In this presentation, Kevin Simpson argues that modern marketers are bombarded with thousands of daily marketing messages, yet only a handful capture attention. He emphasizes that the first few milliseconds of exposure are crucial, and that successful marketing hinges on being noticed before any deeper engagement can occur. To achieve this, he suggests deliberately breaking industry best‑practice norms and employing odd, unexpected tactics that still resonate with the target audience. While novelty can attract eyes, it must also pass a second test of genuine engagement. The talk outlines a mindset shift: instead of following the crowd, marketers should purposefully differentiate by doing what others don’t, while ensuring the approach remains compelling and relevant to prospects.
Chapters
I want you to look at your desk or wherever you are. Look at this. I'm going to switch my camera over and show you what I got going on. It's messy. It's messy, but here it is. So this is just my overhead camera, but you can see my coffee mug. And if I point it this way, you can just see the equipment over there and all this other stuff going on. In fact, I didn't play out exactly how I wanted. But you can see if you look at your desk or where you are, there are tons of stuff sitting around with logos, marketing material, business cards, stack of business cards here. There is tons of stuff vying for our attention at any given time. And sometimes there's very overt marketing and sometimes there's less overt marketing like you see around you. But I believe a study somewhere estimated about a thousand to ten thousand marketing messages are presented to us every day, whatever the number is. The question I have for you is how many do you really notice? A handful? None. Maybe one you pay attention to for a minute and that kind of fades away. Well, that's what you're facing when it comes to your marketing. You must differentiate. The key to successful marketing is getting noticed first. There's tons of ways to build marketing plans that are very effective, but they won't be effective until you know what's working. It's the first few milliseconds of marketing that matters most, and that's the lesson I want to share with you today, is you must get noticed. So how do you differentiate? How do you stand out? Well, one way is not to do the best practices. Look at what your industry does and then don't do what they do. That is one surefire way to be noticed. Now, oddities, weird things, crazy things are very noticeable, but they may not pass the next test, which is the engagement of that prospect. So what can you do that's different, that no one else does, but also is compelling? It speaks to your audience. Think about that. The first stage in getting different is to differentiate. How are you going to do it going forward?
