• by Marilois Snowman , Op-Ed Contributor, November 28, 2017

Marketers work incessantly to reach the "right person, at the right place, at the right time," implying the secret to ad success is a tightly orchestrated, immediate-gratification pitch.

Google dominates advertising's ecosystem by leveraging micro-moments, those "need to know" and "need to buy" consumer opportunities, often provided via mobile queries. Smart advertisers respond with timely offers, served on technology platforms via automated bid systems.

But what if effective advertising is as much a happy accident?

Perhaps the kind of advertising for which consumers don’t mind exchanging attention is about experiences, messaging, content — truly anything creative — introducing a new thought. Even artificial intelligence can't provide that now.

Katherine Schafler, a psychotherapist, writer and speaker, wrote a compelling essay recently in Thrive Global titled "How to Change Your Life in One Second Flat." While the title evokes an immediate-gratification, micro-advice-moment, it wasn’t that. Slow down, be present, exhibit curiosity, enjoy the moment. "We blaze through darling moments every single day," she writes.

Not every media effort necessitates blueprinting, orchestration, modeling, forecasting, immediate response, perpetual optimization.

Here's to the non-micro moments. To the I-can’t forecast-results-but-let’s-try moments. “Be the thing – not the thing that sells the thing,” a colleague once said. Being the thing can be very hard to quantify. But an over reliance on those media tactics paired to metrics results in the false-logic mind-set of “it doesn’t work if we can’t measure it.”

The moments of spontaneous laughter, of creative exploration, of mistakes that inspire invention should count, too.

And marketers should have the mind-set to fully, humanly, appreciate them.