This Week in Strategy: Police station toilet stolen. The cops have nothing to go on.
Hi Strat Pack,
It's October, which means Christmas is just around the corner. And all I want to get me is a Nintendo Switch so I can play Untitled Goose Game, an aptly named (or maybe not-named) game by game studio House House. Seriously. What's the purpose of this game? I'm glad you asked! Here's the premise of the game: you are an annoying goose. As the aforementioned goose, your goal is quite naturally to cause mischief and chaos around a quintessential English village. The game has a beautiful sound design and just looks downright adorable. Click through for no other reason than to watch the trailer embedded in the article.
In other news, if you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, you can rent a bunk bed in a "communal home" for $1,200 a month. Not a bedroom. A bed. Like honestly, it feels like a jail with weekend priviledges. You get a bed, a locker, access to wifi and the chance to meet fellow "pod-estrians" (aka inmates). Each pod includes a shelf and a personal television. Food staples, like cereal and ramen, and toiletries like toothpaste and toilet paper, are also included. The ground rules: Lights out at 10 pm, and no guests allowed. "You can't invite any friends over," said Elvina Beck, the company's 34 year old founder and first customer. "Sorry. Just make new ones here."
Jail. It's jail.
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Alright, stop messing around trying to figure how long it would take to get kicked out of that insane pod-house jail if you started playing a real life version of Untitled Goose Game on your roommates/neighbors. Let's jump right in.
POTENTIALLY COOL WEBINAR!
Faris Yakob on how to balance your brand communication plans [Warc]
October 17 at 10:30 am EDT / 3:30 pm BST
Strategic communications planning considers a number of things— context, channel effects, historical profitability, and numerous other criteria beyond target audience, cost, reach and frequency.
But what's the impact when advertising appears in channels that make people feel bad, or alongside unsafe content?
During this WARC webinar, Faris will introduce the media planning pyramid, built from research that factors in reported psychological well-being of the audience as well as brand impact, as a tool to help balance plans. Register here.
The one thing to read this week
1) We should never use speed as an excuse for poor work [BBH Labs]
[ED Note: Fuck I love this article. I think I basically copied and pasted the whole thing. Brilliant thinking. Wonder how long it took to write...]
Speed. Quality. Cheap. The eternal triangle of creative production. You can only ever have 2 apparently. And in the last few years it’s felt like speed has been a mandatory – the pace at which we work has escalated to match the speed of trending topics. Can strategists get to the best work at speed? BBH London strategy director Dean Matthewson argues it’s actually a benefit…
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain
Our first draft of anything is never the best. Often over-written and under-thought through. As clients set timelines that demand faster and faster strategy, does speed always have to be bad? Is it unavoidable that client demands for faster strategy equals shitter strategy?
Over-written and under-thought. Craft takes time they say.
Our first draft is never our best. We need to test out our thinking and re-test. Write and re-write. Step back before we revisit. It all helps. There’s an element of truth in this, but we should never ever use fast as an excuse for poor work. Why? Firstly, because this presupposes that the strategy we write is perfect first time up. That a strategist presents their final, authoritative strategic brief to the creative team. And everyone nods their heads, says ‘perfect’, and cracks on.
This has never happened. Ever.
It is not the nature of strategy to be delivered perfect and gift-wrapped first time out. Strategy is an iterative process. It gets better by being picked over by fellow strats. It gets refined by creatives looking under the hood. It evolves when you realise that your first attempt was good to get the creative process rolling, but it wasn’t definitive.
Save strat perfection for the pitch or the client meeting.
Our job is like the construction of an Olympic Stadium. We provide a bloody great blueprint to get the building process underway. But the blueprint changes along the way. It gets markedly better when it comes up against the realities of delivery. A few corners might need to be cut. Someone will have an idea off-blueprint that we’ll adapt the blueprint to accommodate. But if you continue to iterate you might just end up with a shining monument of sporting brilliance that the Queen parachutes into.
So we don’t need to box ourselves into a corner, pressurising ourselves to spend copious amounts of time getting it 100% bang-on first time.
Secondly, our desire for first-time perfection comes from one of the biggest hurdles a strategist fancies: their own self-doubt. We want more time so we can convince ourselves our thinking is correct. But if we’re faced with fast, trust yourself. Have faith that there are very few people that know what they’re doing better than you do. Hopefully, it’s why you got the job. And not because Daddy knew someone in the company that had the same school tie as him.
So trust your gut. Trust your gut enough to work up some hypotheses. Then test them. Quickly, with data you can easily get your hands on. You’ve now got your hypotheses either proven or disproven, so you’re in a place to trust your gut enough to write a first draft.
So get your strategy down on paper. But don’t trust your gut enough that you’ll do whatever it says. So test it yourself:
Does it feel right? Does it feel simple? Does it feel surprising? Does it feel like something that a creative would love to get their teeth into? If you don’t believe it, if you don’t love it, no one will. So if you don’t, go again.
When you’re ready, talk to someone else about it, trust the opinions of those around you. Because you’ll definitely have someone around you who can help.
If you’re in a big agency you’ll likely have a collection of brilliant strats around you to quickly test your thinking with. If you’re a one-person band you’ll likely have some actual real people around you. The bloke that runs the café. Your Mum, your Dad. My wife is an endless source of wisdom in helping me cut the crap.
I guarantee you will get something out of talking through your strategy at an early stage. You’ll spot the flaws as you try to sell it. The other person will help you to get to a better place simply by listening. And even better when they pick out the things they like or don’t like. Use your self-doubt to your advantage. Don’t use it to shy away until it’s too late; use it to test your thinking out early with data and people. And quickly.
Use speed to make you braver.
Time gives you even more opportunity to remove everything that was originally bold about your strategy by over-analysing it and testing it too much. Force yourself out of your comfort zone. Use that speed to make you hungrier. Create a momentum that bulldozes the strategy forward, excites creatives, scares clients (in a good way) and makes bold intuitive leaps.
Stick two fingers up to the world and show ‘em that even though you’ve been given a ridiculously stupid deadline you’re still a shit hot strategist.
2) Marketers praise Burger King but McDonald’s is more deserving [MarketingWeek]
McDonald’s unflashy but effective marketing has been overshadowed by rival Burger King’s attention-grabbing stunts, but it’s the former we should celebrate, says Mark Ritson.
I saw Rain Man at the weekend. It popped up on my TV and, before I knew it, I was gripped by a film I had not seen in 30 years and could not switch it off. Dustin Hoffman won the best actor Oscar for playing Raymond, the autistic elder brother. And he gets all the best lines (“I’m an excellent driver”) and iconic moments, like counting toothpicks, in the movie. But watching it all those years later with a bit of age and distance from the original Oscar buzz, it is readily apparent it is Tom Cruise that makes this film tick.
Hoffman gets the glory and the gongs. But Cruise makes the film work and proves himself in Rain Man to be not necessarily the better actor but certainly the more effective one.
That is how I feel about McDonald’s and Burger King. Especially in their original US market. It’s become commonplace today to point to Burger King and its newsworthy CMO Fernando Machado, and bow down in marketing awe.
Machado is, make no mistake, an outstanding marketer. But I have the same feeling about him as I have for Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Most of the things he has done are impressive and eye-catching. But is Burger King engaged in famously effective marketing or marketing that is effectively famous? There’s a big difference between these two points.
It would be unfair to point to ‘Whopper Detour’ and portray Burger King under Machado’s control as a one-trick pony. It’s actually a 40-trick pony, so keen to impress it rarely rides anywhere.
Is Burger King now more famous for its advertising stunts than its food or service? I am still unconvinced that a lot of the promotions actually work for Burger King. I think they make marketers talk – the kind of marketers who bang on about “the average tenure of a CMO is rhubarb rhubarb” or who say “marketing has changed more this weekend than in the past 30 rhubarb rhubarb”. Those kind of people. Agile people. ‘Modern marketers’.
They love this stuff and cite it as best-in-class across all the echo chambers they inhabit. I am not so sure. Would Burger King’s marketing budget have been more wisely spent on a more structured, less atomised, less awarded, less clever campaign?
The proof for my prevarication is in the same-sales pudding. While Machado has been picking up award after award for his innovative tactical exertions, same-store sales at Burger King restaurants across the US have been OK but patchy. When you stand them next to arch rival McDonald’s same-store performance, a brand that many commentators have suggested has been out-marketed by Burger King, that performance looks even more sketchy.
A word about McDonald’s here. It is the Tom Cruise of the story. Assiduous work on its brand codes, brand image and menu has resulted in significant marketing effectiveness. But improving menus does not get you a front-page story in AdAge. And increasing salience through code application is the most boring (but essential) activity in marketing. For all its distinct lack of flash, McDonald’s marketing is working. Recent analysis by UBS concluded that “McDonald’s US brand strength remains robust, with McDonalds outperforming peers across a number of important customer perception metrics”.
McDonald’s is better at marketing than Burger King. Provided, of course, you see marketing as the connection with and impact on customers.
Both McDonald’s CMO, Silvia Lagnado, and the ad agency responsible for the impactful but unheralded American work, Omnicom’s We Are Unlimited, have recently exited the business. That should tell you something. If you aspire to a senior position in marketing, it helps to be good at marketing. But what’s even more important is that people perceive you to be good at marketing. And if you had to choose between being good at marketing or being famous for being good at it, I hope it is obvious which is the more valuable talent to possess.
Put it another way. Dustin Hoffman has an Oscar for Rain Man. Cruise was not even nominated.
3)Tracy De Groose: We've forgotten the ad value exchange, it is time to reconnect with content [The Drum]
There's been a lot written about trust in our industry, but up until recently not enough action.
Trust in advertising has eroded in the UK to an all-time low, from 50% to 25% according to the Advertising Association (AA). In the US, Marc Pritchard talked at the ANA Media Conference how seven out of 10 consumers find ads annoying, and how ad blocking is accelerating at pace.
The single biggest challenge is tackling the value exchange. There's been an explosion of space where brands can serve more ads, more frequently than ever before, whether you want to see them or not. We have forgotten about the end-user.
The bombardment of advertising online has severely impacted the value exchange between brands and consumers and there is no obvious benefit that justifies them accepting this bombardment.
The value exchange used to be easy. Ads helped to fund the content we wanted. Content was the value people got in return. Digital media has in parts disconnected from content and this has clearly undermined the value exchange.
Reconnecting media with content has several advantages. It allows us to be much clearer on the role and value of advertising. It will help us to build better, more transparent monetisation models and will allow us to invest in better quality content online. It could also offer the answer to targeting in a “cookie-less” world. Content drives engagement and engagement drives effectiveness and could help turn around the long-term decline in advertising ROI. It could also ensure we safeguard first-party data, and create a more trusted internet for all.
In this next chapter of the internet, newsbrands are returning to a genuine position of strength. Advertisers, quite rightly, want to be where genuine audiences congregate and crowd around their passion points – whether that be film, radio, music, news, sport, politics or entertainment. Outside of the platforms, newsbrands own the largest audience data set.
The digital world is shifting on its axis, as we ask ourselves what matters. There is a huge gravitational pull taking place as we see content creators moving back to their rightful place at the centre of our world. This change will be a profound one and we might finally see an environment we want, rather than one that’s been designed around us. And then, as we help create the internet’s next chapter, with digital content at the fore, we can return trust, respect and value back into advertising.
4) This week's issue is already getting pretty long. And there are a lot of quick hits. So instead of an article, just watch this adorable Android commercial from 2015 celebrating unlikely animal friends. And phones or whatever. [YouTube]
'Be Together. Not the Same.' is actually a very solid line. Wonder why they ditched it...
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
David Ogilvy on his approach to coming up with a big idea [Richard Shotten - Twitter] "Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you."
CMOs Expect Bigger Marketing Budgets, Despite Economic Concerns [Wall Street Journal] Recession fears are rising and companies are scrutinizing their spending, but top marketers still think they’ll get more money to spend next year, a new Gartner Inc. survey says. 61% of senior marketing leaders expect their marketing budgets to grow in 2020, which contrasts with the recent trend toward budgets that are roughly flat, most recently slipping to 10.5% of company revenue this year from 11.2% in 2018. Marketers seem to be isolating themselves from broader concerns, said Ewan McIntyre, a vice president and analyst at Gartner.
Kantar: Award-winning ads are becoming less effective at brand building [MarketingDive] Only a quarter of this year's Cannes Lions award-winning campaigns provided brand impact over the short or the long-term, according to Kantar research made available to Marketing Dive. This year's winners were found to be only half as effective at long-term brand building than award-winning ads from five years ago.
A Mountain Of Debt Makes Publicis And WPP Vulnerable To A Recession, Not To Mention A Consolidation [Forbes] Publicis and WPP, are retreating and shrinking their footprint. Publicis has already consolidated most of its digital operations, with Sapient absorbing Razorfish, once the biggest digital agency. WPP has essentially eliminated,in all but name,two of its best-known creative agencies, Young & Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson. Its new CEO, Mark Read, has been openly critical of the big agencies in North America., deeming them not creative enough to compete. Thus, they too may become expendable. WPP may also divest some or all of its media agencies, perhaps to private equity firms that are becoming more active in acquiring marcomm companies.
S4 Capital's Martin Sorrell Predicts Holding Companies Will Break Up [AdAge] "I'm not bitter about getting tossed out of WPP at all, says Sir Martin. But actually when asked about S4 in particular what he said was: 'We're the antichrist'. Thanks for your opinion, Marty.
Gary Vaynerchuk on why he (still) thinks it’s OK for creatives to work for free [AdAge] Read this article, don't read this article, it's up to you. But here's my position: the ability to work for free is a privilege that very few of us have. Asking for creative services for free devalues our entire profession, limits you to upper- and upper-middle class perspectives, which gives us things like the Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad. And profiting off of unpaid labor is generally a disgusting and appalling practice. Especially when you're personally worth $50 million.
AIGA position on spec work [AIGA] Definitely read this. AIGA believes that professional designers should be compensated fairly for their work and should negotiate the ownership or use rights of their intellectual and creative property through an engagement with clients.
'We'll maintain 99¢ as long as we can afford it': AriZona on dive into marketing [CampaignUS] In a world of never-ending inflation and luxury brand supremacy, the power of AriZona’s 99 cents has never been more illuminated. "We’re famous for our price point and it’s been the same from the very beginning, which is not something you can say for pretty much anything these days, so we decided to capitalize on its power. Our price point has become synonymous with our brand, and we thought why not use that as a marketing platform. It snowballed," said Welsey Vultaggio, AriZona's creative director
6) Department of Great Work
Skateboard Legend Stacy Peralta Directs Gorgeous Yeti Ads About Life’s Unexpected Paths [AdWeek] Peralta, Yeti and Giant Spoon wanted to create stories that, above all, humanized the brand ambassadors and helped viewers identify with them—rather than feeling intimidated by talent or envious of a jet-setting lifestyle.
Thinx’s first national ad campaign imagines a world where men get periods, too [FastCompany] This ad certainly makes a statement on its own, but the intent is to introduce Thinx to people who don’t even know period underwear exists, let alone know the brand, and turn them into customers. (The company’s target is to reach 50% of women between the ages of 18 and 49 by the end of the year.) From BBDO New York
Qualcomm: The Invention Age by McCann New York [The Drum] (It's, I think, an even split between how much I love this because it's great work and the indisputable fact that Rube Goldberg machines are the best.) To welcome the arrival of the Invention Age, McCann New York worked with Qualcomm to draw on Qualcomm’s long-standing partnership with First, a non-profit organization that engages kids in exciting, mentor-based, research and robotics programs that help them become science and technology leaders, to bring a diverse team of young competitors together to create an all-new Rube Goldberg Machine.
McDonald's Mimics Cheap Takeout Menus To Promote McDelivery Service [AdAge] Take that, previous article about McDonalds not being creatively recognized! McDelivery takeout service in Sweden is taking on some of its local rivals in a very direct way. Agency Nord DDB targeted areas of Stockholm where people order the most sushi, Thai, pizza and Indian food, copied the style of local takeout flyers and made McDelivery menus in a similar format.
Every Peperami Commercial [YouTube] I really have no idea how I came across these ads. I am not British. I am not familiar with Peperami. They're psychotic but they work. British ads are weird and I assume effective? Anyone know who did these?
Airline Tells You Where Crying Babies Are so You Can Avoid Them [Futurism] Absolutely brilliant. Japan Airlines has a new tool that’ll allow you to get as far away as possible from crying infants on your next flight. Children between the ages of 8 days and two years who are booked on your flight will show up as adorable baby icons on the seat selection map while booking on the airline’s website
7) Platform Updates
Oh Facebook. What is going on this week?! And who could forget. Vice bought Refinery29. Forever21 declared bankruptcy. Let's see what else happened.
Oculus CTO John Carmack: Our social missteps are ‘kinda embarrassing’ [VentureBeat] During a keynote presentation, Oculus announced Facebook Horizon, the company’s latest take on social VR. It’s going to enable players to create their own spaces and games that connect to a central hub. Will it pan out? Who knows! At least they're self aware... “On the social side, looking back, it’s kinda embarrassing at all the stages that we’ve gone through at Oculus.” Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack on the company’s past false starts as it tried to build a social experience in virtual reality.
Twitch is rebranding for the first time, and it has a logo for everyone [FastCompany] The company built a new brand system grounded with several logos that live on an identity spectrum. At one end, it’s Twitch, the pixely, purple corporation, with its familiar blocky look that reminds us of its video-game roots. In the middle, it’s Twitch blended with the colors of any individual streamer. And at the far end, it’s Twitch as an ever-changing rainbow, the brand and the users all in one. The new brand will launch with a major advertising campaign, the first in Twitch’s history. The tagline? “You’re already one of us.”
Instagram Takes Another Shot at Snapchat With Threads App [The Information] A messaging app that opens to your phone’s camera and prioritizes connections with your closest friends. Sound familiar? You may be thinking of Snapchat. But that description also applies to Threads, a new standalone messaging app from Facebook-owned Instagram. Threads is based on Instagram’s “Close Friends” feature.
Twitch Is Making Ads Less Annoying [Kotaku] Soon, ads will play picture-in-picture with streams—as opposed to steamrolling over them—and streamers will have the option of disabling pre-roll ads altogether in favor of regular ad breaks. Twitch affiliates will also soon earn money from ads, a perk that has historically been reserved only for partners. When regular, non-affiliate or partner users broadcast, meanwhile, there’ll be no video ads at all, so as to ensure that every ad playing on a channel supports that channel. Ads will also play at the same volume as whatever else you’re watching at the time.
Virtual ambassadors cloud already murky legal picture for influencer marketing [MarketingDive] This is a long read that is 100% worth your time. Chanel, Prada, KFC, Vans and Rihanna's Fenty Beauty are among the established players looking to drive brand buzz with digital influencers. Whether or not these characters have much staying power as influencer marketing's next big thing, they are raising a slew of legal questions around proper disclosure, intellectual property and blurred lines between creator content and outright ads. Coupled with few concrete guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, these questions point to the current state of legal limbo in influencer marketing as the federal agency that protects consumers from misleading advertisements catches up to the trend.
How TikTok can help brands get on Christmas wish lists [Mobile Marketer] For marketers, part of TikTok's appeal comes from the fact that, because it's new, it hasn't yet been overrun by marketing messages. "You're riding a rocket ship," Anne Hunter, EVP of strategy and growth at media research giant Kantar, said in an interview. "TikTok is very exciting for brands that want to have prevalence with younger audiences."
Read the full transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s leaked internal Facebook meetings [The Verge] In two July meetings, Zuckerberg rallied his employees against critics, competitors, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, among others.
About Metrics Being Removed [Facebook for Business] Lolololol I can't even. "We will remove metrics related to 10-second video views and will rename several other video metrics."
Snapchat Expands Ad Length Limits, Announces New Ad Formats [SocialMediaToday] Snapchat is now looking to allow ads of up to three minutes in length in selected formats, up from the 10-second limit which has been the core threshold on the platform.
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!