Introducing… Velocity 3.0

Hello. Come on in. And you brought wine! You shouldn’t have.

We don’t expect you to care about our new site and new direction as much as we do — but the reasons behind it all are super-relevant to every B2B marketer. Even you.

Because B2B marketing has changed a LOT since we launched the old V site. In pretty important ways…

The start of a new era

We saw the tides turning a few years ago: the thing we sold, the way we made it, and the people we sold it to started to change.

The tsunami of Crap Doug predicted in 2013 hasn’t slowed down over the last 10 years — it’s grown. A few Great Content Brands^TM stand fast in the torrent, but the vast majority are floundering in the swell.

Content marketing was a hugely important force for heave-ho-ing us out of the interruptive, spray-and-pray dark ages. And the early days were exciting as hell (remember when just producing an ebook earned attention?).

But once the novelty subsided, Content Marketing dissolved into the mainstream and carried all the baggage of the old world with it.

Marketers continued to presume interest and buying readiness without doing anything to earn them. Only now they did it at scale. They produced so much, at such a low quality threshold, that they devalued the very thing that was supposed to add value.

So it was no surprise that when [REDACTED] turned the world upside down in 2020, and companies needed to prioritize revenue-creating activities like demand gen and sales activation, “content marketing” wasn’t the first suggestion in the room (unless the question was “Where can we reduce spend?”)

But the fact that the easy wins are gone isn’t something to be depressed about.

It’s actually great news for you… and us.

Content marketing was only ever a part of the story

Ye Olde Velocity site served us dutifully for years. But we’re a different agency than we were when it launched. Back then…

• We’d built three sites…now we’ve launched over 30.
• We occasionally tracked projects (in spreadsheets)…now our PMs resource for 50+ clients.
• The performance team was Neil and Agu…now there are 13 of the fuckers (and counting).
• We made mostly ebooks…now we’ve got devs and motion and graders and live action and Strings and Rivers and you get the idea.

But maybe most importantly…

• We were an agency of talented individuals…now we’re all up in each other’s shit.

Truth is, “Content Marketing” is just a bad description of how intermingled our Strategy, Creative and Performance services have become.

It’s something more like Creative Performance: a prismic mix of the Meaning, Metrics and Mojo you need to build brands, campaigns and performance programs that actually make you money.

I say “something more like,” because there’s another part to this launch I’m (also) excited about…

We want to build this story in public

You know the cobbler’s children thing? Christian Louboutin lets his kids run around in threadbare Crocs?

When you make websites for a living, it’s hard as hell to make one for yourself. There are a bunch of reasons:

• You want it to be good.
• You’ve gotta pay the bills.
• You’re scared to fuck up a good thing.
• You have no outsider’s perspective when you’re your own client.
• You wanna do too many things so you end up doing none of them.

This has been coming for a long time. And there’s still so much we want to build and refine. But instead of holding fire, we wanted to just get this thing into the world and work on it in public.

Our hope is that airing our not-fully-dried-laundry will help marketers like you crack similarly tricky stuff. We’re gonna start by unpacking some of the thinking and creative processes that got us here — specifically:

• Our visual identity
• Our web build strategy and workflow
• The audience and performance considerations that drove creative decisions
• Why Strategy, Creative and Performance is so powerful when it all blends together

What else would be helpful to see? We’re not shy — ask in a comment and we’ll let it all hang out.

For now though, take a look around (and tell us if you spot any jank). It’s been a delight to work on this, and I’m excited to invite you along as we build the next permutation of Velocity in public.