That Marketing Podcast
That Phrasee Episode

Successful marketing requires the ability to stand out and do things differently to rise above the noise. No one understands this better than Phrasee and their outspoken CEO, Parry Malm:

How personalisation is misunderstood:

“The thing about personalization is, sticking somebody’s first name into a subject line, that’s not personalization. That’s a database match. But I do think that people have gone down this rabbit hole of personalization for the last five or 10 years saying “we’ve got to have the right message the right person at the right time.” And I think that that’s ********. If personalization worked so well, then why is the single most effective format of advertising on the planet still a homogenous Superbowl advert, which is not personalised whatsoever?”

The battle against boring content:

“I mean, lots of b2b marketing just kind of sucks. Does the world need another four-page white paper? It doesn’t, it absolutely doesn’t. So we’ve really leaned into it, we’ve created an entire content hub. And we’re just piling loads of just useful stuff into it. Because that’s what works for us.”

One book all marketers should read:

“I’m not a big fan of business experts. I’m not a big fan of Gary [Vaynerchuk] and people like that. I’d say as soon as somebody calls himself an expert, you should turn around and run for days. I’m personally a big fan of learning from the past. One book that I always recommend reading is Candide by Voltaire. Because what it does is it really outlines a difference between scarcity and rarity. And you don’t need to read a textbook to get that.’”