I'm a better marketer than the world's biggest brands. Better than Coca Cola, McDonalds, KFC.

Better than anything the UK has to offer. Cadburys? Asda? Walkers?

I'm better than all of them.

Seriously, bear with me.

The reason I'm better than all the global super agencies, creating mainstream campaigns for the world's biggest brands, is because I learned marketing by spending my own money, while under pressure to get results for my own business.

That genuinely made me a world class marketer.

This is because the bigger a business gets, the less effective it's marketing is.

A businesses like Coca Cola simply couldn't do direct response marketing. The corporate, legal & accounting teams would kill it at the first opportunity.

If you look back at the origin stories of most of these businesses, a world class marketer or salesman was involved. Go research the back stories of Ray Kroc or Colonel Sanders. Kroc was a career salesman of pretty much anything he could get his hands on.

In his 60's, Colonel Sanders was sleeping in his car, travelling across America to sell his chicken recipe & the earliest KFC franchises.

They don't do that now.

McDonald's marketing amounts to a few whistleable jingles and meaningless taglines. KFC have committed to spending literally billions on new logos and fonts.

Take away the corporate advertising and marketing world, and the veneer of mysticism that they apply to make this stuff credible, and it all amounts to something that a 5 year old kid could have done as a school project.

Think I'm joking? I'm not.

Think about it. What would a 5 year old do if you told them to create a marketing campaign for Coca Cola?

'Daddy... I've drawn a polar bear drinking a can of Coke'.

Everyone in the mainstream advertising world thinks that the Christmas Coca Cola ads are genius. They think that putting Santa on a Coke truck, with yet another catchy jingle playing in the background is marketing 'genius'.

Can they tell you how many sales Coca Cola made directly attributed to those ads? No.

Because they don't think in those terms, because it's not their business, and it's not their money on the table.

That same concept could have been created in less than a day by any competent marketer working with a halfway decent jingle writer.

It's the billions of pounds of media ad slots that puts it on our screens.

Think of the brands I mentioned above.

A gorilla playing drums. A random shopper slapping the change in her back pocket. Leicester's most famous footballer in random scenarios.

None of this is 'genius'. It's not even difficult.

It was the strength of these brands that made the ads relevant.

The mainstream marketing industry thinks it was the other way around.

KFC's recent re-brand had them all giddy & excited about the latest opportunity to babble a load of rubbish on Linkedin... sorry, 'create content'... talking about the effects of 2D visuals vs 3D ones -

'directing attention to brand owned focal points, that turn design choices into memory structures'...

That's a direct quote. I didn't make that up.

The success of these huge, global businesses isn't down to some BS peddling Madison Avenue or Shoreditch based agency, full of hipster marketing grads.

(Take this sincerely because I mean it - as a rule of thumb, take a marketing degree and a background in a big organisation as a sign of incompetence, not competence.)

The success of these businesses was built by the founders & early pioneers, who had to get results.

The way they market & advertise now pretty much has to be vanilla, because it has to be inoffensive & uncontroversial to the mainstream.

The remaining 99% of businesses however, can't afford to be mainstream.

They don't have a billion quid to push ads out. Every pound spent has to show a return. It has to leave, do its thing, and then come back in the form of revenue with additional pounds attached in profit.

Most mainstream marketers don't even consider this to be their job.

I consider it my ONLY job. That's what makes me world class.