Summer, Christmas, Easter, all these moments in the year make people want to go out and explore. Preferably by taking a week or multiple weeks off to enjoy a well-deserved vacation. Sometimes with the entire family, maybe even together with other couples or families. The more, the merrier.

Who can’t recall those moments at the office or at home where those holiday people fling out their phones or even worse, a self-made booklet with holiday pics? Then the excruciating 10-20 minutes of flipping through their entire chronicled holiday, moment by moment, from dish to dish. Phrases like: “and this was a great little beach where they had this cute little bar where they served these great cocktails” or “And the restaurant has this amazingly funny waiter who one day came up to us, and hilarious, you had to have been there.”

But I wasn’t. So I couldn’t care less. And not that I do not care about you or think that you do not deserve a holiday, I just was not there to witness these moments, so I also have no emotion or whatever to connect to.

This sounds all too familiar to marketers who have this amazing afternoon at an ad agency which was filled with creative juices, excitement, laughter and camaraderie energy. Amazing campaign! They pack up the PowerPoint, sign on the dotted line and go off.

Then reality hits. Trying to present the stuff at the office seems not as easy as it sounded that afternoon with those ad people. Okay, but let’s still move on, great campaign. You go into production; edits go back and forth and what comes out is a shallow reflection of that polaroid memory you have of that amazing afternoon. People don’t seem that excited as you, don’t see the subtlety all of a sudden, don’t see it at all actually.

Ideas shouldn’t need your account manager to stand next to every TV or phone to explain the TVC or OLV to the consumer. There are just not that many of them. What it should do is that it relates to a larger audience and isn’t created to only cater for the fun and laughter of some marketers, some ad people and possibly a very niche in crowd hipster set of urbanite people. Cause if you didn’t manage to reach those, but did connect to everyone else on the planet, sky would be the limit, right?

Sometimes you need to have those afternoons though, crying tears of laughter. Afterwards you thank everyone for the amazing time, maybe even take a selfie with them, to capture the moment. To look back at later. And you keep it to yourself.  

Interested how to deal with these situations? Give me a ring, let’s do coffee.