How Beyonce killed marketing (and saved it)

By now Beyonce’s coup in launching her latest album just before Christmas is a well-known success. But what did she have, beyond the obvious?

Ok, if you type a “B” into iTunes, you don’t get Bach or Beethoven. You get the Queen B. So sure, she’s got a head start.

But then again so do most brands.

The leading brands today have often been around for years and often decades. They can be found on shelves around the world. They can be said to have a lot of friends, if not of the Facebook variety. Rather, the good kind, who buy them over and over again. I’d call that a head start. And yet none of those brands act with the confidence of Beyonce.

Maybe those brands don’t have a story to tell that they believe is intrinsically good enough. Or interesting enough. Or just told well enough.

So did Beyonce kill marketing? Well only if you believe that marketing has nothing to do with storytelling.

Beyonce tells a story. With actual content. Lots of it. 14 songs. 17 videos. Real work. Great work. Great marketing.

She was also fighting against the one-off, the single, the superficial. She rekindled the love for an old medium – The Complete Album. At one time an album was a complete story. Buying a single was always possible, but it was like reading only a single chapter of a Hemingway novel – interesting or baffling, but hardly satisfying. Do brands have a complete album? Or are they looking for that one hit single?

So was all this free? Or was it earned? There is certainly nothing free about creating 17 original videos. Feature films are often shot with much less.

Beyonce needed no media vehicle other than iTunes alone, proving that iTunes is much more than a distribution mechanism for digital music; it is a media force in its own right, an advertising vehicle of tremendous power. And, yet, one that you pay to experience – via your data charges, your time and, ultimately, your money when you download that album.

We have very recently seen just how powerful Amazon can be as a media channel for our clients at Sony and Intel. Amazon is a media ecosystem all to itself. We focus on their touchpoints – starting with the Kindle Fire as our launch screen for this particular story. No classic media in sight. And, not incidentally, close to where you can click to buy a lovely Sony VAIO laptop.

Technology’s real purpose for brands is its capacity to bring the story closer to the transaction. Both Amazon and iTunes are proof of this new reality. They allow brands to do that on a global scale at low cost. And this process works best when it gets out of the way of the story.

Interviewed in Billboard Mag, Jon Platt of Warner/Chappell Music, said: "The release of Beyonce's album was a great way to finish the year, and a chief reminder for me that artists, songwriters and producers have really good ideas… We're supposed to help them nurture and realize those dreams, not kill them. At times, experienced company executives can be so smart at outlining every reason why an idea can't work, instead of focusing on how it can work. In the case of Beyonce's album, her team focused on how it could work."

Brands and brand managers are too often in the business of risk avoidance. Instead, they could ask themselves whether they are nurturing great ideas, or killing them. Are they finding ways a story can work, or why it can’t?

So play that Beyonce album and focus on making that story work in 2014.

Brian Elliott is CEO and founder of Amsterdam Worldwide