools, sites and platforms is in full swing. Recently I have seen more buzz bout the future of content management with social media tools, including the up-and-coming Google Wave, as the front-end content collaboration vehicle. Can I start a meme and call it CMS 3.0?

-> I'm With Stupid

So where is all of this going and when will we get there? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Just call me stupid. But at Trekk, we are not afraid to embrace the stupidity. By constantly trying and failing (a little each time), we learn and we get better. That is how excellence is achieved.

Posted by JA Stewart at 11/03/2009 09:21:26 AM |