For those of you who have attended my Internet Marketing Seminars, you will be familiar with three of my passions.  The third one is that I am a TED fan.

I recently decided to watch (again!) Rory Sutherland presentation “Life Lessons from an Ad Man” .  It is not a new talk but, for those who have not heard him speak before, this is a great presentation given by a master speaker.  I thoroughly recommend taking the time to watch him.

In his TedTalk I love the way he cleverly demystifies the new fangled terminology for Social Media concepts (which seem to be coined by those on the “cutting edge” of life to make most people feel that sex had only just been invented because it has a quirky new name) by associating it to the mundane and wonderfully familiar subject of cooking and food.

Here are some of my favourites:

20th Century Communication Model

Rory’s analogies between food and marketing begin very early on in life. He shows an image of a baby being breastfed and likens it to the classic 20th century model of mass communication between a dependent public and a monopoly supplier. In this scenario the breastfeeding public are “pathetically grateful” for anything offered to them by one of the two monopolies.

User Generated Content

He then shows an image of a farmer carrying crops and tells us that in the modern Social Media world, this is called User Generated Content.

Mash Ups

One of the popular modes of USG content is that of creating a Mash Up. For those who might not be familiar with this, he kindly produces an image of mother and daughter cooking and demystifies this by explaining that the Mash Up is really nothing more than taking something that has already been created and/or grown (vegetables, stock, meat, etc) and chopping it mixing it up into a dish that we cook (stew? soup? casserole? – yes we have all done this before).  By the way, for those who like cooking metaphors and are a little more familiar with SEO, Rand Fishkin recently produced a great blog post on how he likens SEO to the art of cooking.

Mobile Marketing:

Mobile marketing is also one of those terms that makes most people think that it is a new fangled, futuristic and ever-so-complicated new world that we live in, and Rory once again talks of it being no more than food-on-the-go:  sandwiches, pies, wraps, sausage rolls, an extremely popular way of eating in the UK.

Food 2.0?

Whilst sandwiches and wraps are popular they don’t beat the popularity of chips! A large bowl of crispy chips (with ketchup) is a godsend in a bar, where much of its popularity stems from the fact that it is something that is produced to share with friends and, as such, chips are a great way of explaining Web 2.0.  It not only describes the popularity of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but also the onslaught of viral marketing campaigns.

Contextual Communication

Have you ever returned from holiday with a bottle of the local liqueur, only to find that it doesn’t taste quite as nice as you remember? If so, Rory would consider you to be a victim of contextual communication. Every country has a spirit, like Pernod in France, which tastes great in that country but rubbish everywhere else. This is also true of contextual communication, a particularly persuasive form of location specific marketing.

Rory’s fantastic analogies certainly help to take the confusion out of online marketing terminology and this is something that we, at LeadGenerators, strive to achieve through our series of Internet Marketing Seminars and Social Media Breakfast sessions.

We can’t promise you a three course meal, but we’ll certainly give you something to chew over.