Last month’s Marketing Thoughts are slightly late, mainly because I spent last week in Adelaide making my way through the wineries of McLaren Vale and tasting what was probably an unreasonable number of red wines. So, naturally, instead of coming back refreshed and completely switched off from work, I came back with even more marketing thoughts because as we know, I am incapable of going anywhere without analysing the customer experience, the wine club collateral or how someone is trying to upsell me (and spoiler alert – jlo is now a vip member of a wine club).
I feel like there’s a bit of a theme this month around when and where marketing shows up. When is the right moment to offer someone something? Where does an ad actually make sense? When does a little bit of friction become annoying? When does an endorsement actually hold weight? Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but a lot of the things that caught my attention this month weren’t necessarily huuuuuge campaigns, they were just small decisions where I thought, “Oh, that’s actually really smart,” or occasionally, “Why on earth have they done that?” Let us begin!
someone turned their laptop into advertising inventory and I love it
I came across a website called BrandMyMac.com this month and sometimes my Marketing Thoughts don’t need to be particularly deep. Sometimes I just see something and think, that is really f#&@ing cool.
The guy behind it originally wanted to finance buying his first MacBook, so he decided to sell sticker space on the laptop. Brands could pay to have their sticker placed on it for a certain amount of time, and his pitch was that he travels, works from cafes, goes to events and meetings, and therefore the laptop is going to be sitting in front of people constantly. Instead of paying for a billboard somewhere, you could pay for this tiny little piece of advertising real estate that travelled around with him. People loved the idea so much that he ended up building a platform where other people can list their laptops and brands can buy placements on them, with different prices depending on the sticker size and location.
I just find the whole thing so interesting because when you think about it, the value isn’t actually the laptop. It’s the person carrying it. If someone works from home every day and their laptop never leaves the spare bedroom, a sticker on the back of it is obviously worth absolutely nothing. But if someone is constantly in coworking spaces, speaking at events, going into meetings or working from busy cafes, all of a sudden that same little square of space potentially has value. It’s almost this strange combination of influencer marketing, sponsorship and out-of-home advertising, except the billboard is a MacBook.
And no, I definitely don’t think the takeaway from this should be that every possession we own needs to be monetised and covered in brand stickers (plz no). But I DO think it’s such a fun example of questioning what actually counts as media. We spend so much time talking about Meta getting more expensive, Google getting more expensive, billboards costing a fortune and every traditional channel becoming increasingly competitive, while there are probably hundreds of tiny places where the right audience’s attention exists that nobody has thought to sell yet.
Maybe the bigger marketing thought is simply that advertising inventory isn’t really about a particular format. It’s about attention. If the people you want to reach are looking somewhere, there is potentially a media opportunity there. Sometimes that place is Instagram. Sometimes it’s the side of a bus. Apparently sometimes it’s the back of someone’s laptop. 11/10.
just because the placement is contextual doesn’t mean the ad is
Everyone knows I love contextual advertising, mostly because I seem to spend half of these newsletters either praising good examples of it or complaining about Weatherzone telling me to buy sunscreen while it is absolutely bucketing down outside. So when I booked an Uber recently and an Audi ad appeared in the app while I was waiting for my car, my brain immediately looked at it.
My first thought was actually, “Oh, I must be getting picked up in an Audi.” And I thought that was really clever. I assumed the app knew what car was coming and Audi had bought advertising against people who were about to physically experience one of their cars. Because I’ve definitely gotten into Ubers before and thought, “Wow, this car is actually really nice.” If I was sitting in an Audi I’d never driven before, enjoying the interior and thinking it felt lovely, and then the Uber app showed me the exact model and let me learn more or book a test drive, that would be such a good bit of contextual advertising (but I should note that I’m definitely not the right target market to go buy an Audi lol).
Anyway, my Uber arrived and it was a Toyota Corolla.
Which left me a bit confused about the strategy. Obviously Uber is a car-related environment, so on a media plan it probably looks like a logical place to advertise a car. But is someone using Uber necessarily in-market for a vehicle? I don’t know if I’d make that assumption. I use Uber when I’m going somewhere I don’t want to park, when I’ve been drinking, when I’m travelling, when I don’t have access to my own car or for a hundred other reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to buy one. Maybe in other markets where fewer people own cars there’s a different audience insight there, and maybe Audi has data proving this works brilliantly, but from my own experience it felt like the context stopped at “cars are involved.”
And that’s why it made it into this edition: A contextual placement isn’t necessarily the same thing as contextual relevance. Sometimes two things look adjacent enough that the media placement feels #SMART – Uber equals cars, therefore advertise cars – but the actual mindset of the customer doesn’t match. The example I had imagined in my head, where I’m physically sitting inside an Audi and being shown information about that exact Audi, is a completely different level of context because it extends something I’m already experiencing.
And I keep coming back to this with contextual advertising in what feels like every edition of my newsletter: how close does the connection need to be before it genuinely improves the ad? Sometimes context fails because the weather data is wrong. Other times the data might be completely accurate, but the assumption underneath it is too broad. Either way, I still love contextual advertising and will continue thinking about it far more than any normal person should. But this one wasn’t quite a winner in my eyes.
McLaren Vale reminded me that every single touchpoint matters
I recently went to Adelaide for a winery trip which was, firstly, very lovely and, secondly, another holiday where as I’ve already mentioned – the old marketing brain just would not switch off. We went through McLaren Vale and visited places all the classics – Mollydooker, d’Arenberg and a whole heap of others, and one of the things that really stood out was just how much thought had gone into the experience beyond the wine itself.
I’ve worked with quite a few wine/food brands and one of the things people struggle with constantly is wine clubs. How do we get people to sign up? How do we make them care? How do we communicate why this club is different from the 700 other wine clubs available to them? Especially in WA, where there is an insane amount of wine and everyone already has approximately sixteen wineries they like. But going through McLaren Vale, I kept noticing how much personality they put into everything. The wine club names, the menus, the tasting sheets, the language, the merch, the actual way the tastings were run. Mollydooker had things on the tasting sheets where you could mark wines as “yum” or “yuck” rather than feeling like you needed a degree in wine to participate. Everything felt fun rather than intimidating.
And obviously all of that branding and collateral matters, but the biggest thing was the people. At one winery we booked what was meant to be around a thirty-minute tasting and ended up there for an hour and a half. The woman taking us through it was incredible. Nothing felt like too much trouble, she pulled out different vintages for us to compare, answered every question and basically made the whole experience feel incredibly generous. We left signed up to their highest-level wine club, which we absolutely had not planned to do when we walked in. We also left a lot more merry than we initially planned – perhaps the reason behind the wine club sign up.
That’s what I mean when I say customer experience directly generates revenue. Sometimes I think “customer experience” gets talked about like it’s this slightly fluffy brand metric that is nice to have once you’ve sorted out all the serious sales and marketing stuff. But we literally spent more money because the experience was good. That’s about as directly attributable as you can get. The wine mattered, obviously, but so did the person serving it, the tasting notes, how comfortable we felt asking questions and how the membership was explained.
I think if you’re in hospitality, food, beverage, retail or honestly almost any service business, there’s so much value in going through every tiny customer touchpoint and asking whether anyone has actually thought about it. What does the menu feel like? What does the bathroom look like? What does the document explaining your membership look like? Can people write on the tasting notes? How does the staff member explain the next step? You don’t necessarily need to spend a fortune making every detail incredible, but every single one is another opportunity to reinforce how someone feels about you. And occasionally, apparently, another opportunity to make me sign up to a wine club I did not need.
is the extra margin really worth losing the customer?
The Adelaide trip also gave me the complete opposite customer-experience thought when we returned our hire car at the airport. We used Europcar and, to be completely fair, the overall experience was actually very good. No complaints there. But while returning the car I noticed the fuel charges displayed by the rental companies and holy moly – what a rort.
Anyone who has rented a car knows the deal. You return it full, or if you don’t, they charge you to refill it. Totally reasonable. They have to buy the fuel and someone has to physically take the car to fill it. What’s interesting is how much they charge. Europcar was around $4 per litre, and Hertz next door was displaying something like $9 per litre. Nine dollars. For one litre of fuel. Absolutely barbaric behaviour.
I understand there are labour costs involved and that they can’t just charge the exact pump price, but I kept thinking about the customer experience of that moment. Nobody intentionally arrives at the airport with an empty tank because they’re dying to buy $9 petrol. You probably forgot. Traffic was worse than expected. You’re running late for your flight. You’re already stressed, you realise you’ve messed up, and then the very last interaction you have with the company is finding out you’re potentially being charged hundreds of dollars to fill the tank. That’s the memory you leave with.
And I’d genuinely love to see the maths on whether the profit is worth it. Customer acquisition for car rental companies cannot be cheap. They’re competing heavily on Google, aggregators, travel sites and all sorts of other channels. If you’ve spent a huge amount getting me to rent from you, given me a perfectly good experience for four days and then made me furious at the final touchpoint because you charged me $450 for a tank of fuel, have you actually won?
I’d be so interested to see a rental company take the opposite approach. Charge the normal fuel price and add a transparent $20 or $30 refuelling fee that covers the staff member’s time. You still cover the cost, but suddenly the customer thinks, “Thank God, they saved me when I was running late,” rather than, “These people just charged me nine dollars a litre because they knew I had no other option.”
There are obviously businesses where inconvenience fees make economic sense, and maybe the data says most people forget once they’ve cooled down. But I think there’s a broader marketing question in there about how often businesses maximise the revenue available in one transaction without considering what that does to lifetime value.
make the app better – don’t make everything else worse
Another tiny customer-experience gripe this month came courtesy of Australia Post (let’s be honest – there’s probably 87 gripes you could write about Aus Post). I had a parcel delivery where I didn’t think anyone had actually attempted to deliver it, and the notification gave me an option to view the delivery photo. Perfect. I clicked because I wanted to see where they’d supposedly tried to leave it, and then got told I needed to download the Australia Post app to see the photo. And I just thought… why?
This is something I see a lot when businesses are trying to drive app adoption. Someone internally has clearly got a KPI around downloads or monthly active users, so the strategy becomes putting features behind the app. Sometimes I completely understand that. There are genuinely experiences that are better inside an app because you’re logged in, there are notifications, saved preferences or whatever else. But there’s a difference between giving someone an additional benefit for downloading your app and deliberately making a simple task harder unless they do. All I wanted to do was see one photo.
I don’t need the Australia Post app in my life. I don’t interact with Australia Post frequently enough that I want to give it permanent real estate on my phone. So rather than downloading the app like they presumably hoped, I just thought, ah well, and didn’t look at the photo. They didn’t gain an app user; they just stopped me completing the thing I wanted to do and made me annoyed.
It reminded me of that time years ago where every company decided they needed an app regardless of whether there was any reason for one to exist. And obviously Australia Post has plenty of functionality where an app could genuinely be useful for frequent users, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs it. If people want to download your app because it makes the experience easier, great. If the only way you can get them to download it is by intentionally making the alternative worse, maybe that’s a sign the value proposition of the app itself needs some work.
I think the lesson is similar to the rental-car example. Internal metrics can look like success while the customer experience gets worse. You might hit your app-download target, just like you might hit your ancillary-revenue target from fuel, but if you had to annoy people to get there, I’m not sure I’d call that a win.
maybe the best time for a free trial isn’t at the start
For those of you who don’t know, the last few months have involved me juggling work with a newborn, which could probably be an entire edition in itself (the marketing to new mums is WILD). One of the apps we’ve been using is Huckleberry, which lets you track naps, feeds and all the other things you suddenly become obsessed with when you have a baby. The basic tracking is free, but they have a paid feature called SweetSpot that uses all the data you’ve entered to tell you when your baby should ideally go down for their next nap.
Any parent who has ever tried to work out wake windows will understand why this sounded amazing, so when our baby was around two months old we paid for the premium version. The problem was that it just didn’t really seem to work for us. It would tell us he should be going to sleep at a certain time when he’d already been showing tired signs for ages, or it would suggest a nap and he clearly wasn’t tired. After paying the $20-ish a month for a bit, we decided it wasn’t accurate enough to justify it and cancelled.
Fast-forward a couple of months and he’s now four months old. Last week, Huckleberry randomly gave us seven days of SweetSpot for free. It wasn’t even a big “COME BACK! PLEASE PAY US AGAIN!” email with a coupon code that I had to activate. I opened the app and it said, as a gift, you’ve got access for the next seven days. And this time it is frighteningly accurate. It’ll say he’s due for a nap in ten minutes and, right on cue, he’ll start rubbing his eyes and getting grumpy. I don’t know whether that’s because Huckleberry now has months of data on him, whether four-month-olds are simply more predictable than two-month-olds, or a combination of both, but suddenly the feature that I previously thought wasn’t worth paying for is proving its value to me every single day.
And I thought this was such a smart approach to a free trial because so many businesses automatically put the free trial at the very beginning of the customer journey. Sign up today, get your first seven days free. Which obviously makes sense for lots of products, but maybe not every product is at its best when someone first joins. In Huckleberry’s case, if the feature relies on behavioural data, maybe the point when I have two or three months of history is actually a much better time to demonstrate what the paid version can do. They waited until the product could sell itself.
It also made me think about all the freemium products that give you premium access upfront and then never really try again. Imagine someone joins Spotify, gets Premium for a week and thinks, “Yeah, no ads is nice but I don’t really care enough to pay,” then uses the free version for six months. What would happen if Spotify randomly gave them Premium again for a week after they’d spent six months living with ads? All of a sudden the difference might feel a lot more significant because now they understand what they’re going back to. I’m definitely not saying every subscription service should start randomly handing out premium access forever, but I do think there’s something really smart in asking not just should we offer a free trial?, but when is the moment our product is most likely to prove its value?
does Tony Robbins liking something make me more likely to buy it?
The last thought this month came from a Ticketmaster email, which feels like an appropriately random place to finish. I’m on all the Ticketmaster and Ticketek lists because every time they email I inevitably think, “Ooh, is there anything fun happening?” and have a little scroll through. This particular email was promoting Shen Yun, the Chinese dance and live-orchestra production, and right at the bottom they had a GIF cycling through celebrity testimonials.
One said something along the lines of “Magnificent, I highly recommend to anyone” from Tony Robbins. Another described it as exquisitely beautiful and an extraordinary experience, according to Cate Blanchett. There were photos of them alongside the quotes, and I found myself staring at it for way too long thinking: why does Tony Robbins’ opinion matter to me here?
Obviously Tony Robbins is extremely famous. Cate Blanchett is extremely famous. I understand the basic mechanics of celebrity social proof – if recognisable people have been somewhere and thought it was good, that can theoretically make the thing itself feel more prestigious. But I kept wondering whether fame alone is enough to make an endorsement persuasive. If a famous dancer, conductor, theatre director or someone whose taste in performing arts I understood told me Shen Yun was incredible, I could see why their opinion might make me think differently about it. Tony Robbins saying it is magnificent doesn’t really give me any additional information beyond the fact that Tony Robbins has attended Shen Yun.
And maybe that still works. Celebrity endorsement has existed forever for a reason, and I’m sure there is plenty of research showing that recognition alone creates credibility or attention. But I also think we live in a very different environment now where people are much more aware of paid endorsements, sponsorships and brand relationships. I don’t automatically see a famous person praising something and assume they independently discovered it and loved it. Even if the quote is completely genuine, there’s this layer of scepticism that probably wasn’t as strong ten years ago.
I actually think hearing from five normal people leaving the show might have persuaded me more. Someone saying, “I had no idea what to expect and that was incredible,” or “I brought my mum and we both loved it,” gives me something I can relate to. I can imagine myself being that person. Whereas there’s basically no situation in my life where I think, “Tony Robbins liked this, therefore I probably will too.”
And I think that’s the broader thought here. Endorsements only really work when the audience understands why that person’s opinion should hold weight. Sometimes that’s expertise. Sometimes it’s aspiration. Sometimes they represent the exact customer you want to be. Sometimes, sure, it’s simply that they’re famous enough to make people stop. But I don’t think “celebrity = credibility” is automatically true anymore. If you’re going to use someone else’s opinion as proof, it’s probably worth asking why your customer should actually care what that specific person thinks.
