TWIS: I wonder if the guy who coined the phrase 'One Hit Wonder' coined any other phrases

Hi Strat Pack,

Happy Friday! On this day in 44 BC Julius Caesar was, as Shakespeare put it, "carved like a dish fit for the gods" by Brutus, Cassius, and their coup d’etat coterie. Why'd they do it? Who better to explain than Mean Girls' own Gretchen Wieners Beware the Ides of March indeed... 

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short. The conductor on my downtown A Train this morning made an announcement to "Have a beautiful day and a wonderful weekend" as we pulled into Chambers Street this morning.  And that little act of kindness reaffirmed why we are all better off living in a society where we're all a little nicer to each other.

So with that, here's an article from The Ringer that asks (and answers!) What Was the Happiest Day on the Internet This Decade? It's literally a greatest hits list of the last 10 years on the internet.

Alright, stop messing around reading up on 17th century English political philosophers and let's jump right in.

CORRECTION: Last week in Strategy, we alluded to the Stephen King who wrote the seminal 1974 JWT planning guide as that Stephen King, whereas in fact he is this Stephen King. The Strategy editorial department regrets the error.

The one thing to read this week
1) The benefits of being an outsider: Why brands are hiring marketers with no sector experience [Marketing Week]

Consider the old marketing adage, "The most dangerous phrase in the English language is That's the way we've always done it". Whether you're hiring, or looking to get hired, this has a lot of great nuggets for why a wide range of experiences is good for the company, and good for your career.

You can get bogged down in attempting to turn yourself into a sector expert as opposed to bringing your functional expertise.

An outsider will always be able to offer new ways of thinking that perhaps people wrapped up in the business are too involved to see. But fresh perspectives can also be gained by moving between different roles within a brand and different markets within a sector, or by gathering expertise across a number of businesses at different stages of their lifecycle.

2) How Heineken Codifies Creative Feedback [Fast Company]
A must read for anyone who touches the creative process. And because you subscribe to this newsletter, I assume you do... The only reason this isn't the one thing to read this week is because its from 2015. But I only recently came across it and find it hugely useful.

The article paints a picture of how to build an organization where creativity and bravery is not just applauded but one that has gone to considerable lengths to create structures and a culture where it can thrive.

Not all great creative is conveniently presented on a plate and Heineken teaches its marketers to know it when they see it–and then to fight for it. “We train our people to recognize the creative nugget in initial proposals where maybe there is a mixed bag of stuff"

3) Brand Salience Is the Lifeline Between You and Your Customers [Emotive Brand - Medium]

So much advertising theory is focused on brand salience. But I've found that marketers tend to have a hard time translating this concept into theory and action. Read this article because it explains salience in a way that will help you explain it to your colleagues, and because it makes building salience actionable.

Brand salience is the unsung hero of indecisive buyers everywhere. In cognitive psychology, “salience” refers to what is most prominent or noticeable. The term describes how “our attention is drawn to intense stimuli such as bright lights, loud noises, saturated colors, and rapid motion.” For marketers, salience is the degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation.

Read this because we all generally agree that the AIDA funnel is bullshit but and yet we all are still generally forced to use it. Clearly this is a passion for me. And it should be for you.

4) It’s all got a bit flabby [Warc Admap]

Every strategic decision should face a simple test: could you make the opposite choice without looking stupid? For example, that far too common strategy of ‘great customer service’ fails if you consider the alternative is to deliberately offer ‘terrible customer service’. Great strategy is differentiated and distinctive.

More and more, we are seduced by the strategic equivalent of shiny object syndrome.

Strategic thinking is getting flabbier and flowerier by the minute, with fluffy language that is highly evocative, imaginative and inspirational but, says Gareth Kay, is devoid of the brutal rigor needed to create a robust foundation on which to build a brand or business.

BONUS ARTICLE: Our job isn't a summary. [Dave Trott's Blog] I love Dave Trott so much. 

When conventional wisdom says our job is to summarize the contents, or the ingredients, or the consumer insight, or the brand.

Remember our job isn’t any of those things. Our job is to stand out, to provoke, to get noticed, and get remembered.

Our job is impact.

5)  Quick Hits: A few links that are not articles but are are concise, important, interesting, and impactful. Long story short, I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.

  • Lots of shakeups in the advertising industry recently. To recap...

    • 72andSunny Lays Off 5% of U.S. Staff [AdWeek]

    • Wunderman Thompson - the already Frankensteined agency - absorbed Possible and Cole & Weber [The Drum]

    • Publicis Merges Media Shops Spark Foundry, Blue 449 [MediaPost]

    • It's all ok though because Sir (really? still?) Martin Sorrel will get $2.65 million from WPP as part of his long-term bonus after earlier threatening to withhold it for “likely” breaching confidentiality commitments. [WSJ] 

  • The APG Knowledge Reading List [APG] A good mix of advertising staples and lesser known gems. If you work in advertising, and you like knowledge, you should click through.

  • Growth without New News [Twitter] A page from Binet & Fields on how to achieve growth...without...new...news.

  • David Ogilvy continues to keep us honest [Twitter] An essential advertising ideology that’s often overlooked in the “content” era.

  • We’re all being manipulated by A/B testing all the time [Fast Company] The web is being reshaped by the ubiquitous practice–and it’s a serious ethical problem.

6) Department of Great Work
Let's see what came out this week

  • Formula 1's New 3-Second Sonic Branding Is Actually a Chemical Brothers Song Sped to 15,000 BPM. [More About Advertising] So Cool. So so so cool.

  • Reebok sports '90s nostalgia in campaign courting young consumers [Marketing Dive]

  • Forgotten Women Achieve a place in History Textbooks with this AR App [AdAge]

  • Lexus’ 60,000-Hour Documentary About Extreme Craft [Little Black Book] Really cool work from The&Partnership: a Lexus-funded documentary about Japanese master craftspeople

  • JWT and Photographer Jimmy Nelson Are Fighting Cultural Homogenization With AI [AdWeek] The Preservation Robot debuted at SXSW

7) Platform Updates
Good news! No major blowups on any of the major platforms this week! But a lot going on regardless...

  • A new 'wearout' standard for a new era of advertising [Warc] "If the aim of media planning is to maximise purchase intent, the new research indicated that media planners should strive for an average frequency of beyond 10 exposures." I think I'm going to need to process this for a bit.

  • Advertisers respond to Facebook's Changing Metrics [AdAge] Facebook replaced the 1-to-10 “relevance score” it has given ads since 2015 with three new measures, for relative quality, expected engagement and likely conversion rate. Facebook replaced the 1-to-10 “relevance score” it has given ads since 2015 with three new measures, for relative quality, expected engagement and likely conversion rate. 

  • Inside Twitter’s ambitious plan to change the way we tweet [Re/Code]

  • Streaming Video’s New Math [The Information]

  • Today Show’s steals and deals maven Jill Martin helped bring in $60 million in e-commerce revenue [Fast Company] Wow.

  • Accenture Interactive shows off top XR tools brands are already adopting [Campaign US]

  • The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs [The Atlantic] I really don't know how the Atlantic knows so much about teens. I really don't.

Now that's a full email. Thanks for sticking around as always. Have a great weekend!

Jordan Weil