If you have the time, I highly recommend watching this entire interview. Tina Fey is just hilarious but she is also very authentic and there are so many awkward moments between her and Eric Schmidt that it makes for a very entertaining interview.
If however, you do not have a lot of time... then watch the following time period: 3m 00s - 5m 30s
Here are a few lessons I gathered from that scene that can be easily applied to marketing:
1. Messages should not prompt denial - Think of any recent advertisement you saw... did it begin with a question? Was your response to that question.. 'no'? If so, you have already lost interest in the ad. With the rise of digital marketing and more targeted means of advertising, sooner rather than later, marketers should find a way to invoke a 'yes' response. Seth Godin's rules of permission marketing make this action even easier because in this model, customers have to agree to be marketed to in the first place.
2. "An idea that you stumble upon together, is likely to be more interesting than the idea that you started with as individuals." - Marketers are in a conversation age. This is a fairly simple principle and most certainly one that marketers can put to good use with the help of social media. This quote is the essence of crowdsourcing.
Final thoughts: There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between improvisation and marketing. Marketers cannot begin to predict the kinds of conversations that will spark about their brands online, the only thing marketers can do... is understand the basic principles that will allow them to improvise.
