Silent Truths
WRITTEN BY Bill Roden — Director of Creative and Strategy
Innovative marketing soundbites, theories and methodologies come and go. That’s part of our industry's sport. One ancient industry quote still lives rent free in my head. David Ogilvy’s, “What people think and say isn’t what they actually do.”
A potent reminder that the same holds true when target audiences fill out a brand’s marketing survey. Or eat their pizza in after-work focus groups. Or post on their own feeds. Or even when shaking their fists in the comment thread. Building the kind of authentic audience rapport we all dream about lies in bottling the silent truths within an audience. The stories they don’t post on Instagram.. The reasons why they aren’t buying from a brand they follow on Facebook. Rooting out these silent truths is what separates cult brands from the disingenuous - those who show up with the right look or the right talk based on what they see getting traction within the category. Yet the resulting work is often a mere reflection of the category and the creators than the audience themselves. Without these silent truths in hand, we’re rudderless when it comes to better starting points and that’s when strange marketing things happen.
One knee-jerk survival instinct when marketing stalls is to hedge one’s bets with diluted narratives or draft off trends. Another flailing response is to lean on the superficial appeal of a theme, but it always leaves a merchandised veneer aftertaste. In an era that favors speed while sacrificing depth with faster cheat codes, authenticity is often sidelined chasing quick wins on the marketing racetrack. To editorialize Ogilvy’s quote, what audiences think and say now often dictates what brands do. Brands playback the same influencers their audiences are talking about. Use the same IG filters they do. Stick to the agreed upon narratives that are safe and approved in the category. Then blink endlessly at the analytics reports when the needle doesn’t move. If brands simply measure the audience noise on their screens versus spending time on the actual ground listening and watching intently, they risk messaging indiscriminately in a hail-Mary spray of impressions.
It's taken all of us at WOODSIDE years of painstaking, deliberate work earning trust and rapport with our clients and their audiences because we’re out there alongside them listening with our eyes and ears. We're scaling cliffs alongside fourth-generation craftsmen in the Austrian alps. Riding in the saddle alongside cowboys on Wyoming cattle drives. Dodging territorial bison on a regenerative agriculture ranch. Or, simply shutting up when the legendary old timer at the bar is talking and everyone else is listening.
The truths we’re after to build stories that land hard don’t jump out from the pages of a glitzy industry report. They’re impossible to conjure up in an office or a prompt. They’re not handed down to us in industry conference panels.
The truths we’re after require us to get out there and make those silent truths ours as well. That’s how we get to the stories that matter. And the stories that matter win.
