This Week in Strategy: What kind of horses go out after dark? Night Mares!
Hi Strat Pack,
Short week this week. Lots to talk about.
I'm currently obsessed with two things: 1) C.P. Company and Lack of Guidance take a Pantone-inspired look at English football grounds and 2) Chrissy Teigen & Her Mom Vilailuck To Headline Quibi Comedy ‘Chrissy’s Court’ With respect to #2, I've spent the better part of the last half hour trying to figure out if Chrissy's Court is a legally binding small claims court. I really really hope that it is.
In other, more important news, These Belgian Monks Are Reopening a Medieval Microbrewery that has burned town three times since 1128 and hasn't brewed beer since 1798. Their new beer has an alcohol by volume content of 10.8 percent—more than double a Bud heavy. My favorite part is that the mayor of the town where the Abbey is located had to go on record recommending stopping after one or two beverages. As if that was going to happen...
Alright, put down the medieval 40s, and stop trying to figure out how to get the Lori Loughlin case on Chrissy Teigen's courtroom show. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The Long Hard Trek To Getting Good Work Made. And Why It's Time To Feed Back On 'Feedback' [Martin Weigel - Canalside View]
This article is long, and while I've done a brilliant job summarizing it as usual, I behoove you to read the whole thing. I love this piece.
Great work is not negotiated into being.
Subjecting ideas to scrutiny and critique can and does make them better. Ideas get tightened, more focused, more fit for purpose. But feedback is not a one-off event. Work doesn’t have just the one tough and challenging day in court. It is in court every single day until it finally makes its way blinking and gasping for air into the full light of day
If we want to improve what we call the ‘feedback’ process (and thus the resultant work) there are several key contributions and changes marketing teams can lead:
Take ownership of the process: Marketing teams need to accept that it is not the job of creative work to align a client organisation, to reconcile competing interests and needs, to sow harmony where there is internal discord, or to do its strategic work and priority-setting for it.
Be more honest at the outset: Constraints should be aired in the briefing stage, not during the creative development process. Marketing teams certainly need to stop issuing those“blue-sky-reach-for-the-stars-let’s-be-brave-making-a dent-in-culture!” briefs, when they have absolutely no intention of making anything that will come out from such brief. Half-way into a creative presentation is not the time for the agency to discover what a marketing team’s mandatories and checklists are.
Keep all eyes on the prize: The creative process can and should be an iterative one. But some things cannot be treated as malleable and negotiable. Agency teams for their part need to have the conviction and discipline not to accept poor client briefs hoping the creative process can fix it all. Imprecise, woolly, fantastical and inappropriate objectives are the IEDs of the marketing department. And the creative process will always, always step on them.
Listen: The creatives have just spent 2 weeks on this. You've had 45 minutes to absorb the work and process it. Expecting a considered response under these circumstances is unfair to the client, unfair to the agency, and unfair to the work.
Under the spotlight, faced with the serried ranks of hopeful and expectant agency faces, feeling compelled to say something (say anything!) meaningful and to contribute to the process, the instinct is almost without fail is to critique. And in so doing confuse criticism for feedback. It is not surprising. Criticism after all is the easiest kind of response or contribution.
The task is not to feed back. It is to understand. To spend the time to ensure that you have correctly understood the creative intent.
The only way to determine if you understand the idea the same way creatives understand the idea is to ask questions.
Why are the team excited about the idea? How will it work? What will it look/sound/feel like? How reliant is is on technique? What are the most important parts? How will it unroll? How will it scale? etc.
Know when to call time: Calling time when one is knee deep in the process and often no longer able to see the wood for the trees is difficult, to say the least. But leaders within both the marketing team and on the agency side must summon the objectivity, clarity, will and courage to call time when things start to go pear-shaped and while things can be still recovered.
2) The F.E.A.R Checklist [Charlie Ebdy]
There is no such thing as a universal rule of business, and there is no such thing as a universal rule of marketing. Despite this, marketers and marketing scientists have for decades chased the impossible, a universal code to brand-building, at the expense of effectiveness.
Instead, theory and practice point us towards a much simpler truth: that great marketing and enduring brands are built on adaptation, on individual understanding not general principle. Businesses should learn to adapt, or they will die.
The aggregate lesson of the case-studies and data we have at our disposal, from business and nature, brands and animals, is that the only way to avoid extinction, to cheat death, is to relentlessly adapt. For marketers, this means moulding your brand to external conditions, crafting a specific set of characteristics and behaviours around the observable traits of the market your business exists inside.
That approach can be simplified into a single brand strategy checklist: the F.E.A.R. checklist.
Food: How do we adapt to the characteristics of the customers in our specific market?
Faith: how much faith is involved in purchasing a product like ours? How slow are the benefits of products like ours to reveal themselves?
Cost: how expensive are our products, absolutely and relatively? How high are barriers to purchase?
Consumption: how, where and with whom are our products consumed?
Motivation: what do customers in our market want from us or products like ours? If we need a reputation, what do we need a reputation for?
Environment: How do we adapt to changing external conditions?
What are the most likely threats to our brand health over the next two years? Break out culture, competition and technology, and be clear that the significant impact will occur in this period.
What are the most significant of those threats? Assign probabilities and prioritise.
Where (and why) have we previously over- or under-estimated a threat to our brand health?
Advantage: How do we adapt to our business’s greatest strength?
What is our core strength as a business? Why have we survived for as long as we have?
How does that strength offer advantage inside our market? In what way is it most distinct?
Is what we do uniquely well understood by customers in our market now?
Risk: How do we adapt to our relative need?
How far are we behind the category leader (or our target)? Is the gap growing or shrinking? How long has the current trend persisted?
How focused is our approach right now? If we’re the category leader, are we broad enough to grow our base? If we’re behind, are we focused enough to generate more sales impact or build more brand equity with fewer resources?
Do we need to challenge how the market is shopped to maximise our advantage? If so, how?
You can only reach useful answers that guide positive future action if you are honest about how you answer, seek guidance from a broad set of sources and have the humility to calibrate and re-calibrate your understanding based on feedback and results from the outside world.
3) Citroën’s marketing boss: If our job is only metrics and sales, we are not marketers anymore [MarketingWeek]
A glimmer of hope in an industry increasingly suffering from short-termism
As Citroën celebrates its 100th year, its marketing boss is looking to the past and the future both of the car industry and marketing.
Citroën’s senior vice-president of global marketing communications, Arnaud Belloni is clear that whether it is social media or TV, “creativity is key”. He explains: “This is exactly where a lot of brands are failing. We must remember creative. If our job is only metrics and sales, this is not the same job.”
Nevertheless, the brand carries out rigorous testing including social media listening and pre- and post-testing of its campaign films. However, it remains wary of relying too heavily on creating campaigns that can hit certain KPIs.
“If you do so, you are very often going short term and it’s dangerous. My job is to have a vision, to create value to make my brand stronger. If sometimes on a short-term basis there is bad news, I need to stay strong and carry on."
4) How physiological appeals work for QSR brands [Warc]
We so often talk about rational vs emotional appeals in advertising. Research indicates there is a third driver: physiological/sensory appeals.
Many images contained in advertising content are not rational or emotional in nature but instead appeal to behaviors, movements, and sensory interactions.
Quick-service restaurant chains may be able to fuel purchase intent by tapping into these “physiological appeals” based on sensory or behavioral imagery in their TV ads, a study published by the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) has found.
“Results indicate that peak images associated with emotional and physiological appeals led to greater consumer purchase intention, whereas images associated with rational appeals did not,” they asserted. Higher levels of rational responses suppressed the positive benefits of emotionally and physiologically based responses on purchase intention.
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Are Brands Keeping Up with the Changing Face of Ramadan? [Little Black Book] This is a great, and important, read. I would have moved it higher up the list if I thought I could adequately summarize it.
Two amazing interviews you need to read:
Imagine rebuilding your business every few years [Cresta] Bob Greenberg, chairman and founder of R/GA, shares a view on the drivers of change in his business and beyond, in discussion with Cresta CEO Lewis Blackwell
How brands get their names, explained by a professional namer [Vox - The Goods] Dunkin’, Disney+, Impossible Burgers: Who comes up with this stuff?
Your Kids Think You’re Addicted to Your Phone [New York Times] Most parents worry that their kids are addicted to the devices, but about four in 10 teenagers have the same concern about their parents. And the share of parents who felt “addicted” to their devices rose to 45 percent from 27 percent, while the share of teenagers who said the same fell to 39 percent from 50 percent
There's a direct link between the cost of a luxury-goods product and the size of its logo, but it's not what you expect [Business Insider] For every centimeter luxury products’ logos shrink, their price goes up $5,000, according to Jonah Berger, marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future [The Guardian] An advert featuring the human and virtual models is late-capitalist hell, ‘queerbait’ and digisexuality all at once.
This is an ad targeted at millennials [McSweeny's] While technically satire, it's worth a read: Hey you! Look at this sleek piece of branding. This is an ad for a millennial-focused, direct-to-consumer product. Now, you’re going to look at it, and at no point will you fully understand what is going on.
High-end fitness brand Life Time wants you to live at the gym [FastCompany] What really stood out to me was not the WeWork/WeLive concept but this sentence: On average, Americans make roughly 10 trips per day per household. The number is from the National Highway Transportation Safety Board but feels really high to me.
Planet Money Episode 915: How To Meddle In An Election [NPR] What happens when you exploit the power of people's online data and then use that against them to change their minds, maybe without them even knowing it was happening, maybe using misinformation. A 23 minute podcast on the dark side of advertising. (Or a sub 23 minute read of the transcript, if you prefer).
Inside Google's Civil War [Fortune] Some employees say Google is losing touch with its “Don’t be evil” motto. What happens when an empowered tech workforce rebels? A long read that is 100% worth your time.
6) Department of Great Work
The Effies gala was last night, but we're not going to about that. Other than to say I love the Tide ad work so much. And so should you.
I also assume you saw Gillette's new spot where a father teaches his transgender son to shave. It's good. And echos the Shaquem Griffin NFL spot that worked out well for them. Let's see what else came out this week.
Transport Company Highlights Gender Pay Gap with World’s First Women’s Ticket [Little Black Book] On average, women in Germany earn 21% less than men. On Equal Pay Day, public transport company Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) offered the world's first women's ticket. For one day only, women paid 21% less for a ticket than men. From Serviceplan (who just won independent agency of the year)
New Spotify feature from JWT Brazil turns your favorite songs into recipes [PR Week] Guys this is really cool. The "first synesthesia algorithm" was developed by a neuroscientist and classifies sounds into tastes. The algorithm then uses those tastes as "ingredients": dance music was associated with temperature; energy as density or texture; positivity became bitterness or acidity, and musical notes became harmonization. Based on these parameters, a chef classified all the main culinary ingredients by assigning notes to each one of them. This entire database was put together and originated an artificial intelligence that has the same technology used in financial systems
Old Spice Unleashed a Superb Sendup of Classic Monster Movies [Muse by Clio] This is weird as hell. But I kind of love it? And I really really don't know how Wieden + Kennedy sold this in. Maybe they took Martin Weigel's advice from the one thing to read this week...
Nike have made a free guide for sustainable design [i-D which is now owned by Vice?] Created in collaboration with Central Saint Martins students and staff, this manual aims to make sustainable design a mainstay of the industry.
IKEA Recreates "Stranger Things," "Friends," and "The Simpsons" Living Rooms as Shoppable Tributes [Surface] An e-commerce-fueled photoseries recreating rooms straight from three of pop culture’s favorite shows has popped up on the mega retailer’s United Arab Emirates site.
Gotta catch 'em snores: Pokemon sleep app to launch next year [Reuters] Pokemon Sleep will use data points like how long the user slept and when they awoke, to change gameplay. While it's too early to say if this is truly great work, it's potentially a really smart way to entrench Pokemon’s appeal beyond core gamers and tap into a growing market for health-tracking services
Rainbow Village: An Entire Community in Taiwan Hand-Painted by a Single Man [This is Colossal] Not advertising, but a beautiful example of what the power of creativity can unlock.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This week's Bad Work award goes to...
North Face Apologizes and Ends Campaign Manipulating Wikipedia to Promote Its Products [AdWeek] Look, I think that the idea is really smart. The team at Leo Burnett came up with an, honestly, really clever way to make North Face top of mind. This is classic System 1, building memory structures. The dumb part, the part they got in trouble for is gloating about their subterfuge: the agency’s “biggest obstacle” was in manipulating the site “without attracting attention [from] Wikipedia moderators.” The reason Burger King got *barely* a slap on the wrist when they did it in 2017 is because it was 1. their page, and 2. cheeky and clever. Not profit seeking. Lesson learned. Something to think about in the future.
7) Platform Updates
Google! Facebook! Twitter! Measurement! So many things were updated this week.
Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests [Wall Street Journal] New research shows that publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. This stands in contrast to the vastly larger sums advertisers are willing to pay for behaviorally targeted ads. A prior study found advertisers are willing to pay 2.68 times more for a behaviorally targeted ad than one that wasn’t.
Twitter Is Showing More Ads, And People Are Seeing Lots Of Weird Crap As A Result [Buzzfeed News] While Twitter didn’t comment on the content of its increased ad load, the quality bar has seemed to go down as the number of impressions has gone up. The onslaught of junky ads and associated user complaints is the latest challenge for Twitter’s promoted tweets product.
YouTube’s Bumper Machine offers an automated way to create six-second ads [TechCrunch] Interesting...
Female-voice AI reinforces bias, says UN report [BBC] The study, entitled, I'd blush if I could, is borrowed from a response from Siri to being called a sexually provocative term.The study found that these female helpers are portrayed as "obliging and eager to please", reinforcing the idea that women are "subservient", it finds. Particularly worrying, it says, is how they often give "deflecting, lacklustre or apologetic responses" to insults. The report calls for technology firms to stop making voice assistants female by default.
Why There's No Retail Apocalypse [Wall Street Journal] As a society, we're just not ready to let someone else pick our groceries. The shift to online sales is clustered in Books/Music/Movies, Toys & Hobby, and Apparel categories. This 10 minute video is an interesting and easy to digest summary of the shift to online retail
The race for better marketing measurement is on. Are you in it? [Think with Google] In the past, marketers were focused on hitting targets or KPIs around engagement, clicks, or awareness, because that’s all we could measure. But as analytics have evolved, we must now align marketing metrics with primary business objectives. We need to measure the impact of channels, devices, and touchpoints on overall business growth, such as revenue and profit.
Instagram Shopping used by 39% of UK Gen Zers, study finds [Mobile Marketer] Instagram Shopping is a powerful selling tool because of personalization features, such as letting shoppers follow retailers and hashtags or using the app's Explore function to discover fresh content
Phew! That was a marathon, not a sprint.
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