Just occasionally in amongst the cries for attention and the blatant sales pitches on my LinkedIn feed a gem appears. Admittedly most of these gems tend to be written by one of Dave Trott, Bob Hoffman or Richard Shotton but every so often someone else simply hits the spot.<\/p>\n
One such piece appeared last week from Jelena Veselinovic, an integrated marketing professional of many years standing now based in Atlanta, Georgia. You can read Jelena\u2019s piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, having been taken to task by Tom Goodwin for a Cog Blog post<\/a> of a couple of weeks ago on the basis that I wasn\u2019t qualified to comment on either his posts nor his situation with Publicis as I had never met him (a principle that were it to be applied across social media would decimate, if improve the content), I should point out that Jelena was a client of mine for ages when she was at The Coca-Cola Company.<\/p>\n The essence of Jelena\u2019s piece is that her experience helping build Coca-Cola\u2019s business in various parts of the world apparently counts for not very much at all when it comes to evaluating her appropriateness for work in today\u2019s buzzy online world.<\/p>\n It would be funny if she wasn\u2019t exactly right. Experience today seems to count for little, and certainly a great deal less than knowing what the latest acronym stands for or being able to discuss the technical merits of this algorithm over that formula.<\/p>\n Note \u2018discuss\u2019 as opposed to \u2018understand\u2019.<\/p>\n The great Bob Hoffman, in his AdContrarian role is fond of pointing out how very bad we are at learning from our mistakes, or indeed from our triumphs.<\/p>\n A few years ago I was one of the first-stage judges of the IPA Ad Effectiveness awards.<\/p>\n The eventual winner that year (I believe it was 2014) was Fosters \u2013 their excellent \u2018Beach-hut\u2019 campaign delivered outstanding results<\/a> for the business with every pound spent generating \u00a332 in sales.<\/p>\n \u2018Beach-hut\u2019 was duly dropped a few months later to be replaced by I don\u2019t remember what, before making a reappearance last year.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t recall too many articles on what that decision cost Fosters<\/p>\n Brands refresh their ad campaigns all the time but only the most successful learn, and apply that learning through a consistency of thought and approach.<\/p>\n