Traditionally marketing has been one-to-many with broadcast media such as TV, radio, billboards and print, and direct mail with minimal if any personalization.

And sales was one-to-one.

But increasingly marketing is personalized. Jeff Bezos said 20 years ago that Amazon should not have one home page, it should have millions – and it does: each tailored to best sell to that individual. B2B companies are significantly improving their websites, their most important marketing asset, by personalizing based the company of the person visiting, their previous website activity, their interactions with other content of the company (emails, social media posts, etc.) and third-party data. Improved capabilities to identify individuals will mean even greater personalization in emails, direct mail, even ads.

Sales, on the other hand, in many cases has changed to a one-to-many function requiring selling to a buying team of many people with potentially very different interests. Even selling to a family can involved a “buying team” of children of the elderly, or other groups.

This all puts new demands on both marketing and sales. Sales people need to understand a much broader set of buyers, and marketing needs to help them with customer insights and appropriate content.

I recently saw a quote from Jeff Bezos in which outlined a central part of his business strategy:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

“In our retail business we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Similarly, in the interview with Eileen Fisher for the (highly recommended) “How I Built This” podcast, she says that she was inspired to design much simpler clothes by the Japanese kimono – a design that had lasted centuries. Over and over when she was starting out people would say, “They’re nice, but they’re so… simple.” And she’d say, “Yes, that’s the idea.”

Sometimes you don’t need to chase after the latest and greatest, or try to anticipate the next trend. Sometimes you need to just understand, and deliver, what your customers will always want.

The #1 advertising event of the year has passed and we now can pick winners and losers.

An overnight Ad Age survey of several thousand advertising and marketing practitioners ranked the “Alexa Loses Her Voice” ad top, with Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” in second. That seems reasonable to me. The Amazon Alexa ad was fun and memorable, not least of all because Jeff Bezos made a personal appearance in it.

I thought the Tide ad especially clever from a purely marketing (as opposed to entertainment) point of view: setting up viewers early on to notice the clean clothes in all ads and associate them with Tide. I felt bad for the creative team of Persil ProClean detergent (which I had never heard of, but Consumer Reports ranks it as the best detergent). Their ad was okay, and kind of clever, but I kept wondering if it was a parody that was going to flip into the real product. It was blown away by the Tide ad; the agency probably had an unpleasant morning call with their client.

The “Dirty Dancing” touchdown celebration spoof featuring Eli Manning and Odell Beckham, Jr. was certainly entertaining – and touchdown celebrations definitely need spoofing — but I don’t know how much it did for the brand.

On the other end of the stick, the RAM Trucks ad featuring the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a definite loser. I could not figure out what they were hoping to achieve with that – it had no credibility. You never believed for an instant that King would be promoting Ram Trucks, and then it came out shortly afterwards that in the same sermon King went on to condemn advertising in general, and car and Chrysler ads by name.

Gating content is when you require people to give you some identifying information (usually at least name and email address) to download or view a piece of your content. A constant debate among marketers is when, or even if, content should be gated.

Pro: You build up your database of contacts and can market to them.

Con: Fewer people will see your content, and the information they give you may not be accurate anyway (Bugs Bunny at loonytunes.com).

At last Tuesday night’s Sales & Marketing Innovators panel on demand generation, Evergage CMO Andy Zimmerman said that they have recently ungated almost all of their content – even something as valuable as a 180-page ebook on personalization. They feel that as a result they get far more downloads of their content, it gets distributed more, more people link to their site, and the people who do provide their contact information are legit and higher quality.

An interest in fewer, more highly qualified contacts and leads was mentioned by the other panelists, too.

It’s worth considering.

Almost half of executives say that they have invited companies to participate an RFP based on their thought leadership. Executives from companies often speak to grow their company’s brand, and public speaking is one of the best ways for professionals to grow their practice, too.

A few tips to keep in mind for your speaking (and content in general):

• Surveys show that public speaking is the #1 fear of people. Get over it. The audience is your friend. They want you to do well, too.
• Have something new and unique to say. Be a thought leader. And if possible, brand your message. If I had called my approach to marketing “my three step process” no one would have cared, but by calling it “The Bullseye Marketing Framework” (with accompanying imagery, etc.) I speaking engagements and, more importantly, work.
• Get in front of audiences of prospective customers. I need to speak to business audiences, the more senior the better. Some people need to speak to consumers, or sports fans, or whomever. Industry events and conferences can be good for B2B speaking. Pick your spots, as you should with all of your marketing.
• Have an offer ready at the end. Mine is that they can sign up for these daily email marketing tips and/or get a free ebook by giving me their business card. Some speakers, especially those who are selling to consumers, may have a “sign up now” offer.

Like other content marketing, speaking is a long-term branding effort. Minimally it should grow awareness of you; in the right situations it can lead to business immediately.