Over the years, pundits have talked about how the generations coming up that have been raised on video games have a different take on digital marketing than us oldsters. Younger folks understand viscerally the difference with experiential marketing and old-fashioned brand marketing—video game experience surely plays a role in this. I’m certain that But my ten-year-old son had an insight today that I hadn’t considered.
“Dad,” he piped up, “Have you ever noticed that with video games, they always make it possible to win, but that real life doesn’t work that way?”
Well, I knew the real-life part, but I hadn’t thought about the video game part. And it has explained some behavior that I have seen a few times with folks just too stubborn to let go of their ideas.
I’ve watched marketers work on campaigns that weren’t working, but they wouldn’t let go of them. They kept tinkering, kept working, kept tweaking and fussing, but they wouldn’t just kill it. They wouldn’t throw it away in favor of another idea. It was as if they were sure there was some way to make this work—they just needed to find it.
But my son’s right. Sometimes the idea is just not workable. Sometimes we need to give it up, admit it was dumb, and move on to something else. And that’s hard. As resistant as some of us have been to the idea of experimental marketing, most of us know we need to do it. But experimentation includes failed experiments that just will never work out.
Can we put bad ideas out of their misery quickly? Sure, it makes sense to try several variations to see if the idea is OK but the implementation was wrong. But eventually, we need to move on when something isn’t working.
That stubbornness that serves us well in video games might be misplaced in Web marketing. Because in real life, sometimes you can’t win the game and you need to play something else.
