Ideas We Love: One Year of Ideas We Love
Issue Number 37: Some reflections on a year of writing a weekly(ish) newsletter
Hi, how are you?
By our reckoning, the newsletter celebrates its first birthday today. Now. We know that “consumers” don’t really care about brand birthdays - especially where humble newsletters like ours are concerned. But, we’re reflective souls - and the arrival of our first anniversary has given us cause to look back and reflect on some of the things we might have learnt along the way. So, if you’ll endulge us slightly - rather than a deep dive into a case study - this week we thought we share some of those reflections with you.
#1. Positivity as a point of principle
The only rule we have for this newsletter is centred around positivity and thinking about ideas constructively. We think it’s really important and hopefully that resonates with you at home too, especially as the internet (and increasingly the ‘marketing-internet’ too) is awash with armchair critics who like to sling mud from the safety of their living room. Criticising other people’s work is dead easy.
#2. Writing is thinking out loud
The discipline of writing something (nearly) every week is one we’ve found significant value in. Firstly, a commitment to posting our thoughts publicly creates some jeopardy - it forces you to think through arguments, and extrapolate and augment them. How do you respond to criticism, should it arise? We don’t always agree with one another - either in what constitutes an idea worth featuring or in the analysis of the ideas themselves. We have to use our words to convince one another. And then, additionally, it’s widely acknowledged that communications strategy and words go hand in hand. We both see this newsletter as a form of practice. An opportunity to get the reps and steps in and build fitness and stamina in the process.
#3. Keeping us ‘Match-Fit’
As an extension of the last point above - as strategists working in a network media agency , some of our time is spent shaping ideas and pointing them in different directions, but not as much as we’d like. The standard newsletter format, which has a section dedicated for each idea we feature around “what we’d do with it” gets us thinking around brands and categories and consumers and connections we might not typically think about during the day to day and keeps the more creative part of our brains tuned in.
#4. Everything communicates and so everything sells
We talk alot about the idea that everything communicates - and therefore, what a client considers to be a media channel could be just about anything. A year spent looking at ideas in quite fine detail suggests that not only does everything communicate, but everything sells too - and the best ideas are the ones which work across multiple buying phases or stage, that build brand and build sales - and don’t fall foul of a false dichotomy between brand and performance, or long and short term. This might sound obvious, but all too often it’s a reality of our working days which gets ignored when marshalling resource according to output not outcome.
#5. A growing notebook of ideas; both new & nostalgic
The other very intentional benefit of structuring the newsletter as we have is that we don’t just feature one idea each week, we feature typically half-a-dozen ideas that lead idea reminded us of from times gone past that we then whack into our G-Sheet, categorise them by the “plays” inherent in each idea that then act as our own version of ‘Love the Work’ curated to our taste that we mine pretty much most days in our day jobs.
Across 37 issues we’ve featured 200 odd ideas from nearly just as many brands from around the world - and the best bit, typically, is thinking about where the featured idea takes you: to the other ideas it reminds you of.
#6. Learning by doing
Working in an agency we spend a lot of our time offering advice to clients on the best and most effective way to approach their marketing and communications efforts.
Often there are very large sums of money involved - both in terms of the marketing budget, but also the expected return a business is hoping to realise. And whilst there is absolutely no money involved in our newsletter - there is an abundance of on the job learning to be had. We’ve spent the year thinking about tone of voice, about logos and typefaces, about analytics and A/B tests, about Linkedin’s algorithm and subscriber growth.
It might not immediately seem like it, but having our own marketing led side-project is a great way to understand more about the types of challenges our clients routinely face.
#7. Community
The motivation behind starting a newsletter was to keep a record - for ourselves - of the ideas we love. As we’ve said - writing in public - was a means of creating some jeopardy and giving us the impetus to put pen to paper often. Having said that, we’ve been blown away by the support and feedback we’ve had on the newsletter. We’ve seen our work make it into Stratgey department Teams channels, we’ve had the strategists we admire tell us how much they like it and we’ve had people ask us if they can contribute. Community is a word that is too often used in our industry - but we’ve been genuinely taken aback by the little following we’ve gathered around this weekly thing and are greatful for the feedback and engagement we get back as a result.
Until Next Year
It’s Christmas. We’re both trying to shut the laptops down until the new year and so, this is the last issue of the year. Thanks again - and see you in 2025.
Until next time,
Cheerio
Tom & Matt x