This Week in Strategy: What’s the difference between a guy with formal wear on a bicycle and a guy with casual wear on a unicycle? Attire!
Hi Strat Pack,
Thanks to everyone who responded to last week's poll asking whether we should publish on Thursday or Friday. By a pretty wide margin (69% to 31%) the vote was for Friday. So we'll be sticking with that.
It's the summer, which means that there's got to be some kind of controversy around the best style of barbecue, or whether cornhole can really be considered a professional sport, or What Gets To Be A 'Burger'? States Restrict Labels On Plant-Based Meat. I'm sharing this story with you for one reason: The number of meat puns laced throughout this entire article is just plain impressive. It starts at the first sentence and just keeps going. Great content. Check it out.
Speaking of food, I'm currently being shamed by this article in Fast Company The psychology behind why people will eat anything at work. Those three stale bagel quarters left over from the meeting? Gone in seconds. Picked over Halloween candy someone’s kid didn’t want? Eaten in record time. Does that sound like your office. It definitely sounds like every office I've ever stepped inside, ever.
“A good rule of thumb is if you don’t love it, don’t eat it. Do a self check-in, asking ‘Is this something I want or like?’ If you say ‘yes,’ go for it. If not, move on. Well duh. My like or dislike for that rapidly browning 3pm salad doesn't explain why I go for it each and every time. Thanks for nothing, FastCo!
Two upcoming events that nobody asked me to endorse but that I think are great:
1) Do you live in Sao Paolo or New York? Are you looking for strategy training?
Mark Pollard and Julian Cole will be doing the Strategy SuperSizer course in brand planning and comms planning in Sao Paolo on August 30th (buy tickets) and New York October 4th (buy tickets).
I took this course in June and it was great. Like 'reinvigorated my love for planning' great. If it's within your means, I really really really strongly recommend it. Great session and really awesome networking opportunity
2) The Drum Arms will once again be pulling pints for New Yorkers. They'll be hosting a range of events during Advertising Week New York, from lively happy hours to thoughtful panel sessions
Date: Tuesday, September 24 - Wednesday September 25, 2019
Location: McHale's, 251 W 51st St, New York, NY 10019
Free beers? Networking? Panel discussions? I'll be there! (Ok maybe not for the panel discussions and) Register here and I'll see you there!
Alright stop messing around trying to figure out the saddest office lunch I've ever had, let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) All you need is emotion. Really? [Marketing Society]
So the one thing to read this week is really three parts. They're all short. They're all written by Phil Barden who wrote Decoded which you also need to read if you haven't. This is super important interesting stuff. Take 5 minutes and read all three parts here. [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
Emotions have, of recent times, been the marketing hot topic, with increasing and exciting evidence that emotionally engaging communication correlates with positive impact on sales. As much as we may be excited by the correlation and be naturally inclined to believe in the ‘emotion is everything’ narrative, we also know many confounding cases where “they love the ad but it is just not selling…”.
There are two physical dimensions to emotion:
Arousal – intensity of the body’s physiological response
Valence – evaluation of whether something is positive or negative
We like to try and make sense of these physiological sensations and so we construct ‘feelings’ based on the emotional response.
Arousal and positive valence are fundamental but also very basic dimensions. They do not help to differentiate our brands and products. Valence only provides a basal evaluation (good vs. bad) and hence only provides basal differentiation between brands. Communication that evokes an emotional response helps us to process and remember an ad and encourages us to share it with others.
In fact, emotions generally do not cause behavior - There is a link between emotion and behavior, but any correlation must not be mixed up with causality. This is very counterintuitive, so let us have a deeper look at the science here. Emotions are a result of our actions – not the other way around. They provide feedback on whether we are on the right track or not.
But how does that fit with the insight that most decisions are determined by System 1? Doesn’t the work of Kahneman prove that everything is about emotion? No. The notion that ‘System 1 = Emotion’ is an inappropriate oversimplification and misses the point. Take one example: driving a car. In our first driving lesson, we had to think about and control everything that we did. It was exhausting, took a lot of effort and we were slow.
We were using our System 2, because we had not yet developed intuition. Nowadays, we do most of our driving without thinking. But do we drive based on emotion? Hopefully not. Our decisions today are based on intuition. This is what System 1 is about:
intuitive, automatic, effortless and fast decision-making based on associative processes. System 1 includes affective and cognitive aspects and tasks (Camerer et al 2005). Emotional communication helps to make communication more effective as a vehicle to ensure processing of the content of an ad, but the emotional response when watching the ad as such does not drive the purchase decision, because emotions generally do not cause decisions and choice.
Behavior is driven by the expected value of a choice. In very general terms, this value is a function of the experienced or expected discrepancy between our actual (current) state and our desired (target) state. This discrepancy is what makes us do things, this is what motivates us. Motivation – unlike emotion – always has a target component, an outcome that we want to achieve.
But a note of caution: the motivation to change our mood must not be confused with the emotional response to an ad. This differentiation is important because it forces us to distinguish between, on one hand, the emotional response evoked by an ad and, on the other, the message/value proposition of the brand as a means to reduce an expected or experienced discrepancy. Communication needs to dramatize that the brand is an effective means to close this gap, achieve the desired outcome, goal and job to be done – whether it be it on a functional, social or mood level.
Emotions are a result of, and not a trigger for, behavior.
Emotional communication is an effective vehicle, but it is not the message. To impact behavior, we firstly need a message that increases the perceived goal value of our brand, a message that shows that the brand is instrumental in helping us achieve our goals: if you use this brand, you can accomplish the desired state and achieve the desired outcome.
In briefs, agencies are often asked to create an emotional ad. Whilst that is not wrong, if there is no motivating message the impact on sales will be random. What’s more, a focus on emotional responses can result in generic briefings like “make people love our brand” or “bring back love”. But this offers no real guidance for creative development.
To impact sales, the ad needs to convey the right motivational message (the WHAT) in an emotionally engaging way (the HOW). Successful ads deliver on both.
2) Do strategists and creatives need to rethink their relationship? [Creative Review]
Account Planning was introduced in the late 1960s. The original vision was to introduce account planning as a third discipline alongside account management and creative at the centre of the advertising process. Their vision was that planners would become the voice of the customer in the process. The job of planners would not just be to conduct research, but to use research to create better advertising.
Planners need to be sponges for everything that’s going on in the world. As planning has evolved, however, we need greater clarity about what a planner’s raison d’être is. At the inception of planning it was clear: to be the voice of the customer. What is it now?
The way we build brands and our industry's output has changed. When our creativity was confined to creating adverts, responsibility for ‘the idea’ sat with art directors and copywriters. But now our ideas are as likely to be a new product (think Grey’s Life Paint for Volvo) as they are an advert. We need to start seeing creativity as a shared responsibility. It must sit between artists, technologists, planners, data scientists and many more roles besides.
Planners have the opportunity to create a valuable new role for themselves. Building a strong brand is no longer purely about producing great advertising. Someone needs to join the dots across the vast array of activations needed to build modern brands. Someone needs to be able to decipher the objectives, strategies, challenges and opportunities being discussed in the boardroom (and help shape them if necessary). They need to be able to take this complexity, simplify it, and work out where the opportunities for creativity are. And they need to be able to work with designers, art directors, writers and all the rest to create work that builds brands.
If we are to fend off the march of the consulting firms, then what better way to do it than a fusion of the best strategic minds partnering with the best creative minds? Creating not just sharp thinking but sharp execution. Doing this will require creatives and strategists to spend some time on their relationship and understand how, together, they can be a formidable partnership once more.
3) CMOs shift focus away from customer experience [Marketing Week]
I saw this headline and was like uh, what. Especially this: CMOs are shifting customer experience down the priority list as new areas such as leading disruptive innovation and delivering business transformation move up their agendas.
While the data suggests customer experience and understanding consumer trends might be becoming less important to marketers, there is a counter argument that it actually shows marketers simply have more priorities.
CMOs increasingly need to be working across departments, with marketing alone not responsible for the customer experience. Rather, CMOs must increasingly fuse together different agendas behind a broader movement for change. There is a challenge in how they mobilize the rest of the organization to deliver better customer experience. One of the key themes we try to emphasize is that the CMO is an integrator of many other agendas, some of which they may not be formally responsible, or even accountable for.
CMOs are increasingly seeing that they need to transform their business and not just optimize what they’ve got today. We’ve seen this big shift to short-termism and activation in the moment to deliver to short-term results, and now we’re seeing that pendulum swing back again where marketers are realizing the longer-term investment in brand building and overall customer experience is critical if you’re going to have a competitive advantage.
Closing the performance gap is a dual challenge. It’s difficult to do therefore it needs investment, but the focus in recent times has been on short-term returns so securing investment for focus on innovations is very challenging if you’re not delivering short-term results.
4) The Six Templates of Highly Successful Advertising [Faris Yakob - Medium]
"Nothing is original. For a work to have meaning, it must use language — it must “make sense.” It needs to work with memes already living in the host mind: language, images, melodies, patterns. It can’t be wholly original. It can hardly be original at all.” — Nina Paley
Ideal ideas are not original but rather variations on a form, marrying innovation and immediacy to existing frameworks. A dash of the familiar makes something palatable, a pinch of the strange makes it interesting.
In a paper called The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads, an academic research team analyzed 200 award-winning commercials and established that 89% could be classified into just six categories. IPA research shows that award-winning ads are 11 times more commercially effective than those that do not win awards, so we can use this as a proxy for efficacy.
The formulae are:
Extreme Consequences (the Lynx Effect)
Pictorial Analogy (Sony Balls)
Extreme Situations (Dumb Ways to Die, Epic Split)
Competition — against anything, not necessarily competitive brands but could be (Comcast Rabbit, Energizer Bunny)
Interactive Experiments (Whirlpool Care Counts, Fabreze Breathe Happy)
Dimensional Alteration — in which the ads change some parameter such as size or time (Guinness noitulovE, Carlton Draught Big Ad, Morton Salt, and OK Go The One Moment).
The researchers then tried to classify other ads for the same products that didn’t win awards and found that only 2.5% of them fit the templates. Then they experimented to see if the frameworks could create good ads by design. Two groups were briefed to come up with ideas, one equipped with the templates. The results from the latter group were judged to be more creative using standard pretesting methodologies.
To make award-winning successful advertisements, use a formula. To make something ‘original’, seek new forms.
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Everyone at this new advertising agency has served time in prison [FastCompany] About agency ConCreates - a creative shop staffed entirely by people who have been (or are) currently incarcerated. Their goal is to challenge the stigma society so often applies to people with criminal histories. If nothing else, watch the two videos in the article. They're powerful stuff.
The Looky-Likey Amalgam [Dave Dye] On reading The Choice Factory, Dye had an absolutely novel thought. I can't capture his tone or I would have summarized it above. Click through. It's great: Whilst taking in all this intelligent insight an interesting theory occurred to me; why don’t we just create ads that people like? Granted, it’s no theory of relativity, but it’s odd that it’s barely a consideration. We assess everything about our audience, their lifestyles, preferences and behaviours but not whether they’d like the thing we’re making for them.
Romaniuk's Distinctive Asset Grid [Ehrenberg-Bass Institute] This resurfaced in a tweet this week and I thought I'd share it with you. A super useful and handy chart mapping Fame and Uniqueness on an axis. Where do your brand assets live?
FT and IPA find one-third of marketers rate their brand building knowledge very poorly [The IPA] One-third of marketers and more than half of business leaders are not confident in their brand-building knowledge and rate it as average to very poor. And less than a third of organisations use ‘brand health’ metrics, which report on factors such as salience, distinctiveness and favourability, at board level. Read the full report in the link above.
Cannes Lions Digital Doggy Bag [Cannes Lions] Definitive reports covering the six biggest talking points from Cannes Lions 2019, available to download and customize.
It’s Not Big. It’s Not Clever. But It’s A Bit Funny … [Rob Campbell - Musings of an opinionated sod] Related to the link above: Sadly, we still treat creativity and data as an either/or, which highlights our industry seems to be more focused on the ego of power and control rather than what can liberate the most interesting creativity.
6) Department of Great Work
This Machine 'Affected' by Parkinson’s Disease Creates Unique Art Pieces [Little Black Book] Media Monks and Charité Berlin, Europe’s largest University Hospital created a series of 3D printed objects linking the printer to Parkinson's patients EEG. So when the person had a tremor, So did the printer. Check out the case study - powerful stuff.
Cheez-It and a boxed wine company are teaming up. Here's why [CNN Business] Tapping into existing consumer behavior. Nice. People can find the mash-up product for $25 on the House Wine website starting at 5 PM ET on July 25 while supplies last
Waze Users Can Now Get Their Driving Directions from Cookie Monster [Mental Floss] Friends of the newsletter know how much I love Sesame Street. I think this is a brilliant addition to the Waze portfolio of voices.
Shutterstock - Moon Landing "Exposed" [YouTube] Clever! "We know it happened. But if it didn’t, you could absolutely make it look like it did with Shutterstock." Bonus: for a depressing view of humanity, read the comments!
P&G gives $529K to U.S. women World Cup champs for pay gap [UPI] An excellent example of a brand living up to it's purpose. The headline says it all.
Take a look at the Arizona Iced Tea x Adidas 99-cent sneaker collab that shut down SoHo NYC [The Source] Unexpected but cool collab. I'll admit it - I like them in their own way. New Yorkers in the SoHo area where the pop-up was stationed caused a near riot on Day 1 (July 18) that saw injuries, fights and street overcrowding that forced the NYPD to shut it down indefinitely.
A Mural of Swirling Cursors, Dancing Skeletons, and Rainbow Hearts is Set in Motion When Viewed Through a “GIF-iti” App [This is Colossal] Really cool installation commissioned by Shutterstock for the D&AD awards in May. The artists statement: “I hope that the work might make creatives consider how they feel about themselves, their work, the endless deadlines and their use of time in life.”
7) Platform Updates
Facebook’s News Feed ads are changing [Digiday] The move is intended is to boost ad load on mobile without sacrificing user experience in the News Feed. Great.
Instagram Adds New Warnings for Accounts Which Are Close to Being Banned [Social Media Today] It's good to see Instagram taking more action to address concerns with user well-being - which, in many ways, reflects lessons learned from parent company Facebook, which has traditionally built systems first, then sought to address potential problems much later.
Snap’s 2019 comeback continues with heavy user growth in Q2 [TechCrunch] Daily active users are up 8% year/year and average time per user per day was 30 minutes. Share price has nearly tripled since 2019's start.
With new conversion data tool and product updates, Pinterest solidifies pitch to advertisers [Digiday] The platform is now beta-testing a new tool that allows buyers to share their conversion data with the platform. That, along with the addition of a shopping specialty and updates like the integration of product catalogs to automatically generate pins, has buyers feeling more optimistic about spending ad dollars there
E-commerce channel, mobile search ads boomed in Q2, study finds [Marketing Dive] In the E-Comm channel. Amazon spending grew 66%, spending for Instagram Stories grew a massive 186% compared to Q2 2018. Video ads in social media were up 53% YoY, and represented 43% of total social ad spend.
Report: TikTok tests app features that resemble Instagram's format [Mobile Marketer] Instagram getting a taste of their own medicine after copying nearly all of Snapchat's favorite features
Spotify Is Adding "Social Listening" to Let Friends Listen to Music Simultaneously [Hypebeast] Similar to the 2010 app Turntable.fm.
The Man Who Built The Retweet: “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds” [Buzzfeed News] Ending on a high note... The button that ruined the internet — and how to fix it. (PS this is actually a super interesting article on human psychology)
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!