The launch of Varian’s Ethos ™ therapy today marks Mortar’s fifth foray into machine intelligence* this year.

We kicked off 2019 with Cloudability and machine learning (ML) in the cloud. Apptio snatched up Cloudability earlier this year.

We featured ExtraHop’s use of ML to stop threats outside the corporate firewall in their 2019 campaign. (See the Rise Above the Noise video here).

Our friends at global hearing aid giant Phonak (the parent of Mortar’s client Advanced Bionics) built AI into their new Marvel hearing aids, delighting the hard-of-hearing (the sound from the new devices is apparently incredible!) and resulting in a massive spike in earnings (and, of course, exciting implications for Cochlear Implant recipients—but we can’t talk about that yet. More on that in a future post).

Our most recent project, e-commerce disruptor CommerceIQ is built around using AI to unify Advertising and Sales on Amazon.com.

Of Sunday’s launch of Ethos ™ therapy, Varian said their innovation “marks the moment when artificial intelligence and adaptive therapy combine to create the world’s first application of Adaptive Intelligence”. Varian goes on to say their breakthrough will “inspire healthcare professionals worldwide to reimagine cancer care”.

It’s not quite the mean, machine-driven apocalypse that James Cameron presented in Terminator. But hey, there’s still time.

From the cloud to advanced hearing loss to empty shopping carts, and eliminating cancer, we’re hoping machine intelligence can continue to make our lives easier and yes, maybe, curb suffering. 

Wanna be a part of it? We’re hiring.

* At Mortar Machine Intelligence means the various flavors of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). And yes, dear readers, although we know that you know that we know there is a difference between the two, confusion about the difference is undeniably rampant.

Oh sure, we’ve read the books about the power of saying no.

Saying No is the key to success in any management role.

Which would be fine if it wasn’t so darn tough. Marketing is hard enough without trampling on the feelings of our colleagues. And to be so definitive about innovation, well is that really ever wise?

So I tell my team that No should be reserved for the absolute last resort. Clients come to us for a way forward, and an energetic and passionate commitment to making the best of what’s been done.

But for those of us who still struggle with the two letter negative, here’s five ways to navigate the No conversation:

Search for information: before you close off any avenue of inquiry are you sure you have gathered all the relevant data? There are two forms of data available to every marketer: facts and emotions. Just because the company has not done something before does not mean it will not try something new. And just because the last team failed does not mean you can’t organize the data to energize a new round of experimentation and creation.

How fixed is the situation? You can think of any marketing conversation as a kind of negotiation. And great negotiators caution us to avoid getting stuck on any point and constantly expand the conversation in search of variables that can be used to move participants past fixed points. What does next week mean? Monday or Friday? Do we really need a product name to develop an elevator speech? Can we make that decisions after we test the idea? Beware of rolling out a no before you have considered all the angles at play.

What do prospects have to say? Innovators, by their very nature, must learn to discount criticism and customer feedback: When Henry Ford asked his customers what they wanted, they said a faster horse (he didn’t, but still innovators say this with depressing frequency). The first lesson of Moore’s famous Market Adoption (Chasm) theory is that members of the early market are few and far between and don’t conform to the patterns of the majority. Innovators lean hard on  the experience of the early market to identify opportunities. But they also learn not to listen to most people. Nevertheless, many marketing logjam can be cleared with a small dose of feedback from early customers.

What about rivals? Many a marketer plans with faulty assumptions about the competition. It rarely makes sense to assume rivals will not match an innovation or worse, are not thinking along similar lines as your team. One of the first principles of Sun Tsu’s Art of War is keep your enemy close, by which he meant understand how your rival thinks. Still, I am often surprised by how reluctant my clients are to model the reaction of rivals. A favored technique is to ask client teams to imagine they are their rivals and attack their plans from that perspective. It is a rare team that does not learn from open and clear contemplation of competitive threat.

When there is no way out of No, ask us. Well this may be an awesome time to roll out the agency. Third parties can often say No in a way that internal teams will support. Indeed, one of the great advantages of a smart agency is its ability to Marshall what it knows about a project to drive consensus and drive forward in the most profitable avenue. We can say the things you can’t. And that can be very helpful.

Of course you may well be one of the few executives who have no trouble saving No. Who revel in your power to inspire and lead the rest of us to the promised land. Good for you. But for the rest of us cowards, there is still hope.

Look, most agencies aren’t slow by choice.

In fact, internal politics or scheduling challenges on the client side are often the greatest hindrance to a speedy process.

But the creative development phase can slow to a crawl for many other reasons. If you are facing agency speed issues, here are five things you can do to put more oomph back into your creative relationship.

1. Streamline the briefing process. You can spend months gathering the right data, researching the issue with customers and prospects, discussing possibilities with team members and influencers, and running briefing documents up and down the chain. Or you can accelerate the process by getting the key players, which includes the agency’s creative team, into a room and white boarding the problem, as well as potential solutions, on day one. Brainstorming on opening day will focus the team on solving the problem—and can turbo charge creative development as long as the principals are open to entertaining new ideas early in the process (fair warning, not every agency or client team can handle sudden changes in creative velocity).

2. Focus on what makes you different. The most important part of any marketing success is deciding on how you will be different. Providing a litany of your products features and benefits is not being different.  Adopting a tactic that a rival has used is a fail. Difference is born of study, discussion and an in-depth understanding of customer need. If it’s not different, don’t do it. If a rival zigs, you should zag (not zig harder). Difference is the force multiplier that will get you a meeting when others are frozen out. Difference sets proposals apart, gets Sales excited, fuels referral and drives premium prices. Difference is often hard to define, but difference can’t be skipped or faked. Agency briefings can be radically shortened by focusing everyone on this one, key area. Try it: ask your team to define how you are different—and see if the answer is crisp, actionable or a mumbled incoherency.

3. Look at ideas early and often. Approval cycles eat up huge amounts of time, energy and, handled poorly, threaten to weaken strong ideas. A lengthy round of approvals inevitably leads to revisions, and successive rounds of revision can weaken concepts and undermine confidence in the process. Approvals are both a necessity and a road block. So short-circuit the process by asking to see ideas early and often. Most good ideas can be effectively assessed in a draft stage. And putting those new ideas in front of decision makers early-on can provide valuable clues about the shape of the final idea. Don’t wait for the idea to be perfect before seeking buy-in and approval.

4. Keep the same team. Introduce new players to creative development mid-process at your own peril. New players often reset the clock. There is something about marketing that encourages individual interpretation and endless rounds of comment and change. Good ideas do not change well. The best way to avoid the pitfalls of endless approvals is to identify the core team and have them present from the first briefing. And then insist they stick with you through the process. And, if you can, insulate yourself against feedback at the beginning of the process by getting alignment on team members, your power to secure approval, and the importance of streamlining approvals.

5. Avoid the Big Reveal (aka Think Small). Agencies love the Big Reveal: the moment when, after weeks of deliberation and frenzied activity, the agency makes its BIG PITCH. We call it the Big Reveal, and honest agency folk admit that it fails more than twice as often as it succeeds. Not landing a big idea presentation eats up time. And money. And worse, because expectations have run up in anticipation of the grand solution, a Big Reveal fail also saps confidence in the agency and the Marketing team. But thankfully, the digital age allows us to think differently. We’ve always been able to generate multiple ideas from the same creative brief. And now those same “small ideas” can be quickly executed and tested online. Which means decisions can be based on immediate feedback from our target audience. Smaller ideas are easier to conceive, easier to sell, easier to execute and test, and yes, much much easier to flight. Approving a series of small ideas is a quick way to identify the right idea, and a wonderfully streamlined way to get to market.

Of course your problem may be you are working with the wrong type of agency. In which case might we whole-heartedly recommend these guys?

My dear reader, I can tell you without reservation that we do not make enough time for feelings in Marketing.  Even though feelings, not logic, are the secret to great marketing.

We buy things because they make us feel good.

Oh, when pressed, we muster up all kinds of malarkey designed to justify our actions and hide our capricious nature from view. Your customers are no different. Even hard core business buyers are heavily influenced by perception and awareness. Which is why big brands invest so heavily in awareness studies (only to flail around trying to tie changes in influence to sales patterns).

Engineers are the absolute worst at acknowledging their true feelings. But masking feelings does not remove emotion from the equation—it just makes our jobs that teensy bit harder.

And introduces additional impediments to innovation and velocity.

Here at Mortar, we are big believers in the power of de Bono’s legendary six thinking hats exercise for giving workshop participants permission to indulge their emotions—and share their deepest feelings about a project.

The results are often surprising.

Here are five reasons you should do the same, and encourage your team to indulge in the weepy side of a project:

Stanford says we should. The cornerstone of Stanford’s famed MBA program is Interpersonal Dynamics, which pretty much everyone calls “Touchy-Feely.” “The ability to forge strong relationships with others is crucial to becoming a more effective manager in today’s complex, global, and highly interdependent organizations,” says Stanford. You can’t build relationships without feeling. Interestingly, Touchy-Feely has been the most popular elective for at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business for 45 years.

How people feel drives how they act. By listening to your team’s deep-seated concerns, you can effectively ease anxiety—freeing up previously masked aspects of your plan. You can win friends and smooth forward progress just by listening. (Of course, how you listen is a trick in itself—for which might we suggest, ahem, these guys?).

People, i.e., customers and teams, buy on emotion and yes, logic. It may not always feel like it, but business-to-business marketers do have permission to indulge in the more advanced forms of emotional marketing. The more technology verges into the realm of consumer preference, app development, community marketing, networking and customer advocacy, the more we can borrow from giants like Apple, Nike and Google—and present our products as something truly amazing, smart and human.

The other guys won’t do it. Indulging how your team feels about the project, and understanding the emotions surrounding the opportunity—good and bad—is often neglected. It makes most of us uncomfortable and can feel like a weird thing to do in corporate America. It is thus a source of competitive intelligence denied to most. We may be afraid of asking our colleagues how they really feel about their work and the jobs they have been given, but in today’s race to the finish line, any advantage—especially one so easily accessed—can prove decisive.

It works. Every marketing brief we write at Mortar has two components: how we have decided the client will be different, and the A-ha moment that is made possible because we have made the choice to focus on something new and surprising. We start with the logic, but we land with emotion. In our pursuit of emotive reasons to believe, we never case to be amazed at the quality of information our clients (and their customers) share when asked to detail how they feel about the job at hand. Don’t take my word for it, try it: ask your customers about how they feel about you and to detail their A-ha moment. They will ALWAYS offer an answer.

At the beginning of projects we often ask workshop participants to share a favorite object to illustrate their feelings about the topic. One Marketing Director opened a meeting with a colon-cleansing kit to demonstrate how inefficiently the organization approached marketing decision making, and to make her hope that this time would be different. We used that same example in our final presentation to management to highlight the need to address internal frustration and move forward with confidence and gusto.

Medical and technical marketing can’t help but over-rotate towards logic, science and the facts. But in any pursuit of advantage it always pays to seek out easy ways to differentiate and move forward.

Is today the day you invite team members to share how they really feel about the product they are about to launch?