TED Talks are a great place to go when you need any sort of inspiration, and that extends to the world of marketing. You can find more than 3,000 free and ready to stream talks, including a rich selection of talks dedicated explicitly to marketing tips, lessons, trends, and experiences. Check out discussions on everything from the future of digital advertising to how to use — and trust — the data you’re working with. It’s a great hub to turn to when you want to learn something new while also energizing your team.
Not sure where to start? In no specific order, here are four of our favorite TED Talks for when you want to provide a boost of inspiration to marketing professionals — or get some inspiration yourself.
1. “What Brands Can Learn From Online Dating” – Sarah Willersdorf
Sarah Willersdorf is the former partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm. She also did a stint as the interim chief marketing officer for fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. In her TED Talk, she outlined some of the unique and intriguing similarities between trying to catch someone’s eye on a dating app and trying to catch their eye in marketing.
What we like about Willersdorf’s TED Talk is that it’s actionable. For example, just as Tinder only gives its daters five pictures and a couple of sentences to show off their best selves, Willersdorf recommends adopting a branding strategy from just five images and a couple of sentences. Her talk is a good exercise in reinforcing just how important that first impression is in marketing, and is also a fun one to watch.
- Watch the talk here.
2. “404: The Story of a Page Not Found” – Renny Gleeson
Renny Gleeson, managing director of ad agency Wieden + Kennedy and a mentor for tech accelerators and startups, tells an interesting story in his TED Talk about internal brand failures and the negative impact these have on consumers — and how to turn them around.
Trying to access a page on a website and being faced with a “404: Page Not Found” message is frustrating for visitors and a major blocked road in the customer journey. Using these pages as an example, Gleeson goes into detail about the little things marketers do that can stand in their own way, like not having a landing page where there’s supposed to be a landing page. He then offers lots of helpful tips for creative ways you can turn mistakes into marketing opportunities, and use that same “404: Page Not Found” page to strengthen your brand identity instead of harming it.
- Watch the talk here.
3. “How to Make Choosing Easier” – Sheena Iyengar
We’re all faced with lots of choices every single day. And behind the scenes, there are a lot of mechanisms contributing to those choices. Sheena Iyengar is a proclaimed “world expert on choice,” and the S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the management department at Columbia Business School. In her TED Talk, she goes over the three consequences of offering your leads too many options and the four techniques your brand can use to limit choice overload.
Not all of Iyengar’s tips are going to be practical to marketing professionals since there’s a lot of overlap with sales and product development. But there are many fantastic takeaways for guiding marketing efforts, particularly when it comes to making choice a major factor when planning and creating content.
- Watch the talk here.
4. “What Physics Taught Me About Marketing” – Dan Cobley
Physics don’t usually come up a lot in marketing. Still, Dan Cobley, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist (and former marketing director for Google), puts down a pretty strong argument for why it should. His TED Talk is all about the overlap of physics and marketing, and how lessons learned from one can inform the other.
A big point he makes is why you need to focus on what your leads and buyers do, and not what they say they’re going to do. Marketing doesn’t have to be all about guesswork. The data is there — you just have to read it. Cobley’s talk will have you digging back into your own data, searching for not just big ideas but big ideas that are supported by real, concrete, provable data.
- Watch the talk here.
Ready to get inspired? Start with one of the TED Talks listed above, or head to the TED Talks website and start browsing. And if you’re new to TED Talks, consider just clicking on a few videos that sound interesting to you, even if they’re not directly related to marketing. Often there is plenty of insightful takeaways to gather, which can be applied, in some way, to your marketing work.