I recently met with a guy named Marcus Glover, the charismatic creative lead at an ad agency called Glu. We were discussing a new app to be built on Kinvey – a mobile infrastructure start-up where I run marketing. At some point in the meeting, the team began to lose focus. Glover raced to the board and crudely sketched a classic Air Jordan ad with his opposite hand, while reminding us to keep our sights on the core idea. He explained that great ideas transcend execution (to wit, his left-handed demonstration) – a phenomenon he called “the primacy of great ideas.”
Products are no different. After all, products are simply ideas made tangible. To encounter a product that provides a value that’s as compelling as it is self-evident is rare. A few months back, I had the good fortune of running smack-dab into one such product — TrackMaven.
My colleague Brian Whalley was invited into a closed beta for TrackMaven. He raved about the product — a dead-simple way to track the efficacy of competitors’ online marketing campaigns, then use the data to make smarter choices about the content we publish and the offers we run. Whalley’s enthusiasm had me intrigued. So I came up with a test to determine if his opinion was representative of most digital marketers.
At this year’s Content Marketing World I delivered a presentation highlighting 10 premium content marketing products in which marketers should invest. The final entry on the list was TrackMaven, which I described as “Google Analytics meets competitive intelligence.”
In the weeks following the session, the entire tech ecosystem — marketers, venture capitalists, analysts, bloggers — reached out with questions about the solutions profiled. The product most often asked about was TrackMaven. Curiously, almost nobody asked, “What is TrackMaven?” Instead they wanted to scrutinize our use case. It was almost as if they intuitively understood what the solution does. No need for an elevator pitch. Primacy.
The ad Glover sketched depicted nothing more than a basketball hoop, a leaping stick figure holding a ball, and a scoreboard displaying: “Jordan 2, Isaac Newton 0”. The idea is unmistakable: Jordan can fly. More than anything else, it’s this principle – the primacy of great products – that attracted me to TrackMaven. And that’s why I am thrilled to join their advisory board.