Vintage Rishad

Image Source

Rishad Tobaccowala is a tough act to follow. The man generates more sound bytes per second than Bill Maher touring the Vatican. Or Al Gore at a Hummer plant. Or Rush Limbaugh at the gay pride parade. OK, you get the point.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of moderating the ad:tech Chicago keynote panel immediately following Rishad's keynote conversation with Drew Ianni. As you can imagine, the crowd was plenty warmed up.

Unfortunately, I missed the last 20 minutes of his session while they got my panel situated and mic'ed up backstage but I was still able to fill 4 pages of notes with classic Rishad quips. Below are the ones I caught. To sample the entire vintage, run a search on Twitter for "#adtechchi + rishad."

• You can't get good word-of-mouth without good products
• Before social media, there was no amplifier for WOM
• When clients ask for a Facebook strategy, inquire why they never asked for an NBC strategy
• The future doesn't fit in the containers of the past
• Marketers spend 50% of their time demanding resources for what they spend 10% of their budgets on
• The future will be about marketing, not advertising
• Marketing is understanding and meeting customer requirements
• 4 things that build brands are performance, desire, culture, and intrigue -- only 1 of which has anything to do with math/data
• Most important thing with earned media is to de-fang detractors
• TV works
• If you are going to build digital without TV, you have no imagination
• Working media will decline from 85-90% of budgets to 65%
• The world may be digital but people are analog. Analog = feelings.
• Ideas scale much faster than math
• Creative and media must be at the same table but don't need to work for the same company
• Clients want best-of-breed (resources) with minimum drama. The only way to ensure zero drama is to hire 1 agency and get a pool of mediocrity.