Want your marketing initiatives to stand out? Be brave with your campaigns.

Research from Effie Worldwide, the group behind the marketing industry’s Effie Awards, surveyed 6,000 campaigns to see what makes marketing most effective.

“Our data clearly show that campaigns whose approach to testing the boundaries is a little tepid perform considerably less well than those aggressively pushing the envelope,” Traci Alford, Effie Worldwide’s president and CEO, explained in AdAge. “If you want to stand out with consumers today, you simply can’t skimp on bravery.”

During the study, each campaign was rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with very conservative campaigns receiving a 1 and very risky campaigns earning a 5.

“Campaigns with a score of 1 did pretty well; the 2s performed the least well, with the 3s and 4s faring only slightly better,” Alford says. “But the 5s were off the charts. The truth is, if you want to create effective work, your safest bet is to take the biggest risk.”

Righting Data Errors’ Wrongs

https://twitter.com/NeilLewisJr/status/1155562542439305216

Data makes the world go round, but it’s humans who derive meaning from it.

“Data can’t say anything about an issue any more than a hammer can build a house or almond meal can make a macaron,” writes data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy on Quartz. “Data is a necessary ingredient in discovery, but you need a human to select it, shape it, and then turn it into an insight.”

But human involvement can also cause random and systematic errors, not to mention errors of exclusion or failure to look at the right data, Jones-Rooy says.

“These errors don’t mean that we should throw out all data ever and nothing is knowable, however,” she says. “It means approaching data collection with thoughtfulness, asking ourselves what we might be missing, and welcoming the collection of further data.”

Other Links of Note

Handwritten thank-you notes can be a nice gesture, but it’s important to remember that cultures express gratitude differently, says Nonprofit AF.

The one ingredient many organizations are missing: spontaneity, according to CMSWire.

CEOs who delegate generate 33 percent greater revenue, according to research from Gallup. The HubSpot blog has tips on sharing your workload with your team.

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