This Week in Strategy: Jokes about communism aren't funny unless everyone gets them

Hi Strat Pack,

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth! Happy May Day international workers of the world! Unite! More importantly, tomorrow is May 4th, which is Star Wars day. Which is what I'll be celebrating. 

But most importantly, I really need you to watch this video of Shinzo Abe installing the beaver door-knocker he brought back from Canada.  

Get yourself a man who
☑️ Attempts at least partially to reflate Japan
☑️ Reshapes Japan's role in trade and Asian diplomacy
☑️ Wears a button-down pink striped Oxford shirt for DIY

I've watch this video about 14 times so far this week. And so should you.

Alright guys stop fighting about who gets to play with the red lightsaber on May the Fourth, let's jump right in.

The one thing to read this week
1) These Ads Think They Know You [New York Times]

I try not to include a ton of Times articles because of the metered paywall, but this one is absolutely burning one of your monthly articles for. Even for those of us that work in digital, the breadth and depth of tracking is big.

Nearly every ad you see online is tailored just for you. These digital ads are powered by vast, hidden datasets that allow advertisers to make eerily accurate guesses about who you are, where you’ve been, how you feel and what you might do next.

While targeted ads may be familiar by now, how they work — and the power they have — often seems invisible. Companies today are mining private lives the same way they exploit natural resources, turning them into profitable goods. She said that makes every “smart” device and “personalized” service just another way to collect data for the surveillance economy.

That change happened so quickly and so secretly, Ms. Zuboff argues, that the public is not equipped to fight back.

Today’s data providers can receive information from almost every imaginable part of your life: your activity on the internet, the places you visit, the stores you walk through, the things you buy, the things you like, who your friends are, the places your friends go, the things your friends do, and on and on. One provider boasts about having “precise second-by-second viewing of tens of millions of televisions in all 210 local markets across the country.” 

If you responded to an online event invitation, the details could be used to target you. If you’re listening to energetic music, you could be targeted almost instantly in an energetic mood group. Much of this data could be shared among brands.

It’s about ads, but it has all these other implications that have nothing to do with ads. And that’s the price we’re paying to see ‘relevant’ ads.

BONUS ARTICLE: Ad saturation and over-targeting damaging people’s trust in brands [MarketingWeek] New research further highlights the risks brands face as a result of over-targeting, with negative feelings towards advertising all stemming from precision marketing rather than brand building activities.  

2) Marketing and Modesty [The Ad Contrarian] 
Short, sweet, and to the point. Advice we would all do well to heed.

Human beings have an annoying habit of thinking we know things we don't really know. My psychiatrist friends often tell me how unfathomable a lot of human behavior is. And yet 27-year-old account planners seem to understand behavior so thoroughly. 

In my career I’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing and advertising people. And I mean no disrespect, but I don’t think they knew shit either. Mostly what we do is precision guessing.

I think we would be wise to keep open minds and admit that a great deal of our understanding of consumer behavior is incomplete at best, and wrong at worst.

We would do ourselves and our industry a whole lot of good to exercise a little modesty and discretion when we claim to know things we don’t really know.

BONUS ARTICLE: Dear planners, trying to sound smart actually makes you look stupid… [Shane O'Leary]  As Michael Gove famously said, “people have had enough of experts”. So let’s stop coming across as egotistical “experts” and have a bit more intellectual empathy and humility. 

After all simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Trying to sound smart actually makes you look stupid. “Enough of your bullshit, just get to the point”.

3) Millennials Tried to Kill the American Mall, But Gen Z Might Save It [Bloomberg] 

Gen Z keeps confounding Corporate America. But perhaps the biggest surprise about this new cohort of teenagers is the most unexpected of all: They love the shopping mall.

Around 95 percent of them visited a physical shopping center in a three-month period in 2018, as opposed to just 75 percent of millennials and 58 percent of Gen X. But they don't shop like their parents. Here’s a look at some of the ways retailers are keeping up:

  • They Don’t Fight the iPhone: Forever 21, consistently ranked among American teenagers’ top brands, rewards phone-in-hand shopping by offering customers 21 percent off if they snap a picture of themselves in a Forever 21 outfit and post it with designated hashtags—then show the cashier at the register.

  • They Let Them Customize It:  Champion, the activewear company trained store associates to heat-press and embroider its iconic “C’’ logo and brand name anywhere consumers want on their sweatshirts and hoodies upon request. Levi Strauss & Co. put tailor shops in most of its mainline stores to entice consumers to add monogram stitching to the brand’s trucker jackets and iconic jeans—which CEO Chip Bergh admits weren’t popular with millennials

  • They Don’t Think Secondhand Clothing Is Second-Rate: Neiman Marcus bought a minority stake in Fashionphile, an e-commerce company focused on pre-owned luxury handbags and accessories. While the used luxury products will still be sold on Fashionphile’s website, in the next year Neiman will open about five to seven in-store showrooms.

4) Three Super Useful Planning Resources

Julian Cole has one of the sharpest minds in advertising. And if you're not signed up for his newsletter Planning Dirty, you should. Here are three super useful decks that shared

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

  •  The age of the influencer has peaked. It's time for the slacker to rise again [Quartzy] This article is so so so good. I wish I had the ability to condense it in a pithy blurb. But I can't which is why it's here and not further up.

  • Binet highlights importance of brand building [Warc] “Brand building is more important in a digital world than it is in the old economy,” said Binet. “Of course, most marketers have learned completely the wrong lesson. They’ve seen the efficiency of short-term activation and they put all their money there"

  • Hands up who’s heard of TOM McELLIGOTT? [Dave Dye] He was half of Fallon McElligott until they just became Fallon. Why don't we know his name? I really don't know. But here's like 50 beautiful print ads that he did.

  • Starbucks is battling fake viral ads promising free drinks to people who stream Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga songs [Business Insider] On the collateral damage a rabid fan community can have on a completely unrelated brand

  • Death Of Car Use Among Younger Cohorts Has Been Greatly Exaggerated [MediaPost] Millennials account for 35% of those looking to purchase a vehicle this year. The percentage of millennials who plan to go car shopping within the next 12 months is also directionally more than Gen-Xers, And one point for a clever title. 

  • "Long-term brand building makes all other metrics grow" 3 min watch with Les Binet at Effectiveness Week 2016 [YouTube] It's a Les Binet kind of week.

  • Chase Fails to Read the Room, Sparks Backlash With Snarky Tweet About Low Bank Accounts [AdWeek] When Elizabeth Warren claps back you know its bad.

  • Uber Apologizes After Using Racial Slur To Address Customer’s Complaint [DesignTaxi] On needing to guard against the dregs of the goddamn internet. Uber has been heavily criticized after mysteriously posting a racist tweet in response to a customer complaint. This was something they could have relatively easily avoided and should be a lesson to us all.

6) Great Work
Because we didn't cover it last week, here's a double serving of the good stuff this week

  • Lego Is Making Braille Bricks. They May Give Blind Literacy a Needed Lift. [Forbes] Braille literacy has fallen significantly in recent decades to around just 10% of blind and low-vision children. Lego just seems like a genuinely great company. Keep it up, Lego!

  • A Head-Turning Trailer for the Newport Beach Film Festival [Shoot Online] Our most powerful ideas can often come from our most emotionally challenging experiences. Watch the commercial. It's insane and absolutely brilliant. 

  • How This Polish Chocolate Brand Used ASMR to ‘Hear Taste’ [Little Black Book] You'd think this would be kitchy and corny as hell. It's not. Great work from Ogilvy Poland.

  • Jeff Bridges to play a human bridge in a new beer advert because his surname is Bridges [It's Nice That] "The [Stella] ad might have been seen by many marketers but it wasn't massively seen by consumers in the UK. The path was clear to land our message and do a long-term piece with Jeff."

  • Hotels.com parodies 'hate-like' travel envy on social media [Mobile Marketer]

  • Energy Upgrade California Darkens Its Own Ad to Save Energy [Little Black Book] The dark TV spot from DDB San Francisco actually saves up to 20% more screen energy than the average commercial 

7) Platform Updates
It's newfront week this week in New York. Which means you've probably read about all the fun platform updates that I will spare you from. And hopefully you've gone to some fun parties along the way.

  • Verizon is looking to sell Tumblr and Pornhub is interested [The Verge] Link is 100% safe for work.

  • Most Cord-Cutters Aren’t Missing Cable TV [eMarketer] the number of US cord-cutters—adults who have cancelled a pay TV service and continue without it—will climb 18.9% this year to 39.3 million

  • Pew: US adult Twitter users tend to be younger, more Democratic; 10% create 80% of tweets [TechCrunch] Just marinade in that for a second. 10% of Twitter users create 80% of tweets

  • Successful social media ads target the passive user experience [AdAge] I"m asking you to read this and consider how the author is basically asking us to design ads more like TV. In AdAge

  • Netflix ads: would they turn off subscribers? [The Drum]  Spoiler Alert: Yes. 57% of a Netflix control group said they would immediately cancel their subscriptions if ads were integrated into the platform

  • Hulu tops 28 million customers, unveils new shows and a ‘binge watch’ ad experience [TechCrunch] 

  • What is TikTok  [Twitter] a useful explainer for kids and Marketers alike

  • Snap Select Is Aimed at Giving Brands Access to Snapchat Discover’s Premium Shows [AdWeek]

  • Virtual and Augmented Reality Users 2019 [eMarketer] VR slows as AR grows.

  • Dead Facebook users could outnumber the living by 2069 [TheNextWeb] Both interesting and completely unrelated to advertising.

Phew! That was a marathon, not a sprint. 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.
Now that's a full email. Thanks for sticking around as always. Have a great weekend!

Jordan Weil