Christmas ads, one theory marketing, brand love: What will get consigned to Marketing Week’s Room 101?

Marketers all have their bug bears, and in the latest episode of Marketing Week’s Room 101 we hear from three of the industry’s big hitters on what they’d like to see banished for good. Each will put forward two pet peeves and then it’s over to you to decide which ones should get ditched for good.

The first nomination is from Ali Jones, Co-op’s customer director, who wants to get rid of the “incredibly long” deadlines for TV booking.

“Having flexibility and being able to book TV when you want to, being able to adapt to the ratings, and perhaps the audience, would make such a difference,” she says.

And it’s become all the more important since the pandemic. “I’m calling on the TV media industry to join us in the 21st century. Give us flexibility – just think about the extra business you could get,” she adds.

Her second nomination for Room 101 is “mega bucks Christmas ads”.

“Is that really what’s right at this time?” she asks.

Tom Roach, vice-president of brand strategy and Jellyfish and Marketing Week columnist, wants to put the idea that advertising is dead into Marketing Week’s Room 101. He says it’s “bizarre”, as it is so easily proven to be completely false.

His second nomination is the concept of brand love, a term he says many clients and agencies use. Roach describes it as “slightly lazy shorthand” for driving brand equity and building an emotional connection. “We need our brands to be no brainers not love marks,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Helen Edwards, director of Passionbrand and fellow Marketing Week columnist, is keen to see an end to “one theory marketing”.

She says it’s incredibly lazy to jump on one piece of marketing theory and decide that every part of the job needs to be looked at through that lens. Edwards believes the industry has fallen into a trap of using the phrase “it’s all about” in relation to customer insight, penetration, purpose, salience, content marketing or whatever it might be, when in actual fact it is just one part of a much bigger whole.

“Too much focus on one means you miss the subtleties of the discipline of marketing,” she adds.

Her second nomination is for the phrase “we know from research”, which she says really irks her: “Because what we actually know is that all research is time and context bound.”

Watch the episode to hear each of our marketing heavyweight’s full rationale and then vote below.