Carolyn Wilkins of the NAB throws a great party. She invited me to speak on a panel at the latest NAB show in Las Vegas where I shared the dais with top interactive management from four media companies. Since the session, “Top 20 Digital Money Makers,” was scheduled in the cleanup slot at 4 p.m. she decided to do something different to lure folks away from heading back to the casinos. She found a sponsor that supplied us with beer, wine and pizza for the session. Moreover, Carolyn fulfilled her obligation successfully — she delivered a packed room and extra chairs were even brought in. It was up to me and the other four on stage to deliver the goods.

Carolyn accomplished her goal because she recognized that by the end of the day many people would be tired of dragging themselves around the vast convention center. Hungary, thirsty and just worn out was what she was competing against, but as Clay Christensen would say, “she understood the job to be done.” No amount of PowerPoint tweaking or breathy agenda prose was going to do this job. It wasn’t about how good our Top 20 would be or why broadcasters needed to hear it. It was about what people needed after seven-plus hours of jostling through a crowd of 85,000 people. Free beer and pizza fit the bill.
It’s funny, because as I listened, and contributed, to the Top 20 digital money makers over the session’s hour I realized that these successful campaigns were due the nature of these promotions to get the job done.
If you heard keynoter Clay Christensen speak on this topic at our conference last month, you know the story. How a fast food restaurant chain tried to improve sales of milkshakes that customers bought in the morning. It turns out the chain was trying to make a better milkshake when all that most customers wanted was something to hold in their hand’s and occupy their time on a boring drive in to the office. Instead of improving the product, all they needed was to add some fruit chunks to make the milkshake more interesting and place the shake machine by the door with a card swipe on it.
This is exactly how a great promotion is crafted. The nature of a promotion is to generate immediate results. If it doesn’t work at that level, you haven’t recognized the job to be done.
If you are a local media executive, do you really understand the job to be done when you conceive a promotion? Is it to increase page views? Increase site visitors? Increase opt-ins? Make the cash register sing?
Define what the expectations are and then look at the buyer’s needs not the product. Don’t look at placing products or consumers in categories; look at what drives their emotional needs. Carolyn Wilkins figured this out. And, so must a good promotions manager.
We predict that online promotions will outgrow online advertising over the next five years. That’s a lot of jobs to be done if you are going to capture your share of local marketing revenue.


