THERE ARE NO QUICK, CHEAP AND GUARANTEED MARKETING SOLUTIONS. LIKE THE TOOTH FAIRY, EASTER BUNNY AND FUN ROOT CANALS, THERE'S NO SUCH THING.

There are no hacks, shortcuts or steals when it comes to strategizing, developing and executing marketing that works. There are no marketing silver bullets, holy grails or secret of secrets that will increase your revenue easily, quickly and cheaply. There are no off-the-rack, one-size fits all solutions that will make your organization look or perform better year after year.

There is, however, Immortology. We create impossible to ignore and hard to forget business building solutions strategized, designed and written to:

Continuously reach and attract new customers
Deliver compounded returns over time.

After creating transformative advertising for some of the world’s most successful companies, we decided it was time to transform the advertising agency.

Fed up with an industry hell bent on churning out disposable, short-term and short-sighted marketing that leaves clients short-changed, we founded an agency driven to create legendary creative work that maximizes brand growth over both the long and short-term. With a network of 300+ seasoned marketing pros, Immortology is a full-service ad agency without the full-service overhead.

We specializing in creating Long Ideas that help our clients outsmart, outdo, outlast and outgrow their rivals - without outspending them. Long ideas are ideas are creative brand platforms that inspire a never-ending campaign of fresh and surprising executions with the same look, message and personality. Impossible to ignore and hard to forget, our long ideas not only deliver higher returns across all media, they create consistency. And consistency over time compounds returns.

WE DO TWO THINGS EXCEEDINGLY WELL:

1. We develop strategic and creative brand platforms made to last that:

Are based on actionable consumer insights gleaned from our research and/or yours
Powerfully distinguish and differentiate your company from your competitors'
Center your communications, products and services around your unique brand promise that:
- Answers what your customers truly want and need
- You can communicate and fulfill in ways your competitors can’t or won’t
Rally internal teams
Guide the development of more effective, evidence-based media plans that drive sales now and exponential growth over the long term
Inspire the creation and execution of highly impactful Long Ideas (Big Ideas on steroids) that maximize growth today and compound returns over time

2. We craft kick-ass Long Idea campaigns that:

Fuel a never-ending stream of fresh impossible to ignore and hard to forget creative executions
Seamlessly integrate across all media
Have the same look, feel and message across all executions to build memory, desire and purchase
Maximize both your long-term and short-term revenue without cannibalizing either
Deliver more fame and fortune per dollar than any agency out there

READ ABOUT THE 12 EVIDENCE-BASEDS ADVERTISING PRINCIPLES EVERY BUSINESS SHOULD FOLLOW TO MAXIMIZE GROWTH.

Instead Of Wasting Your Time And Money, What If Your Marketing Did The Following?

Reached more people, more frequently with a smaller media budget?
Attracted more new customers?
Helped keep more current customers?
Simultaneously harvested existing demand while growing future demand?
Continuously motivated more people to consider your brand and buy it more often?
Rallied and unified your entire employee team around fulfilling your customer promise?
Reduced the need for promotions and discounting?
Surprised and delighted your customers at every touchpoint?
Helped your business become more immune to economic downturns?
Allowed you to charge more than your competitors for similar offerings?
Made you actually proud of your advertising?
Increased your market share?
Dramatically decreased or eliminated your need to keep creating more and more new campaigns?
Caused people to actually look forward to watching, reading or experiencing your ads?
Generated more free press?
Made your competitors nervous and envious?

What if we can do all that for you and more?
Would you be interested?

**We Don’t just Create Ads. We Create More SHORT AND Long-Term Buyers.**

Nothing give you better returns than big, long ideas.

Big ideas aren’t enough anymore. They also need to be long.

If you want to maximize the number of people who notice, like, share and remember your advertising, you need to think beyond the big idea. Today you need a long idea. While big ideas usually have a shelf life of 18 – 24 months (not coincidentally the average tenure of CMOs), long ideas can last decades or more. Think Geico’s We’ll save you 15% in 15 minutes or Nike’s Just Do It campaigns. Each has created thousands of new executions over the last 20+ years that surprisingly and brilliantly support these two basic messages. Big ideas integrate across multiple channels. Long ideas do that plus inspire hundreds of entertaining, informative, and interesting executions for many years.

That’s because long ideas don’t wear out. In fact, there is no such thing as ad wear out. But there’s a catch. Ads that perform well will continue to perform over time. In fact, their performance compounds over time and usually doesn’t reach full potential until the ads have run for 3+ years. Poor performing ads never perform better no matter how long you run them. That’s one reason why most agencies have to keep creating more and more new work. They blame platform algorithms for poor ad performance and claim the algorithms demand fresh creative work to optimize performance. This is bullshit. Great ads don’t wear out. Bad ads never wear in.

Long ideas also last longer. Individual executions in long campaigns get noticed, discussed, shared, talked about and remembered for years to come. Today, great marketing ideas can literally fuel awareness and sales forever. For example a video our founder, David Smith, created for Triumph Boats back in 2008 was recently re-discovered and generated an incredible 38 million views and more than 568,000 shares – without any promotion whatsoever. Spots he created for Lipton Brisk and Smirnoff Ice back in the late 1900s are getting thousands of shares and hundreds of thousands of new views and buyers every year.

Truth is most agencies and design firms simply don’t have the strategic, creative and production chops to conceive and execute big business building ideas much less long ones. They’re staffed and managed by online direct marketers - not marketers. They don’t have a clue about long-term brand building and therefore put 100% of their efforts into cranking out lots of disposable, short-term, short-lived ideas with results that frankly, come up short. To continue with the theme, this is incredibly short-sighted.

And while performance marketing (direct marketing) tactics should be a part of your marketing mix, a 100% investment in them does not even come close to the exponential returns businesses get when they pair them with the long-term brand building tactics we create.

In fact, most Marketers see a 90% increase in Returns when they combine Performance Marketing with Long-term Brand building.

That’s not a bullshit number we made up. That’s the conclusion of a major study by WARC called the Multiplier Effect.

Here’s why combining long-term brand building with performance marketing is like rocket fuel for growing your company.

Brand-building advertising is best at generating future demand for your product or service. Performance (Direct) advertising (Google Ads, Email, Direct Mail, PPC Banners, etc.) is best at harvesting current category demand.

You need both to maximize growth.

This is as close as we’ve ever been to a Unified Theory of Advertising. According to the Advertising Research Foundation, the optimal media mix for maximizing advertising effectiveness for most businesses is 78% long-term brand building and 22% short-term performance (direct) marketing.

The Truth About Performance Marketing (Direct Marketing)

Performance marketing is a prospect harvesting tactic. It only works for the estimated 5% of in-market (ready to purchase) buyers in any category at any time. (This percentage comes from research by John Dawes at the Ehrenberb Bass Institute called the 95:5 Rule.) Performance marketing does not build awareness, memory or consideration for your brand. It only captures category demand. Once you stop doing it, sales from it dry up instantly. And Just like a farmer, you can’t expect to harvest more crops (leads/prospects) without planting, fertilizing and watering the seeds to grow new ones (demand). And while this is ok for start ups in the beginning, it is deadly to depend on performance marketing to grow. That 5% number of in-market buyers is misleading. Research shows, +80% of that 5% have already decided what brand they are going to buy. And it’s almost impossible to convince them at this point to buy your brand. What’s more of the -20% of in-market buyers left, when given a choice between more than one brand, they will choose the one they are most familiar with +70% of the time. So it pains us to see time and time again, clients who have been duped by performance marketers and invested almost 100% of their budgets into direct marketing tactics like (SEO, SEM, Google AdWords, Email, PPC, Affiliate Marketing, etc.)

Bottom line, performance advertising is not advertising. It’s distribution. It’s online shelf space. And while distribution is critical, distribution works a lot better when it’s combined with brand building.

THE TRUTH ABOUT BRAND BUILDING WITH LONG IDEAS

Brand building generates future demand. It increases awareness, memorability and consideration with the 95% of potential buyers who are not ready to buy now. The short term “buy now” messages of performance marketing are completely ignored by future buyers. They are not ready to buy now so messaging asking them to buy now is 100% irelevant to them. And unlike performance marketing, brand building not only delivers long-lasting returns - it actually compounds them. When you execute long-term brand building through impossible to ignore and hard to forget creative campaigns that entertain, the returns compound even more. Creative campaigns that entertain can 10X returns. Creative campaigns that entertain and run for 3+ years are proven to generate returns up to 7X more than campaigns that run for 6 months or less. That’s a fact, Jack.

In Effectiveness In Context, Les Binet and Peter Field present evidence that all brands need brand building and sales activation to maximize growth. On average, companies should invest a minimum of at least 60% of their ad budgets into long-term, mass reach, brand building campaigns and no more than 40% into direct, short-term sales activation tactics. However, the average business puts 72% of its advertising in online media – almost the direct opposite of what they should be doing. Ouch.

Still skeptical? Consider this. With all the targeting capability and data you can imagine, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and direct to consumer brands like Warby Parker, Bombas and Chewy are not only spending heavily on traditional channels, they are all increasing their investments in mass reach media like TV, print, outdoor, radio, social media and other traditional long-term brand building channels.

Why?

Because they know an over-investment in short-term, performance marketing is leaving big money on the table and will lead to diminishing returns and declines in growth.

A video campaign for Triumph Boats, created by our Founder David Smith, has been viewed over 90 million times and caught the attention of Entertainment Tonight

A BIT MORE ON WHY PERFORMANCE MARKETING ALONE DOESN’T CUT IT

Short-term performance tactics are designed to target and “engage” people who have already shown interest in or bought from you or other products/services in your category. Online platform algorithms are designed to target the very small number of people who frequently click on ads in your category. These people are not normal buyers as most people do not click on ads anymore. In fact, it’s been shown that +90% of buyers that see an ad online or somewhere else, go directly to the company’s website, Google it or search via A.I. for that company at a later date. Yet, Google or A.I. takes 100% of the credit.

This is why CTR (Clich Through Rate) is false metric. There is zero correlation between CTR and sales, growth or brand recognition.

The simple truth is you can’t maximize growth by optimizing spend on performance attribution data alone. Performance grades its own homework and never gives credit to other tactics that had a bigger impact.

Despite what you’ve heard, targeting that’s too tightly defined can actually stunt growth. Here’s why. For most companies, 50% of growth comes from new and infrequent purchasers. This is in direct conflict with Pareto’s law which states 80% of sales come from 20% of current customers.

In How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp presents data that proves growth is directly correlated with increasing the reach of your advertising and penetration of your product. To maximize growth, you should concentrate your marketing efforts on acquiring new customers – not just retaining old ones. To do this, your advertising should reach every buyer in the market for your product or service your budget will allow.

Advertising that raises awareness is scarce. Advertising that’s authentic, entertaining, informative, memorable and sells is priceless. Creating that level of work is hard and it takes time. And most agencies shy away from doing things that are hard and time-consuming. You and your customers not only deserve better, you also deserve longer.

We Make The RAREST Of RARE Marketing. The STuff People Notice And Remember.

An estimated 84% of advertising is ignored – so just being noticed is a huge advantage.

However, being noticed isn’t nearly enough. To grow, you also need to be remembered. Research by Karen Nelson-Field has shown that over 85% of ads fail to create memories for the brands they advertise. In fact, only 15% of digital ads achieve the minimum standard of brand memory which is 2.5 seconds of attention. It’s called the Attention/Memory Threshold. And if your ads fail to attract a minimum of 2.5 seconds of attention, there’s almost zero chance your brand will be remembered.

That’s why the number one priority of advertising is actually two-fold. To maximize effectiveness your ads need to be noticed and remembered. Instead of being afraid your ad won’t be liked, be afraid it won’t be noticed. Be very afraid your brand won’t be remembered.

A million impressions is 100% meaningless if it generates 0% attention. An ad that a million people notice is worthless if they don’t remember your brand. This is the big problem with influencer and creator content. Many do a decent job of getting attention but over 80% fail to connect their content to the brands they’re promoting. Not surprising, given the number one goal of creators and influencers is to build their brands not yours.

Every single piece of communication you put out there from your business card to your your social media ads to your TV spots should aim for maximum attention. Data from The Long & Short Of It by Les Binet & Peter Field shows that aiming for fame – making more people notice and remember your ads/content – can massively enhance overall performance.

Here’s the simple goal we aim for with all our communications. Make ads and content that are the most interesting, entertaining or informative thing on the media channel in which it appears or start over.

One Last Word

We're able to produce successful results time and time again because we hold everything we do to a higher standard – no matter how big or small the project. Our ideas must be more interesting, entertaining or informative than the medium in which they appear. If it’s online, it must be the most compelling thing on the platform or site. If it’s in print, it needs to be the best thing in the publication. If it’s a billboard, we want it stopping traffic. If it’s on TV, we want to make people wait to take that pee break.

All marketing – performance, social, native, traditional and even content - is interruptive. We just make damn sure the interruption is worth it. Doing anything less is just plain rude. Impossible to ignore, hard to forget and authentically surprising are the criteria by which we judge our work. Are you ready to join the 1%?