Article

Best Practices Are (Usually) Bullshit

February 26, 2024

This week’s issue is one I’ve thought about (and had saved) for a long time, but never felt quite right writing – at least, until this week. Part of that is I had other things on the docket, and part of it is that it attacks something pervasive in the marketing industry: best practices.

The impetus for this issue starts with a call I had with an old friend who runs a high-performing company. And, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think the start of this story was the lead-in to a moderately amusing joke: a high-performing brand, a small performance agency trying to win some business and an audit log into a Zoom. What followed was less knee-slapper, and more death-by-powerpoint power hour, starring slide after slide citing “best practices” not being followed.

The agency made claim after claim that various aspects of their ad accounts, marketing strategy and brand did not adhere to “best practices” and were, therefore, not optimal / in need of their “expert” assistance. In reality, this brand is an outperformer – their ad accounts are weird but wonderfully profitable. Their marketing strategy is unconventional, but undeniably effective.

The individual asked me what I thought of those recommendations. I had a simple response: those – and most – best practices are bullshit.

To articulate why, I think it’s helpful to start from a single first principle: as adoption increases, surplus value decreases.

Put another way: the higher the number of people/organizations/brands that do a thing, the less remarkable – and the less impactful – doing that thing becomes.

Best Practices – by their definition – are things that many others have done over a substantial period of time. They are tried, tested and (sometimes) true. They deliver results that fall squarely in the chunky part of the bell curve (which, depending on the brand, could represent an improvement!). For many marketers and brands, that sounds appealing. It sounds safe. It feels good. And all of that is an illusion.

Adopting best practices is like hiring McKinsey: it’s safe. No one ever got fired for choosing McKinsey. Conversely, I’ve , “I’m SO GLAD I hired McKinsey – they were REVOLUTIONARY!”

There’s a reason accountants and lawyers and HR and physicians all default to a “best practice” – they are in the business of avoiding conflict, mitigating risk and minimizing failure rate. Risk mitigation is the goal.

But there’s no free lunch. If you want low-risk, you sacrifice the potential for high rewards.

Here’s the thing: there are spaces where best practices should be followed. I don’t want the pilot of the plane I’m on to go rogue. I most certainly don’t want my dentist to think outside the box while he has a drill in my mouth.

Marketing is rarely one of those spaces. Digital marketing even less so. Why? The rate of change in the industry (broadly) and within platforms (specifically) is so much greater than the rate at which “best practices” can be established that it renders the very concept absurd.

In case the above just isn’t spicy enough, let’s go one step further: marketing best practices are often the worst things a brand can do.

Why? I have five reasons:

Retrospective vs. Prospective – By their very nature, best practices are retrospective. They examine what has been done over a period of time, find commonalities or learnings, then assess the relative impact or efficacy of each. Those that are determined to be the most impactful are repacked as “best practices.” Here’s the rub: all of these debate and assess the past. A best practice is one designed in a reality that no longer exists. The challenge marketers face isn’t “how do we win yesterday?” – it’s “How do we win tomorrow?” And while the past can be a useful strategic guide, it rarely offers an actual playbook.
Rigidity – Best practices are rigid and prescriptive – they specify precisely what should be done, and allow for little-to-no flexibility, based on what has worked in the past. The challenge this presents is simple: prescribing how something should be done based on the past – by definition – restricts the ability to adapt to the present and future. It cuts off options that can – and should – be explored, considered and tested. Just because something worked in the past does not mean that it will work in the future, and placing artificial limiters on your optionality is a dangerous thing to do.
Assumptions – every best practice is rooted in a single, foundational assumption of continuity: the world will be the same tomorrow as it was yesterday; what had an impact in the past will have a comparable impact in the future. That assumption is rarely, if ever, true: surplus value declines with adoption. This isn’t just marketing talk, either – it’s well-established in scientific and economic literature, not to mention our own “lived” experiences: Having a Stanley mug a year ago was a statement that created “surplus” societal value – if you knew, you knew. And you had a Stanley. Today? I think every person in our office has a Stanley. The surplus value is zero. The same is true of human behavior: evolution is a shockingly fast process – two years ago, I don’t believe my grandmother knew what an app was, let alone how to use one. Today, she buys groceries on Instacart. The rate of change of human behavior exceeds the rate at which best practices are forged by an order of magnitude.
The Death of Curiosity – There is a prevailing sentiment among the organizations I’ve worked with who have adopted best practices: once the practice is adopted, that part of the growth/advertising/marketing/website/customer experience puzzle is “solved” and our efforts should shift to other, unsolved areas. The curiosity & burning desire to understand and grapple with the complexities of those problems dies. And with it, the spark of innovation that pushes the boundaries of the possible. Best Practices replace the truly difficult, arduous work of contextualizing, observing, identifying and solving various patterns of problems we encounter during our day-to-day work.This is a death knell for innovative, groundbreaking, paradigm shifting activity – whether it be marketing or experience or product. Could you imagine if SKIMS marketing team responded to the pitch for massive hype cycles + limited quantities + random drops product strategy with, “Well, that’s not product launch best practice – we should have ample supply, create a waiting list and ensure that everyone gets it.” That probably would’ve been fine. Unremarkable? Yes. But fine. What it would not have been would be groundbreaking. Best practices would not have catapulted the brand from curiosity to $4B brand in just over 4 years.
Perpetuation – Finally, and perhaps most insidiously: best practices are like Lays: you can’t have just one. Best practices perpetuate – they infect every aspect of the organization, restricting possibilities, constraining growth and stifling innovation. What starts as a well-meaning exercise to improve cascades throughout the organization, creating new processes + bureaucracy, slowing the rate of change and restricting avenues for exploration and experimentation. And as more and more best practices are put into place, the avenues available to execute true, outsized value opportunities diminishes exponentially (yes, you read that correctly).
Bonus: There’s No Such Thing, Anyway: All best practices are context-dependent. There is no single practice that, regardless of context, is superior to all other possible practices. There are practices that have performed better (note: past tense) in certain contexts than others, but (2) past results are not indicative of future performance and (2) the context is never the same, because the environment is never the same.

Some people reading this might think this is hypocritical – that a newsletter that has put out many opinions on how to structure and run accounts shouldn’t dismiss “best practices” – but I couldn’t disagree more.

I have said before, and I maintain, that there are some practices that are objectively better than others. There are. But I believe everything should be tested. Nothing is sacrosanct. Evolve or die.

I’m not going to change something that is performing because it doesn’t adhere to a best practice. I’m not going to leave something in place that sucks because it follows established guidelines. I don’t care what worked yesterday; I only care whether that knowledge can be put to use to win today, tomorrow or the day after that.

The world moves too fast. Best practices are relics of a time gone by; recipes for unremarkability.

What Do We Do Instead?

If you’ve stuck with me this far, then you’re probably wondering what I recommend instead. I have five simple rules I strive to live by – and work by – every day:

Think In Frameworks, Not In Practices

Excellence in marketing (and growth, and product, and everything else) is not obtained by following a checklist or implementing a series of tactics. It comes from framework thinking, dispassionate analysis and critical awareness (both of your brand + your ecosystem).

My standard framework is:

Goal → Problem → Strategy → Tactics → Assess → Iterate

This forces you to grapple with the nuances and complexities inherent in every challenge. There’s no easy button that allows you to skip from objective/goal to implementation; you must understand the problems/blockers preventing the goal from being achieved, develop a strategy, execute it, assess it, and iterate.

Evolution is baked into the framework. I start from the premise that there is no stable solution to a problem, and I continually test that thesis throughout my engagement with it.

Nothing is Sacrosanct & Nothing is Forever.

Everything we do should be challenged and validated, again and again. There are no things that are beyond reproach or questioning.

If you can not justify why something was done on its own merits – whether that’s the technical operations of a platform or a design choice – then it shouldn’t be done. An appeal to precedent (“that’s how it was always done”) or practice (“this was the best practice”) or procedure (“this is what X resource says”) is not acceptable.

Question everything. As the old saying goes, “In God we trust; all others bring data.”

As a concrete example, our agency abandoned SKAG structures long before it was popular (or considered “best practice”) to do so. We did it because the published changes to match types and our observations of search term data indicated that the structure was no longer achieving the desired output (i.e. tailored ads based on a specific search term).

We hypothesized that moving from a SKAG to a STAG structure would consolidate volume with minimal, if any, incremental change in performance. Subsequent testing validated this hypothesis. I remember the client calls when we proposed this move – clients couldn’t believe it. It flew in the face of “best practice” – but we brought both the evidence and the data to support it – and they agreed (after being quite shocked we dared to question it).

Nothing is sacrosanct. And if you ever find yourself thinking something is, that’s exactly when you should question the ever-loving-daylights out of it.

Excellence is the result of brilliantly-timed and meticulously-orchestrated disruption.

So much of the modern ecosystem – whether it’s products from TEMU or ads from the next DTC diet powder thing or the news (something bad happened, click to read more) even phones/computers – is a sea of sameness.

Best practices create sameness. They create homogeneity.

Excellence results from breaking those patterns and doing things that are truly unexpected, surprising, delightful – whatever.

Question everything. Force yourself to consider the alternatives, to explore other possibilities. Challenge established ways of thinking.

Find The North Star

The goal of everything we marketers do is to create and capture demand that otherwise would not have existed (or gone to our brand) were it not for our efforts, and to do so profitably.

That, in a nutshell, is incrementally (which I wrote about here)

Everything else – from goals to strategies to tactics – can (and will) change based on the life stage of the business, the context, the time, the macroeconomic climate and 1,000 other things. But throughout all of it, the north star remains and serves as a guide for everything else you do.

No Spend > Bad Spend

This concept is a recurring theme in my newsletter for one, simple reason: it’s mathematically true.

Before we get into why, I will first define “bad spend” as ad dollars expended with an expected return that is materially below your acceptable threshold. Obviously, your concept of “materially” will differ from business to business, product to product, service to service – but regardless of the level, the rule holds true.

The reason is simple: if we assume there’s a limited pool of funds available for investment (however large or small that pool is), then any investments made with a return materially below target place a commensurately higher strain on the remaining investment, simply to recover overall investment returns to the initial target.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider the following example.

Assume a brand has a $100,000 marketing budget, and expects to receive 1,000 sales from that budget (you can substitute leads or app downloads or account creations or whatever else if that helps you) – or $100 per sales (or whatever).

The first $50,000 of that is spent on a tactic that produces only 100 total sales. This leaves $50,000 to obtain 900 sales – requiring a cost/sale of $55.55. This is exponentially more difficult to achieve than the original target (remember, CPA curves aren’t linear).

The downstream effect of this is that each of those 100 customers acquired with the initial $50,000 probably has a negative LTV – meaning the brand itself would have been healthier from a bottom-line perspective if it had never acquired them using paid media.

If the brand had simply not spent money – or ceased spending sooner – on a tactic that was materially under-performing targets, it would have been in a much, much healthier place overall.

My final point on this is a related one: every dollar spent, anywhere in a business, is zero-sum: that dollar can’t be spent anywhere else. A dollar that goes to advertising is a dollar that can’t go to salaries or R&D or operations or rent or shareholders. As a marketing leader, you have a responsibility to understand the relationship between the expected return on your investments and your brand’s north star. It is probable that there will be times when you should reject budget, so it can be allocated to higher-return components of a business.

Play The Audience & Work The Problem

It’s easy to get hung up on process – to market to keywords instead of people, to obsess about creative instead of the people it is intended to serve, to implement a structure without regard for the problem it is intended to solve.

Remarkable things come from doing things that aren’t easy.

Play The Audience: No target audience mirrors a population average. It is our responsibility to obsess about our audience. Learn their ins & outs, their quirks, their fixations, their desires, their struggles. That knowledge – combined with the right framework – is what leads to powerful, impactful campaigns.

Work The Problem: Approach every challenge as a blank sheet of paper, without preconceived notions of the appropriate solution. This is, perhaps, the most challenging thing I’ve worked with our team on: don’t go into a call assuming you have the solution. Don’t open an account looking for mistakes. Seek to understand the problem, then find where the current solution falls short.

I know this is one of those controversial articles that may not feel good to read, but it’s one of the most important I’ve ever written.

That’s it for this issue!

Cheers,

Sam

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