This Week in Strategy: How does Moses make coffee? Hebrews it!
It was Yom Kippur this week! You can't give me flack for this one
Hi Strat Pack,
Guys, what a week. First of all, if you haven't read this: Former Droga5 CCO Ted Royer addresses sexual misconduct allegations in public for the first time, please read it. It's long and weird and just really weird.
In other content-you-should-consume news, I watched American Factory on Netflix this week. It's a documentary that looks at what happened when a Chinese company took over a closed General Motors factory in Ohio. I've been thinking a lot about it recently. Here's the trailer. And here's the NYT review...it's a critics pick.
Did you know that over 62,000 people share #foodporn posts every day to Instagram? Apparently that can contribute to obesity in select individuals because, get ready for this, Study finds some individuals display larger brain responses to food-related cues than to erotic images. The researchers found that individuals with larger neuroresponses to cues predicting food delivery than to erotic images ate more than twice as many chocolate candies in lab conditions. Interesting. You know what's not interesting? This article didn't compare food to sex drive at all. What a bait and switch.
But seriously folks, Are armchairs the future of transportation? Assuming you're not afflicted by the whole #foodporn thing, this is definitely the best 0:23 you'll spend today. Watch as two men ride through a vehicle expo in Newcastle, Australia, on motorized armchairs. Andrew Burns and John Norton, the friends behind the lazy creation, joked that they came up with it “over a few beers in the shed” where they “just sort of bumped heads, did a bit of brainstorming and this is what we came up with.
Alright, stop messing around trying to create a motorized your armchair assembly line in a former GM factory. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Erhenberg-Bass: Marketing needs to embrace its scientific status or risk a slow death [MarketingWeek]
Marketing is a young science that needs to be nurtured and nourished if the industry wants to enter an “age of enlightenment”, according to professor Jenni Romaniuk, associate director of the Erhenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science. Marketers should embrace marketing as science if they want to ensure the discipline has impact and influence within organisations and among consumers.
“With the changes marketing is facing with the C-suite and getting credibility with the board, can we afford to not take ourselves seriously as a marketing discipline?” asked Romaniuk.
“Can we afford to wait for that or will we just get rendered obsolete by the CFO in the company? We can move now and get there more quickly than if we have to wait for all of the people who don’t think marketing is a science to first die.”
Romaniuk argued that to enter an age of enlightenment, marketers need the humility to realise they can’t know everything about such a new science and some of their thinking may be wrong.
The Erhenberg-Bass director called on marketers to stop being seduced by case studies and quibbling over the fundamentals of marketing, asking them instead to demand more robust insight. Romaniuk argued that case studies serve a purpose in terms of illustrating a point, but are not data from which to draw conclusions that can be generalised.
“Every case study has biases in who wrote it, biases in the information you’re given. Even something like the Effies, there’s a lot that’s left out in most cases,” she argued. “Unless you’re able to ask systematic questions you can’t draw proper conclusions and we need to stop assuming that case studies equal generalisable knowledge.”
Romaniuk was also keen to dismiss the idea that science is the enemy of creativity and that if marketing is a science it means people can’t have fun anymore. Rather, she wants marketers to set high expectations for what marketing can achieve as a science and attempt to define their own scientific laws of marketing.
2) How our brains get overloaded by the 21st Century [BBC Future]
This article is about consumer behavior, not advertising. And yet, the goal of every advertisement ever created is to influence consumer behavior. So please, read this, and consider how to adapt your comms plans accordingly.
It’s commonplace to say that we’re all deluged by more information than we can possibly handle. Less commonplace is the acknowledgement that human judgements also rely upon secondary information that doesn’t come from any external source – and that offers one of the most powerful tools we possess for dealing with the deluge itself. This source is social information. Or, in other words: what we think other people are thinking.
Consider a simple scenario. You’re in a crowded theatre when, suddenly, people all around you start panicking and looking for an exit. What do you do, and why? Your senses inform you that other people are moving frantically. But it’s the social interpretation you put on this information that tells you what you most need to know: these people believe that something bad is happening, and this means you should probably be trying to escape too.
At least, that’s one possible interpretation. It may be the case that you, or they, are mistaken. Perhaps there’s been a false alarm, or part of the performance has been misunderstood. Reading social information accurately is an essential skill, and one most of us devote an immense amount of effort to practising. Indeed, wondering what’s going on inside someone else’s head is one of humanity’s greatest fascinations – alongside trying to influence it.
Consider the spread of an item of misinformation through a social network. Once a small number of people have shared it, anyone subsequently encountering that information will face what is at root a binary choice: is what they’re looking at true, or untrue? Assuming they have no first-hand knowledge of the claim, it’s theoretically possible for them to look it up elsewhere – a process of laborious verification that involves trawling through countless claims and counter-claims. They also, however, possess a far simpler method of evaluation, which is to ask what other people seem to think.
As Hendricks and Hansen put it, “when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof”. When we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.
The automation of this observation is one of the foundational insights of the online age. The great initial innovation of Google’s search engine was that – rather than attempting the impossible task of coming up with an original assessment of the quality and usefulness of every website in the world – users’ own actions and attitudes could become its key metric. By looking at how web pages linked to one another, Google’s PageRank algorithm put a proxy for content creators’ own attitudes at the heart of its evaluation process.
It may sound crushingly obvious today, but it’s worth pausing to consider how fundamental the measurement and management of social information is to almost every company seeking to turn trillions of bytes of online data into profit. User traffic, reviews, ratings, clicks, likes, sentiment analyses: what people are thought to be thinking makes the digital world go round. And these currencies of reputation, unlike money, are only enhanced by usage. The more they’re spent, the more their worth increases. The public signal is all.
How to handle an infostorm? In a social situation in the real world, a false consensus can be dispelled by publicly sharing trustworthy new information: an official announcement in our hypothetical crowded theatre; a confession of confusion by someone who started a rumour. Online, the notions both of universally trusted sources and universally accessible announcements are problematic, to say the least. Yet, work such as Hendricks and Hansens’s suggests that there’s hope to be found if we remember that the mechanisms involved are fundamentally agnostic about truth and untruth. Infostorms, like actual storms, are the products of climatic conditions – symptoms of something far larger. And different climates can produce very different results.
Perhaps most significantly, the way in which social information ripples through a network can be understood in terms of rational reactions to uncertainty, rather than irrational impulses addressable only by further irrationalism. And the more we understand the chain of events that led someone towards a particular perspective, the more we understand what it might mean to arrive at other views – or, equally importantly, to sow the seeds of skeptical engagement.
3) The Omnichannel Trap [MediaPost]
No word falls more trippingly off the tongue in marketing circles than “omnichannel.” It’s the stated ambition of many a marketer, and taken as a given among the conferences and pundits beckoning to marketers. The need for brands to take an omnichannel approach is unquestioned, although there’s much to question about it.
That’s because an omnichannel strategy is overly ambitious and lazy at the same time.
It’s overly ambitious because it injects complexity and strain into marketing systems that already require far more layers of infrastructure and effort than they did 10 years ago. On a purely practical basis, an omnichannel mindset is a game that can never be won. The new marketing ecosystem generates a constant introduction of new channels and subchannels. If marketers try to keep a hand in them all, resources will be stretched to the point of ineffectiveness.
It’s lazy because it neglects the strategic effort required to understand what combination of channels are most essential to the audience and objectives of the brand. It takes work to understand the ways people come to a brand, and to prioritize where to excel, where to participate, and where not to play at all.
Omnichannel starts at the wrong end of a strategic marketing process. It’s like collecting as many tools as possible and then figuring out what to build from them. Strategy is deciding what you want to build, and then assembling the tools most critical to its construction.
Consider these useful questions to develop more strategic channel choices:
How well defined is my audience? Is it mass or niche? Is it easy to identify by demographic, behavior or location?
What are the key elements of your customer Journey? Is it a high-consideration purchase? How often is the customer in market?
Are there common triggers to purchase? (e.g., a life event, a problem, a seasonal need, a cultural cue)
What are the key consumer incentives and barriers to brand consideration? (e.g., understanding how it works, knowing what others think of it, seeing what it looks like, being easy to purchase)
What’s the value of a new customer? How frequently is your product/service purchased, and what’s the retention/loyalty rate?
What emotional reward are people expecting from the brand? (e.g., empowerment, connection, status, escape, etc.)
It’s reasonable to suspect that the fervor for the omnichannel gospel comes less from marketers and more from those striving for the marketer’s budget. Omnichannel thinking drives a FOMO mentality that drives spending. Don't get caught in the trap.
4) Do people 'f---ing hate' ads? Marketers look to embed brands in culture as aversion grows [MarketingDive]
Said by Boudica Chief Creative Officer and former Hearst content chief Joanna Coles during a panel about the future of creativity at Advertising Week.
Coles said that consumers today will take "any opportunity" to skip to the end of an ad or sign up for an ad-free service like Netflix, which her co-panelist, Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard, largely agreed with.
Marketers continually touted the promise of new innovations and sponsorship models on channels like esports and TikTok, while acknowledging that those emerging spaces lack some key features. "What we need to do is really merge the ad world with other creative worlds," said Pritchard, who cited the statistic that roughly seven out of 10 people today find ads annoying. "We tried to change the advertising ecosystem by doing more ads, and all that did was create more noise. "You can get an ad across and you can get a point about your product across pretty quickly. But you can't get behind what a brand really stands for," he added.
Tools that can track ROI or product sales — the types of solutions marketers still broadly struggle to implement with digital marketing — proved a sticking point for some of the ad alternatives offered at the show. Executives suggested that measuring the success of newer mediums beyond squishy metrics is difficult, even as they agreed that those tactics are essential for engaging cause-minded, ad-averse younger demographics.
"The honest answer is there's not a really great mechanism or tool available to get to 'what is an ROI?' for a content integration," Brad Feinberg, VP of media and consumer engagement at MillerCoors, said on a panel with Hulu and mattress disruptor Casper later in the week. "What we do believe is that the longer our brands are on-screen ... intuitively, that's a good place for us to be," Feinberg added. "If we're trying to weave our brand into culture more — to become culturally relevant — there's no place better than content, especially when, in most cases, consumers are trying to avoid advertising."
Brands tapping into culture seemed to usurp the place brand purpose held at Advertising Week last year as the chief talking point. Where purpose is the positioning and values marketers develop to lend their organizations credibility with skeptical consumers, culture is more nebulous, seemingly most commonly defined as the places brands can embed their messages so that they resonate. Navigating the nuances of culture can be challenging, as each category has its own cultural set of values, influencers, holidays and events, according to John Elder, CEO of Deloitte Digital's Heat agency.
Avoiding capital-A advertising was reflected in marketers' approach to esports, or professional video game playing, another nascent category that filled a lot of schedule space. Content marketing is also being reinvigorated. Dads," a new feature-length documentary funded by Dove Men + Care and helmed by Bryce Dallas Howard, which was picked up by Apple at the Toronto International Film Festival.
How to translate similarly light but still purpose-led branding into existing programming was more of an open question. Critics have started to express frustrations at the appearance of more product placement in otherwise ad-free shows, suggesting marketers might need to innovate to avoid turning viewers off.
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Making a Marketer | a Marketing Festival documentary [YouTube] Yeah. It's an hour-long YouTube video. Specifically, it's a documentary exploring the issues of today's marketing featuring some of the smartest minds in marketing: Les Binet, Peter Field, Vikki Ross, Helen Edwards and Tom Goodwin. Watch it during your hangover lunch.
Is designing for Instagram hurting design? [Fast Company] In some ways, design is better today because of the proliferation of images on the Internet. We’ve scrolled through so many vivid images that we instinctively create them in our designs—but sometimes it’s to the detriment of depth, meaning, even function. An Instagram moment is a one-shot deal. One photo has to grab your attention—and it goes by fast. If designers aren’t thinking about a superstar moment, if we’re not designing for the photo spread, we will approach our designs more holistically. Certainly, we will be more creative. Perhaps it’s time to turn off the flood of imagery and trust our instincts. New approaches and ideas could come from tackling the next problem, not through pictures of someone else’s work, but in the snowy storm of white nothing that every artist knows.
Time for WPP and its rivals to be broken up says Sorrell [More About Advertising] Take this with a grain of salt: Sir Martin Sorrell got kicked out of the company he created because he bullied junior employees and was accused of using company funds to pay sex workers. He may own 1.4 percent of WPP (the biggest individual shareholder as he reminds us below) but he thinks the marcoms giant is no longer “fit for purpose” and the best way to get his money back is by breaking up the company.
Consumers Are Annoyed By Excessive Retargeting: Study [MediaPost] Uh. No shit. But actually I'm sharing this with you because I think it's horrible research. Some highlights:
"28% of respondents object when a product appears in an ad and it is no longer available." (Really? 72% of people are ok with clicking on an ad and not being able to buy it? Not buying it)
"Facebook appears to be the most popular shopping tool, leading in all metrics. It is followed by Instagram, general display ads across the web and YouTube" (What about, oh, I don't know, Amazon??)
White Claw hard seltzer cut media spending 30% as brand's popularity surged, study says [MarketingDive] Overall, ad spending jumped 21% among hard seltzer, hard cider and "malternative" brands during the same period. What the article didn't quantify was the value of the earned media associated with "Ain't no laws when you're drinkin' Claws"
Google contractors allegedly offered darker-skinned homeless people $5 dollar gift cards to scan their faces for facial recognition software [Business Insider] In some cases, sources told the Daily News, they were instructed to conceal the fact that they were recording these people entirely. Remember when Google's corporate ethos was "Do No Harm"? Yeah me too.
6) Department of Great Work
A Witch Cooks an Annoying Teen in a Pot in Skittles' Halloween Ad [Muse by Clio] In Skittles' first traditional Halloween commercial in five years, a woebegone witch attempts to cook an incredibly annoying teen in a big pot while a crow hops around her dingy kitchen. Dude seems unfazed, though, and keeps demanding more Skittles. Then things get weird, or meta, or something, when he whips out a smartphone and shows her a different Skittles commercial about a witch cooking a kid. From DDB Chicago
Adidas made a Snapchat game to drop limited, 8-bit-themed baseball cleats [Engadget] It's the first time Snapchat will let people buy a product inside a game. In case you're wondering why Adidas is doing this, don't forget the brand recently signed Ninja to its first pro gamer deal, which is a sign of how serious it is about the gaming community. Esports and the sneakerhead market may have been niche at one point, but that's no longer the case -- and companies like Adidas and Snapchat are having to make moves in order to adapt to that cultural shift.
John Smith's Yorkshire Bitter OOH from 1989 [Twitter] If this ran today I’d still think it was awesome... and it’s 30 years old. from BMP before they got bought and turned into DDB London
Why did Tinder make a show about the apocalypse? We drank margaritas and found out. [Mashable] Tinder's new "Swipe Night" is a ... product? Experience? TV show? Last night during the series' premiere, the company tried to explain to reporters why it got into the content game. Honestly, it kind of made sense. Every Sunday in October from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. local time, U.S. Tinder users will be able to access a new five-minute scripted episode of "Swipe Night," an interactive series following a group of friends in the last three hours on Earth before a comet destroys us all. From 72andSunny LA
As the Face of Aging Changes, Getty Images Launches Photo Series to Combat Stereotypes [AdWeek] Getty Images is tackling another stereotype by launching a series of more than 1,400 images that more accurately portray how people age today. The Disrupt Aging Collection brings an authentic focus to the changing lifestyles of those age 50 and older. Over the past few years, the company has embarked on several projects to better reflect what the world looks like. In 2015, Getty launched a collection of stock photography that gave masculinity a modern makeover. In 2018, the brand worked with the Disability Alliance on a series of images. This year, Getty awarded $20,000 to photographers creating better representation for the LGBTQ community and, in a partnership with Dove and GirlGaze, launched Project #ShowUs, a series of images that shows a much more comprehensive range of diverse women.
This retailer's staff wore contact lenses designed to make you buy a cinnamon bun [AdAge] It was National Cinnamon Bun day in Sweden last Friday (Oct. 4) and apparently, competition was stiff between retailers vying to sell the delicious treats. Convenience store chain Pressbyran and agency Akestam Holst asked employees to wear special contact lenses with a cinnamon bun motif and a price tag. These so-called "eyefluencers" were present in up to 300 stores on the day. Is it "subliminal" marketing? The agency says no: it "is right in front of the eyes of the customers and nothing we are trying to hide"
Ads We Like: Sandra Oh teaches people how to ‘Travel Like a Canadian’ for Air Canada [The Drum] Killing Eve star Sandra Oh is from Canada, and since Canadians are known globally for their polite ways, Oh is out to teach people how to ‘Travel Like a Canadian.’ It's cute. From FCB Canada.
7) Platform Updates
Americans and Digital Knowledge [Pew Internet] Just 29% of Americans correctly named WhatsApp and Instagram as two companies owned by Facebook. A majority of U.S. adults can answer fewer than half the questions correctly on a digital knowledge quiz, and many struggle with certain cybersecurity and privacy questions
Never Trust a Platform to Put Privacy Ahead of Profit [Wired] Twitter used phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication to target ads—just like Facebook did before. My favorite quote from this article: "If you wanted to secure the phone numbers you’d just put them in a database table called '2FA numbers don’t sell to marketers,'" says Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University.
Instagram is testing Group Stories [Mashable] Interestingly, Facebook (which owns Instagram) has already tried out a similar feature in its main app, and decided to shut it down last month. Instagram, however, is more story-driven than Facebook, so Group Stories might fare better there.
Start here: Introducing Pinterest Academy [Pinterest] Pinterest Academy is a free e-learning tool we designed for businesses new to Pinterest. It can help you get started on our unique visual discovery platform, discover the benefits of all our ad products, take advantage of our advanced targeting and other features—and lots more. It's is a series of fun, smart online courses you can access from anywhere on any device. Go through them at your own pace, learning how to connect with your audience on Pinterest. You’ll get information on how to design Pins, inspire visual discovery and incorporate Pinterest best practices.
Facebook Tests New Photo Layout Options for Multi-Image Posts [SocialMediaToday] Facebook is now experimenting with a new set of layout options for multi-image updates, which would enable users to choose four different presentation options for multi-image uploads within a single post. You could choose to highlight certain feature images, or give your post a more dynamic style, or even a colored background, dependent on how you wanted them to look.
Reddit revamps its ad strategy to woo big brands [Financial Times] Reddit is looking to clean up its content by “investing” in a combination of machine learning tools that recognise suspicious or badly-behaved accounts, working together with human moderators who oversee the entire site. It also relies on moderators who are not employees to set standards and monitor individual forums. Reddit has also joined the ranks of Silicon Valley’s so-called unicorns, raising $300m earlier this year in an investment round led by China’s Tencent, giving it a valuation of around $3bn. But tempering extreme conversation while also maintaining Reddit’s reputation as a radical bastion of free speech is a delicate balance, especially as many among its 330m-strong user base are quick to accuse it of censorship.
This Week in Frivolous Lawsuits: Federal judge says nobody cares about the iPhone’s notch [The Verge] A lawsuit alleges that Apple’s advertised screen size and resolution for the iPhone X, XS, and XS Max count pixels that aren’t actually there due to the notch. A federal judge hearing the case, in an all-time great quote, thinks this may not be a big deal: “There doesn’t really seem to be anyone in America who seems to be concerned about it.”
As always, the full archive is available here. Was this email forwarded to you? Want to start getting this on a weekly basis? All I need is your email, everything else is optional.Thanks for sticking around, and as always see you next week!