This Week in Strategy: The most convenient time to add insult to injury is when you’re signing someone’s cast.
Hi Strat Pack:
A quick programming note: Because none of you got me that Han Solo Le Creuset pot (It's not too late...!) I'm giving myself the gift of going on hiatus over Christmas. Which means this week will be our last issue of the year. But not all is lost because here's everything that got added to Netflix in December 2019. Yes it's from Teen Vogue. What can I say - they're an authority.
In other news, I'm currently obsessed with: Inside 29Rooms Of Manufactured Moments & Solipsistic Emptiness. First of all, any time you can squeeze Solipsism (my favorite -ism, by the way.) into a headline, I'm basically already swooning. Here's a snippet: Some of these experiences are pretty up-front about their vapid offerings (get a pic of your face emerging from a ball pit for $48 and show your followers how much fun you're havin' in life!), but others try to assign meaning to their overpriced immersive gimmicks. Enter: 29Rooms. No, please do, enter, right this way, just past the neon signs asking you to "Live it! Work it! Love it! GET IT!" Click through, read the whole thing, bask in snark. Marinate in it, if you must.
Before we jump into this week - a quick personal note: We all get into advertising for different reasons. For me, it's because of my grandmother, who was a copywriter on Madison Avenue in the 70s. Some of my favorite memories are of us all sitting around the table at some restaurant, me the ripe old age of 7, and her asking me what ads I remembered on TV. We've all layered on so much marketing theory and jargon and bullshit that sometimes we can lose sight of one of the main roles of ads: memorability. For grandma, If I could remember the brand, it was a good ad. If I could only remember, say, the red firetruck, it wasn't. And in a weird way, interactions like that gave me the passion to do what I am really fucking fotunate to be able to do today.
As you read story #2 this week from BBH's John Harrison, I would ask you to think of why you got into advertising (or if you fell into it, which a lot of us do, why you chose to stay in it). It's so easy to be a cynic and shit on other people's work when comparing it to Nike's last spot, or Spotify's Year in Review. And when we're the ones making work that gets shit on (and you're lying to yourself if you think you've never made a bad ad), it's important to take a step back, gain some perspective, and look at the job that we're really asked to do when we're creating work.
Alright, stop getting so goddamn sentimental around the holiday season. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Advertising's Untold Stories [Ad Contrarian]
In recent years, copywriters, "branding" experts, "strategic" thinkers, and advertising and marketing agencies have evolved a conceit in which they refer to themselves as "storytellers."
Although it is largely self-inflating bullshit, I enjoy this conceit. It puts an emphasis on the concept of "stories" and helps me when I try to explain and expose one of the great logical miscalculations of our industry. I call it the "untold stories" problem. Here's how it works.
The stories that reach us are usually superficial -- they are mostly just headlines lightly dusted with a few specifics, some meticulously curated numbers, and a generous helping of spin. This is because marketing strategies are valuable trade secrets and are crucial to business success. You don't just give 'em away. As a result, the stories we get are often devoid of some crucial specifics that are key to understanding the true nature of the activity.
Nonetheless, for every story we are exposed to, there are a thousand untold stories we don't get to read or hear about. These are the non-spectacular stories, created in non-spectacular fashion, by non-spectacular brands. In other words, almost everything that ever happens in the world of marketing.
I would wager any amount of money that the untold stories about the underperformance of a particular marketing activity outnumber the heroically told stories of success by a hundred to one. This is doubly true of (but not limited to) the shiny new object activities like social media, content marketing, virtual reality, native advertising, "personalization," blockchain, and whatever other new marketing miracle happens to be trending this week.
The narratives we are exposed to about these activities are profoundly skewed by the bias toward trumpeting success, not failure. The confidence we have in these activities adding value to our marketing and advertising efforts are likewise skewed by the tendency to narrate only the good news.
This is perilous. It leads to conferences, books and, god help us, Powerpoints, extolling the efficacy of these activities based on wildly unrepresentative samples. It gives an entire industry a false impression of the value of these methodologies. It leads us to throw money at expensive, wasteful tactics. And it reinforces the lemming-like attraction of naive marketers to the trendy fantasies that have dominated our industry for the past decade, often through widely read "success" stories.
Before you take any story about advertising or marketing as indicative of a general truth, you'd be wise to assume that just the fact that it is being told at all makes it likely that it is one or two standard deviations from normal. You should assume that the likelihood is that the overwhelming number of stories that haven't been told on the subject aren't nearly as rosy.
In marketing, the untold stories are usually the real story.
2) An Apology to a Dreadful Ad [BBH Labs]
Everyone’s a critic. As a creative industry we judge our work by comparing it against our peers. John Hegarty once said “95% of what our industry produces is crap”. We pretend we’re ‘consumers’ and critique with our analytical minds, but are we being fair?
[John Harrison, group strategy director and effectiveness lead] was chatting to a BBH intern (called a HomeGrowner) yesterday, and she told me she’d been asked in an interview at another agency “what is the worst ad you’ve seen recently?”. So she asked me how I would have answered that question.
I went into a rant about an ad that I absolutely hated. I’m not going to say which brand it was. But safe to say, this ad was absolutely dreadful. It was a pompous homage to a supposed universal millennial attitude, with the product unconvincingly crowbarred in at the end. It made me really angry that this brand, once famous for its brilliant advertising, was producing something so crap. In my mind, the agency and brand team had failed on an industrial scale.
But on reflection, I was wrong. I owe both the agency and brand team an apology. So, I’m Sorry.
Research from Ehrenberg-Bass suggests that only 40% of advertising is remembered, and only 40% of that is correctly branded. This means that 84% of what we as an industry produce is utterly irrelevant.
This irrelevance is what failure on an industrial scale really looks like. At least the ad I hated was in the 16% of ads that I’d actually seen and could correctly name the brand. At least I’d noticed it. As Bill Bernbach said, “If no-one notices your advertising, everything else is academic”.
That was when I realised that the question our intern had been asked was fundamentally flawed. The very fact the answer required you to pick something from the 16% meant that it was nowhere near as bad as the 84% of dross that gets churned out each day without causing even so much as a ripple. The utterly irrelevant majority.
Maybe a better question would be “what brands are failing on an industrial scale because you can’t remember anything they’ve done recently?”
3) Who got 2019’s marketing predictions right – and absolutely wrong? [The Drum]
The Drum looks back at last year's swathe of marketing predictions and reveals if any of them actually came true. There are a lot of predictions in the article and I encourage you to click through. Below are some of my favorite hot takes:
Earlier this year, David ‘Shingy’ Shing left his ‘digital prophet’ role at Verizon Media. As far as we know, no one else has hired Shingy for a similar job. The news may have placed a dark cloud over the predictions industry. After all, what if those forecasts are largely useless? I cannot help but wonder if Shingy’s departure this year will herald the arrival of more common sense in the marketing industry.
Voice technology will break through in creative planning and the marketing mix. Nope. I will repeat that marketers allocated only 2% of their media budgets to voice this year. Score: 0/1
The industry will address ageism: “Our industry is seeking what Coty’s Ukonwa Ojo described as ‘diversity in front of the camera as well as behind it’. With ageing populations, this seems to us to be an area which needs prioritising.” Advertisers focusing on the people with all the money – Generation X and the Baby Boomers – rather than cash-strapped millennials and Generation Z? OK Boomer. That would be too smart. And according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 53% of advertising employees were aged 25 to 44 in 2018 compared to 44% of workers in all industries. Score: Wishful thinking in front of the camera and behind it. 0/1.
Food gets tobacco-like labels: “Chile has adopted tobacco-style labelling and marketing restrictions for foods high in salt, sugar and fat.. Peru, Uruguay, Guatemala and others are following suit, and now Canada threatens to be a springboard to take the Latin American approach to the rest of the world.” Correct. See Australia, Chile, Mexico and South Africa. Score: 1/1
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Which ad agency is the most profitable? [CampaignLive] For use in your next salary negotiations: McCann, DDB and VCCP made more money, before tax and other outgoings, than any other ad agencies in the UK last year, analysis of their financial results by Moore Kingston Smith has found.
Webby Awards CEO reveals how to cut through the clutter [AdAge] as all things digital have become so deeply ingrained and entwined in our daily lives, cutting through the clutter has never been more difficult. Especially when catering to peoples’ basest instincts has never been easier. Interesting, insightful listen with David-Michel Davies, the CEO of the Webbys.
Influencer marketing agencies prepare for the end of the Instagram like [Digiday] As likes become less available, advertisers might need to rely more on building relationships with influencers to gain access to accurate data. Without a direct relationship with an influencer, advertisers have no way to know if the numbers shared by that person are real.
Adobe Stock’s 2020 Creative Trends: Challenge the Expected [Adobe] As culture becomes a globalized space thanks in large part to the common language of internet culture, mainstream visual fluency continues to grow in sophistication. Creative skill sets are keeping pace with the readiness of applications that help us fluently translate our ideas into reality.
Consumers are pushing brands to keep up with an ever-widening world of aesthetic shifts. Beyond trends, there’s a growing need to deeply connect to larger cultural, economic, and social movements through a multitude of industries. No trend exists in a vacuum — every trend is connected with a multitude of references and microcultures, all fostered online.
Here’s a look at our four top visual trends for 2020.2019 research review: Insights we uncovered in 2019 that will take you into 2020 [Google] A surprising amount of good content in here. Best to bookmark and keep coming back to: This year consumer journeys became increasingly complex. New channels of media consumption emerged, traditional industries went digital, and standards in privacy and digital wellbeing were raised. This is a review of the insights we uncovered in 2019, based on Google and YouTube data and research. Our analysis uncovered five key themes that underpin the changes we saw this year, all of which are trends we expect to continue into 2020.
Rent The Runway Is Expanding Into Your Hotel Room. Other Retailers Will Follow. [Forbes] This morning Rent The Runway, the fashion clothing rental service, and W Hotels announced a partnership allowing travelers to choose Rent The Runway clothes before a trip and have the clothes delivered to a hotel for the guest’s arrival. Rent The Runway’s business is not fundamentally store-driven, but this announcement demonstrates that they are thinking about location in a flexible, creative way. That’s what needed in retail thinking now to reach customers and it’s what makes this announcement so interesting. It’s a very early sign of leveraging a non-store location to drive a retail transaction. When you extend that thinking, it opens enormous possibilities for ways to use many types of non-store locations to drive the retail sales. Retailers have to think of ways to bring their stores to their consumer and not just virtually.
5) Department of Great Work
Google — Year in Search 2019 [YouTube, duh] Friends of the newsletter know that I am on record for not loving 2018's year in search. Last year, Google tells us we searched for "good" Contrast last year's searching for a even funny animal clip to give us momentary refuge from the endless news cycle that reminds ushow fucking terrible, unhinged, and just straight up off the rails the world is. This year is about "heroes" and I think they really nailed it. It does a good job of moving us from passively taking a quick hit of dopamine to hide from the aforementioned terribleness to reminding us that there are people who are passionate and who are still committed to doing good in this word. And their bridge line is a good one: "To everyone using their powers to empower others..." Parallel construction! Gets me every time.
Carrefour's Response to the Art Basil Banana [Facebook] "With our Organic Products, culinary art is within reach." Probably the only good brand response to that banana.
A Young Wayne Gretzky Gets Tim Horton's Autograph in New Ad Based on a True Story [Muse by Clio] In a story almost too good to be true, Wayne Gretzky tells the story of when he got THE Tim Horton's autograph in a small Canadian town in 1968. The :90 can maybe lose 15 seconds in the upfront but hell. the intense emotion on The Great One's face around the 1:20 mark is powerful enough to melt the ice at any rink in town. From GUT Miami
‘Peloton Girl’ Stars as Herself in the Greatest Sequel Ever: An Aviation Gin Ad [AdWeek] (I couldn't find credits - do you know who created this? Drop me a line!) Not only did Aviation Gin hijack a cultural moment, it got the real actress to star in this ad … no “re-envisioning,” no parody or satire, but the real deal. Of course, this likely means there won’t be too much work from Peloton coming her way. But, at this point, does it really matter? Redemption usually comes well after a mistake is made, but to flip the script in a few days like this is the thing of legend. And our guess is that she’ll do just fine.
The Responses To This Horny Netflix Tweet Are Unhinged [Huffington Post] On Thursday, the official Netflix account asked its followers: “what’s something you can say during sex but also when you manage a brand twitter account?” Look, we’re not prude. We love a good sex joke, but it makes us feel all kinds of weird when Mr. Peanut, a cartoon character from our youth, just casually says “I need a nut.” Netflix has responded to many of the double entendres they’ve received with, you guessed it, more double entendres.
Another Whopper on the Side of a Bus [Twitter] Everyone in advertising in the UK has wanted to do a ‘massive lie on the side of a big red bus’ idea and these guys did it. Nice one BBH. (For our non-UK friends - this infamous Brexit bus is the reference point)
This is how they prevent people from urinating in public in the Czech Republic [Twitter] Not advertising. But a great exploration in visual design nonetheless
Department of Work that just makes me go "Ughhhhhhh. We get it already"
Popeyes Drops Chicken Sandwich-Inspired Ugly Christmas Sweater [Hypebeast] Guys, hot take here: the ugly sweater fad is over. We started wearing our parents old, genuinely ugly sweaters ironically, then they became a thing and people earnestly started buying new ones, now we're in this weird post-post-modern phase of the ugly sweater where I really don't think anyone knows if they're participating earnestly or ironically. Time to move on. Anyway For the cost of 14 Popeyes chicken sandwiches — $44.95 USD — you could pick up its Ugly Christmas Sweater for yourself. Of course the sweater, like Hypebeast for writing about it, has already sold out.
Now Popeyes Is Selling a Taped Up Chicken Sandwich for $120,000 [Thrillist] The Sandwich" is priced at $120,003.99, and Popeyes told Thrillist that "a buyer has already inquired" about making a purchase. Ughhhhhhh. We get it already.
6) Platform Updates
Trends of 2019: Social Media and Creativity [Creative Review] This is actually really interesting! Check it out! This year saw increased analysis and reflection over the impact that social media has had on creativity, from the dangerous lure of the likes to the way that social channels could be designed for the better. Here are the key points to catch up on
Tiktok's First Year-In-Review Features Cheese-Slapping, Carrot Heels And Lots Of 'Old Town Road' [AdAge] I wanted to put this in with Great Work. I really did. And while the inaugural look back video from Adam&EveNYC did remind me how much TikTok I watched this year, I didn't have the resonance that I wanted. C'est la vie. And not to nitpick, but come on AdAge, LOTS of old town road? Hardly.
‘Disney Plus’ was Google’s top US trending search term in 2019 [TechCrunch] Two platforms, one update! Let's be honest: The bulk of people were searching "Disney Plus," but thinking "Baby Yoda."
Facebook promised transparency on political ads. Its system crashed days before the UK election [CNN] Tens of thousands of political ads went missing from Facebook's archive this week, according to researchers, just days before voters go to the polls in the most important UK election for decades.
Instagram influencer marketing activity jumps 48%, study finds [Mobile Marketer] The number of Instagram Stories posts per influencer has risen 20% this year to an average of 3.6 a day, indicating the growing popularity of the format. Beauty was the most popular product category mentioned in Stories, making up 25% of sponsored posts, followed by 24% for fashion and 19% for food.
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 as always. See you next week!