This Week in Strategy: Every morning I announce to my family that I'm going jogging, but then don't go. It's a running joke!
Hi Strat Pack,
First - a quick heads up: next week will be a non-publishing week. the Strategy Editorial Department is going on our annual retreat next week. We appreciate your understanding and invite you to join us for a drink or 7 if you're in Tokyo.
Friends of the newsletter know that I love outer space. And actually personal space too but let's talk about outer space. There's a scam letter going around where, and this is really a thing that exists, A Nigerian astronaut lost in space needs $3 million to get back home. It's a riff on the Nigerian price scam but I just love the audacity of this. It's just so outlandish. Who gets stuck in space? I mean come on. Click through and read the letter. You'll get a chuckle.
In more terrestrial news, I got a huge kick out of this: Snickers got a shout-out Tuesday during Republicans’ impeachment protest, in which some two-dozen GOP lawmakers marched into the secure room where a closed-door session was being held.
Rep. Mike Quigley (D., Ill), holding a candy bar, said he offered the protesters a Snickers to stop “because you know you’re just not the same when you’re hungry,” ABC reporter Ben Siegel tweeted. Nice.
Last but not least. Taylor Swift had a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR's office last week. I love Taylor Swift and I love Tiny Desk Concerts. If you're not familiar with them, they're all on YouTube and most are even worth a watch!
Alright stop messing around trying to figure out how you can beam a copy of Taylor's Tiny Desk Concert to that stranded Nigerian Astronaut. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Ad Creative Cheatsheet [Davis Ballard]
The one thing to read this week isn't an article, but a resource.
Your place to find all the ad creative you’ll ever need, quick. Whether its display ads, TV ads or Facebook Ads, this is your rapid fire way to do competitive research on a category.
Over 500 links so far from 200+ companies that will be continually updated as Davis picks up projects in new categories.
Click through. Bookmark this. It's an incredible resource.
2) Adidas: We over-invested in digital advertising [MarketingWeek]
Adidas admits that a focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness led it to over-focus on ROI and over-invest in performance and digital at the expense of brand building.
The sports brand’s global media director, Simon Peel, explains that four years ago the company didn’t have any econometrics, its attribution modelling was based on last-click and it didn’t do any brand tracking. It also focused on efficiency over effectiveness, leading it to look at specific KPIs and how to reduce their cost rather than what was in the best interests of its brands.
Under a new marketing playbook – dubbed ‘Creating the new’ – and a renewed focus on generating brand desire, Adidas introduced a new campaign framework with emotional, brand-driving activity at the centre. This was an attempt to connect with consumers around major campaigns three or four times a year, while at the same time Adidas ran advertising with a rational message.
At the same time, Adidas brought in an econometric model. That helped it discover that where it had thought loyal customers were driving sales, and it was therefore investing in CRM, in fact 60% of revenue came from first-time buyers. Adidas also found that its business units were not just driving their own sales. It thought that football advertising would drive football sales but found in reality that all advertising drove general Adidas sales.
Those wrong metrics were caused by Adidas’s four attribution models – Google Last Click, Google Custom, Adobe and Facebook – as well as a focus on short-term, real-time measurements that focused on ROI and return on ad spend (ROAS).
That led Adidas to over-invest in paid search, for example, an error it uncovered in its Latin America market when a breakdown at Google AdWords and therefore inability to invest in paid search didn’t lead to a dip in traffic or revenue coming from SEO.
“It told a very digitally focused story, that you should invest in paid search, online display. But when you look at econometric modelling it tells you something very different,” said Peel. The econometrics told Adidas that it should invest in video, which hadn’t shown up before because it didn’t do well in last-click attribution, as well as TV, outdoor and cinema to drive ecommerce.
“We are just walking, we have a long way to go. We do overly focus on digital attribution, but we are improving,” Peel concluded.
2) Les Binet defining brand-building and activation [LinkedIn]
People often ask how Peter Field and I define brand-building and activation For us, activation is when you evoke an immediate behavioural response, without necessarily affecting long-term memories or behaviour. Brand-building is when you create long term memories that influence behaviour over the long term.
ALL marketing activities have both brand and activation effects. But the mix varies, depending on targeting, copy, medium etc.
Evidence suggests there is a trade-off between brand and activation effects. Activity that is good at one tends to be poor at the other. “Brand response” is possible, but often ends up being a poor compromise.
It is not too hard to divide marketing activities into those that work primarily by brand effects (eg a big broad reach, emotional TV ad that people remember for years) and those that primarily work by activation (eg an email with a time limited offer). Note the word “primarily”.
Our suggestions for budgeting (“the 60:40 rule”) are based on dividing activities into these two broad categories, with the understanding that the boundaries are blurred and that all activity does both jobs to some extent. And we the mix needs to be adjusted for category and context, as outlined in our book, “Effectiveness in Context”.
3) Measuring the magic: Why brands need to refocus on the effectiveness of creativity [MarketingWeek]
I know! Two MarketingWeek articles! What can I say, they're both relevant and important
Measuring creativity might sound like an oxymoron. That ability to perceive the world in a different way and make connections others might not is seen as unquantifiable. Yet time and again it has been shown that more creative brands deliver better business results.
The Cannes Advertiser of the Year from 1999 to 2015 outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of 3.5. And data from Nielsen, which analysed 500 FMCG campaigns in 2016 and 2017, shows creative is responsible for 47% of the sales uplift, ahead of reach (22%), brand (15%) and targeting (9%).
Yet despite this evidence, creativity in advertising appears to be declining. The rise of digital marketing over the past 10 years has led to a focus on performance and optimisation over creativity. It is seen as easier (and cheaper) to improve SEO than try to come up with a fame-creating brand campaign. If the industry can’t prove the effectiveness of creativity, brands will continue to up spend on short-term sales activations rather than brand building.
According to the Marketing Week research, live testing, focus groups and online quantitative surveys remain the most popular methodologies, used by 66.7%, 62.2% and 50% of respondents respectively.
Newer methodologies such as neuroscience and biometrics are used far less often but where they are used they deliver better results. Neuroscience, which was used by just 8.3% of those surveyed, came top in terms of the ‘most useful’ research methodology.
“I’m starting to see those [rational research methodologies] die a death because of their limitations. The new thinking is around system one and system two, and the ways consumers make decisions around brands,” the CMO of Birds Eye.
There is also evidence to suggest too much testing can be a bad thing. Further research by Field found a negative correlation between the use of quant in pre-testing and the success of IPA award entries. The concern, says Sophie Lewis, chief strategy officer at agency VMLY&R, is that brands and agencies end up creating work that can pass pre-testing.
A shift from rational messaging to more creative, emotional messaging helped the brand reach a wider audience and improve consideration. The more rational your advertising is, the further down the consideration funnel you are. If all you’re doing with brand investment is talking to people in market today, you are missing probably 80% of the effectiveness of that investment.
The goal is to get marketing seen as an investment: people believe in it, they see it works, they see we are serious about increasing the effectiveness of that investment and there isn’t pressure to cut. We would look everywhere else to cut if we need to rather than marketing, and that’s a wonderful place to be as a marketer.
4) David Ogilvy: I am a lousy copywriter [Letters of Note]
April 19, 1955
Dear Mr. Calt:
On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:
1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.
3. I am helpless without research material—and the more "motivational" the better.
4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.
5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every conceivable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.
6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.
7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)
8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.
9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.
11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)
12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.
Yours sincerely,
D.O.
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
The Case for Comms Planning [Julian Cole] This would be the one thing to read this week if it didn't have so many graphs! I can't summarize a graph, Julian! Comms Planning recommends one idea customized to different times and media. An easy theory to grasp however I’ve often lacked the rigor for the theory. Julian found 10+ academic papers that build the case for comms planning.
14 Iconic Ad Campaigns, Recalled by the Creatives Who Made Them [Muse by Clio] Very interesting read. To get the behind-the-scenes scoop on some of advertising's greatest campaigns from the past 60 years, Muse solicited tales of their creation—and in some case, immediate fallout—from the creators themselves.
Don’t Let Metrics Critics Undermine Your Business [MIT Sloan Management Review] This article is about business metrics not advertising metrics. It's a 12 minute read. But its SUPER interesting. Please click through and read it. Read this line and ask if it reminds you of any media agency you've ever worked with: Serious leaders respect Goodhart’s law — best defined by Cambridge anthropologist Marilyn Strathern as “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — and take pains to avoid it
People Want Brands to Heal Nationwide Divisions [DNA Seattle] Just as political candidates are courting independent votes, brands can broaden their relevance to more people by championing common ground than by firmly planting a flag on the side of any single issue or candidate. Staying authentic and doubling down on important shared values may be the best way for brands to add value and bring people together in today’s landmine filled political landscape.
9 recent CMO departures that point to the radical transformation of marketing [Marketing Dive] Dunkin's Tony Weisman announcing plans to step down last week capped off a remarkable few months that also saw leadership changes at McDonald's, Taco Bell and Johnson & Johnson.
6) Department of Great Work
Google teams up with Domino’s on special Pixel 4 deliveries [AdAge] If you didn’t order Domino’s pizza today but see it’s being delivered, go ahead and answer the door. To showcase the Pixel 4's hands-free functions, Google decided people should test out the new phones while their hands are occupied holding pizza. So Google is sending the Pixel 4 to select people across the U.S. packaged in special pizza boxes that have the device nestled above an actual Domino’s pizza. From VMLY&R
HP Calls Out the Many Ways Technology Has Stripped Our Lives of Authenticity [AdWeek] New ad 'Get Real' was created by GS&P. The spot concludes by asking viewers if we’ve collectively “lost touch with what’s real.” The campaign promotes HP’s printing business, the idea being that it’s better to print out a photo and stick it on the refrigerator than post it on Facebook and hope it racks up hundreds of likes from acquaintances disguised as “friends.”
McDonald's unveils touching Happy Meal ad as earnings fall short of estimates [The Drum] Brutal headline. But a really touching :60 that maybe should be a :30 But still very cute. Understanding that the Happy Meal has been a cherished component of McDonald’s offering for a long time, TBWA\Paris wanted to capture the story surrounding its box as a tradition passed on from generation to generation and find a way of celebrating it.
Miller Lite asks to be unfollowed on social media in 'Miller Time' revamp [Mobile Marketer] Miller Lite is "going dark" on social media. In a nod to how serious it is about it's new campaign for consumers to put down their phones, forget about their social media accounts and have a beer in person with real friends, Miller Lite is giving away free beer to up to 118,000 people — the number of the brand's Instagram followers — who unfollow Miller Lite on Instagram or Facebook.
Eerie Sounds of Undiscovered Ocean Life Highlight Cost of Pollution [Little Black Book] Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) is launching a new radio campaign to shine a light on the damage we are doing to our oceans despite the fact that 95% of them remain unexplored. Created by M&C Saatchi, this radio campaign continues to ask the question ‘are we killing what we are yet to discover?’ The creative features real deep sea hydrophone recordings of infamous, mysterious and unexplained underwater sounds that are considered to have an organic source and be proof of large, undiscovered sea life.
7) Platform Updates
Snapchat Begins Testing Dynamic Ads That Work Off Brands’ Product Catalogs [AdWeek] Snapchat will conduct an open beta-test of dynamic ads that enable brands to automatically create ads in real-time based on their own product catalogs, which can contain hundreds of thousands of items. As a result, users will see more relevant ads based on their interest, and those ads will be delivered through templates that will enable advertisers to up the quality of their creative.
AMC Theatres Launches Movie Streaming Service For AMC Stubs Members [Deadline] With its core exhibition business the subject of heated speculation about the future of release windows and the impact of Netflix on its business, AMC Theatres is responding by launching a streaming service of its own. AMC Theatres on Demand will offer about 2,000 movie titles from distributors large and small, including releases from all major studios.
Twitter Grows Daily Active Users to 145M, Stock Tanks on Earnings Miss, Ad "Bugs" [Hollywood Reporter] Social media giant Twitter on Thursday reported lower third-quarter earnings and revenues due to advertising product "bugs," but improved user growth as it added 6 million daily active users. The financials missed analysts' expectations, and the firm noted "a number of unexpected headwinds in our ads business," sending Twitter shares down 20 percent in pre-market trading.
With Dataxu, Roku Has Big Ambitions To Launch An OTT Marketplace [AdExchanger] Roku’s $150 million purchase of dataxu illustrates the streaming giant’s vision to own and operate an open marketplace for OTT inventory, similar to what Xandr is building at AT&T for advanced TV inventory.
Study: In-game banner ads have high viewability, but low recall [Mobile Marketer] I'm calling this the 'no duh' study. While banner ads that appear on the bottom of a smartphone screen are viewable 90% of the time to mobile gamers, recall rates were only 11% as those audiences spent 1.5% of their time looking at the ads
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