This Week in Strategy: Why does the Norwegian Navy have bar codes on the sides of their ships? So when they come back to port they can...Scandanavian!
(I'm in Oslo through Sunday! Are you in Oslo? Email me! Let's get drinks!)
Hi Strat Pack,
Living in New York, I constantly am bombarded by a cavalcade of horrors and some, frankly, pretty weird smells. And if you live in New York, you probably are too. That's why today, I want to talk about the horrors. First: MTA Making Subway Scarier Than Usual This Week. I honestly almost put this in the Department of Great Work. The Haunted Subway has now returned, and if it's anything like last year there will be dozens of costumed actors on hand (transit officers and volunteers), atmospheric lighting, dark corners, and spooky sounds. You can enter the Haunted Subway at 14th Street Union Square Station-15th Street and Union Square West. It will be there waiting for you this Thursday and Friday, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. You must be 7 years or older to partake, because the horror is real. Second:Spectacular Street-Level Photo Of NYC Rats Wins Urban Wildlife Photography Award. These are actually really great shots. Rats! They're just like us! But seriously, click through it's totally worth it.
In other news, I'm not Catholic, but I am an unabashed capitalist. I just didn't realize the church was too. This week. the Vatican launched a $110 'click to pray' wearable rosary. The device -- which can be worn as a bracelet -- is made up of 10 consecutive black agate and hematite rosary beads, plus a data-storing "smart cross." Once activated, the wearer can choose to pray the standard rosary, a contemplative rosary or a thematic rosary, which will be updated throughout the year. The device shows progress throughout each prayer and keeps track of each rosary completed.
Maybe it's gamification, not capitalism. So hard to keep track these days.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how many AI rosary beads you have to buy to get into heaven (the answer is 7, PS) Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Belief is our killer app [Adliterate - Richard Huntington]
This article really spoke to me. I've often had trouble articulating the passion I have for the brands I work on and the commitment to coming up with, and trying to sell great ideas even after the client has killed the last 13 in a row. No matter how often we fall off the horse, for some reason, people that work in advertising seem to keep getting back on. I'm glad it's not just me.
Tribalism simply cannot stop itself from creating an environment and adherents that dislike, demonise and ultimately attempt to destroy those outside or against their creed. And so, tribalism has become a force of division that unpicks and erodes the ever-delicate cohesion of our society. Whether those divisions are based on perspective, experience or birth. Right now, tribalism appears to be altogether a bad thing, a vestigial limb of humanity best left in a less enlightened era.
Except, my friend, in the advertising agency.
in many ways, it is our partisanship that marks us out from the many other people and disciplines that offer professional services to the organisations we serve. We are deeply partisan. Not just about the agencies and businesses we work in but about the brands and businesses we work for. The first may be important in building our cultures, driving our success and enabling us to record our progress against those we consider our peers. But it matters little outside our industry.
The latter, our devotion to the success of our clients’ brands and business, bias even, is something altogether different. It’s an engine for the success of those brands and businesses. An agency that believes wholeheartedly in its clients, is an agency that will do what it takes to help them win. Neutrality is not a recipe for success in our world.
Other professional services don’t share this partisanship, in many ways it’s an anathema to them. Lawyers need to be above any sense of loyalty to those that pay them. And no one in their heart really wants an accountant that is biased, they are economic umpires that keep the score in a manner that’s fair and square. When the big accountancy firms periodically forget this, all hell breaks loose.
Not so advertising agencies. We are fiercely tribal, wholly partisan and completely biased. It’s in the very fibre of our being to devote ourselves to our clients and to fight tooth and nail for them and with them.
And this is why great agencies rarely develop sector specialisms. We may have experience of a category but we never have more than one client in it. We work across portfolios, of course, but not with category brands outside that portfolio. This isn’t simply about codes of conflict, it’s because it is impossible in our world to be bi-partisan and to do a good job. Because the truth is that we are not here to offer best practices or processes to our clients, we are here to help businesses win and to make sure their competitors loose. It’s as simple as that.
It is this spirit that marks us apart. I recently asked a consultant friend who worked across multiple businesses as part of a sector specialism, about a specific business’ right to win in the market. Met by a look of incomprehension, I realised that this intense fighting spirit was completely alien to them. How to win is the first thing an agency person thinks about. And if there isn’t a clear right to win the next is how we can reframe the brand or the category so there is.
Our tribalism doesn’t make us blind to the shortcomings of a business, brand or service, indeed it makes us more all the more alive to them and the ways that a promise or purpose is not delivered by experience. Indeed, our task is often to speak truth unto power and caution against behaviours that are counter-productive or harmful. But even the most tense engagement between agency and client usually comes from a shared desire to win.
So, while I despair at the increased tribalism and absolutism of our society, when it comes to work I am proud to be partisan. For unlike other professional services, we have always known that we sell better when we believe what we are selling and we sell what we believe in.
2) Did Carlsberg UK's bold 'Piss to Pilsner' gambit pay off? [The Drum]
Carlsberg made the risky admission that its UK lager was 'probably not the best beer in the world' in its most recent multimillion-pound marketing campaign. Did it pay off?
Six months after the 'Piss to Pilsner' bait and switch, Carlsberg had seen a dramatic sales turnaround in the on-trade market.
The original Mean Tweets social media campaign racked up almost 15m video views and reached 6 million people in the UK. Carlsberg personally responded to 6,000 consumer messages, positive and negative, to drive sampling of the new formulation. Carlsberg was in the limelight for around a month, due to a staggered, multiplatform marketing campaign. It debuted by retweeting criticism, followed by a print and poster campaign, then a viral mean tweets video, concluding with a TV ad.
In April taste tests, 59% of respondents said they prefer the new Carlsberg Danish Pilsner over “the current UK best-selling mainstream lager. On-trade rate of sale was up by 14% for the brand. There is a 10% difference over the last 12 weeks between Carlsberg and the standard lager performance in the on trades. Just last year, Carlsberg's on-trade volume sales were down by 13.1%, with consumer demand looking to be rapidly drying up.
Few brands would triumph after admitting they had put out a sub-par product for decades, fewer yet still after claiming to be "probably" the best beer in the world. But it appears Carlsberg has.
3) Daniel Kahneman: Putting Your Intuition on Ice (The Knowledge Project Ep. #68) [Farnam Street] Psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman reveals the actions we can take to overcome the biases that cripple our decision-making, damper our thinking, and limit our effectiveness. Listen to the whole 40 minute podcast. It's worth it. Learn from the master.
I think changing behavior is extremely difficult. Anybody who’s very optimistic about changing behavior is just deluded. It’s hard to change other people’s behavior. It’s very hard to change your own. Not simple.
Motivation is complex, and that people do good things for a mixture of good and bad reasons; and they do bad things for a mixture of good and bad reasons. I think that there is a point to educating people in psychology. It’s to make them less judgmental. Just have more empathy and more patience. Being judgmental doesn’t get you anywhere.
What gets in the way of clear thinking is that we have intuitive views of almost everything. So as soon as you present a problem to me, I have some ready made answer. What gets in the way of clear thinking are those ready made answers, and we can’t help but have them.
We have beliefs because mostly we believe in some people, and we trust them. We adopt their beliefs. We don’t reach our beliefs by clear thinking, unless you’re a scientist or doing something like that. There’s a fair amount of emotion when you’re a scientist as well that gets in the way of clear thinking. Commitments to your previous views, being insulted that somebody thinks he’s smarter than you are. I mean lots of things get in the way, even when you’re a scientist. So I’d say there is less clear thinking than people like to think.
Very quickly you form an impression, and then you spend most of your time confirming it instead of collecting evidence.
Negotiations is not about trying to convince the other guy. It’s about trying to understand them. So again, it’s slowing yourself down. It’s not doing what comes naturally because trying to convince them is applying pressure. Arguments, promises, and threats are always applying pressure. What you really want is to understand what you can do to make it easy for them to move your way. Very non-intuitive. That’s a surprising thing when you teach negotiation. It’s not obvious. We are taught to apply pressure and socialize that way.
Independence is the key because otherwise when you don’t take those precautions, it’s like having a bunch of witnesses to some crime and allowing those witnesses to talk to each other. They’re going to be less valuable if you’re interested in the truth than keeping them rigidly separate, and collecting what they have to say.
4) Dove, Comcast detail divergent paths to culturally relevant marketing [MarketingDive]
"People will buy products based on what they need, but they'll choose a brand based on what they value, and culture is a reflection of our values," according to research Twitter conducted with IPG's Magna agency.
The idea of embedding brands in culture has become a bigger point of interest among marketers this year as consumer advertising aversion grows. At the 4A's annual StratFest conference Wednesday, representatives from Unilever's Dove and Comcast's Xfinity division shared case studies. A focus on niche and emerging cultural touchpoints could be seen in Dove and Xfinity's marketing toward underrepresented consumer groups.
Dove spoke on the early traction it's seen for a collaborative image library called #ShowUs that looks to diversify depictions of women. Values-based advertising has been part of Dove's playbook for decades, including through a "Real Beauty" platform that debuted in 2004 and features women who aren't models or actresses. The brand's championing of women has become well-regarded as a case study of purpose marketing done right, but real-world improvements to inclusivity have been slow to catch up. Internal data found that 70% of surveyed women still don't feel represented in media and advertising.
That climate is what led Dove to launch #ShowUs in March as a collaboration with Getty Images and the creative network Girlgaze. The stock image library features more than 5,000 photographs that are not digitally altered and were shot exclusively by female and gender non-binary photographers. What differentiates #ShowUs from Dove's past cause marketing efforts is the more collaborative angle, with the project intended to be a resource for other businesses and the industry at large. More than 900 companies have used #ShowUs so far, according to Stepanian, and the brand has opened a form on its website for other women to share their pictures and stories to expand the collection.
An Xfinity campaign titled "Reality Week" also targeted an underserved market, albeit through a pop culture lens and more content-heavy media play. The cable provider found that reality TV beats sports programming for live viewership by a 2:1 ratio. But that popularity wasn't necessarily reflected in advertising.
Xfinity devised a way to better cater to reality TV followers and conversations about the genre on social media, while also promoting its X1 platform. Sports bars, which comprise 31% of all bars in the U.S., seemed a particularly relevant venue to promote the idea.
From the "Reality Bar" venue, Xfinity livestreamed hundreds of pieces of content across platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook during the five days of the pop-up activation. It then remarketed its service to viewers afterward, surpassing internal benchmarks. Engagement levels overall were high — the Twitter stream drew 16 million viewers — leading Xfinity to work on a second iteration of the concept.
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Style Is an Algorithm [Vox] This is a year old, so you might have seen it already. I love this article. It's long. It goes super deep. Read it please. No one is original anymore, not even you. It’s up to us whether or not we care about the shades of distinction between human and machine choice, or indeed if we care about fashion at all. Maybe taste is the last thing separating us from the Singularity; maybe it’s the first thing we should get rid of. “I don’t think the consumer cares, as long as it works,” one Stitch Fix executive said of its algorithmically designed clothes. But if we do want to avoid displacing or reassigning our desires and creativity to machines, we can decide to become a little more analog. I imagine a future in which our clothes, music, film, art, books come with stickers like organic farmstand produce: Algorithm Free.
Amazon Surges and Facebook Falls Again in Report on Brand Value [Wall Street Journal] Facebook fell out of the top 10 in Interbrand’s annual Best Global Brands report, dropping to 14th place from ninth as the estimated value of its brand declined 12%. Gillette’s brand value dropped 18% this year, sinking to 37th place from 28th.
Marketing with memes: The ins and outs of sharing viral social content [MarketingDive] Read this. Witty, relatable content is ripe for social sharing, but success with the tactic takes more than simply repurposing what's buzzy online to snag brand attention.
Are Films Like HP's History of Memory the Future of Branded Entertainment? [Muse by Clio] "Brand-funded features" are a hybrid genre that straddles the line between art and commerce. "The storytelling power of films allows brands to connect with audiences in ways that traditional ads and marketing do not," Angela Matusik, head of brand journalism at HP, tells Muse. "These films don't interrupt their viewing, but rather become a part of it.
‘Cutthroat part of the market’: How big-box retailers are competing to win a greater share of holiday toy sales [Modern Retail] Consumers have very few qualms about buying toys online. You really have to add a lot of value over and above simply stocking the products to get people in, so that’s what this push towards interaction is all about. Target and Walmart’s efforts around toys this holiday season seem particularly designed to make their toy sections more noticeable both online and in-store
6) Department of Great Work
Ad of the Week: Bayer helps humanize corporate brand [CampaignUS] When most people hear "Bayer," they think "Aspirin." And while that’s a very important brand in its portfolio, the pharmaceutical company wants the world to know its breadth and depth of work -- from over-the-consumer products to agricultural innovations and more. Today, Bayer laiunched a campaign that aims to spread awareness of its mission as a corporation around advancing health and humanity. The effort is the company’s first major corporate brand campaign in America in its 155-year history. From Campbell Ewald
C41 Takes Football Back to the Streets in Incredible Campaign for Nike [Little Black Book] L’Incredibile is a story that tells the constancy and dedication of young football lovers, of every day that they train and allow football to cut into their lives. It’s the story of a neighbourhood that day by day is approaching a new future, in which the passion for football unites girls and boys together to meet up to play in the neighbourhood.
The New York Lottery Made Actual Heavy Metal Tracks For A Scratch-Off Game With A Confusing Name [AdAge] The songs are actually pretty good. The New York Lottery‘s new campaign plays up the (intentionally?) confusing name of its scratch-off game, with suggestions that it might be a high-end cologne or a cutting-edge smartphone—or the heaviest of heavy metal bands. From McCann New York.
Jack Daniel's hypnotic ad will leave you thirsty for apple whiskey [CampaignUS] You may not be a whiskey lover but -- come on -- who doesn’t like apples? No one worth trusting, that's for sure. Jack Daniel’s has dropped a hypnotic campaign created in partnership with FCB to push its new flavor, Tennessee Apple.
Your Shot: Pressing the Atlantic Ocean’s Difficult Second Album from Ocean Plastic [Little Black Book] Very cool. Havas London creatives tell LBB’s Alex Reeves how they pressed Nick Mulvey’s (and the Atlantic Ocean’s) latest track into plastic washed up on Cornish beaches for Sharp’s Brewery.
Department of Bad Work
I know it’s early but “Unlimit the More” for Kia Motors has got to be the worst thing I’ll see today, right? [Twitter] Oye.
7) Platform Updates
Twitter Tests Emoji "Reactions" for Direct Messages [SocialMediaToday] Twitter's looking to make it easier and faster to respond to a direct message by testing out emoji reactions which you would be able to attach to specific message.
Pinterest's Testing Emoji-Like Reactions for Video Response [also SocialMediaToday] Not to be outdone, pinterest is also adding emojis. Fresh from rolling out its new reactions for group boards, Pinterest is now testing a whole other style of quick emoji response characters, this time for videos posted on the platform.
Facebook Holiday Marketing Guide [Facebook] What is magical about the holiday season is the amount of opportunity to be found within the season. The holidays are a great time to introduce your brand to new shoppers and attract new buyers in volume. The season also presents the perfect opportunity to increase engagement with your existing customers and boost their lifetime value. So how can you create this kind of magic for your business? Just keep reading.
Exclusive Research: The Webbys And YouGov Survey Rise In Internet Fighting [The Webbys] We are seeing far more fighting on the Internet, with consequences in our offline lives. This research dives into this trend, why, how, and where it’s happening, and the types of work people actually want while living in a culture of conflict: 1) People aren’t sure why they’ve navigated to social media and what they see when they get there doesn’t leave them satisfied. 2) Most people are ready to fight, even if it’s not what they’ve come to do — and it is having an impact on their lives offline
TikTok taps corporate law firm K&L Gates to advise on its US content moderation policies [TechCrunch] Why, for example, is the short-form video app censoring the Hong Kong protests but not U.S. political content? Why is it banning political ads, but supports hashtags like #trump2020 and #maga, each with millions, or even hundreds of millions, of views? TikTok so far has struggled to answer these questions.
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