This Week in Strategy: A pun has not completely matured until it is full groan
Hi Strat Pack,
It's been a really busy week which means I didn't have the usual amount of time to slack off and find weird internet stuff for you this week. I'm sad about this too. But I did read this which is exactly as depressing as you think it is: Sex, Drugs, Misogyny And Sleaze At The HQ Of Bumble’s Owner
The dating app Bumble was designed to place power in the hands of women, by creating a platform where the safety of its female users is the first priority. But according to an investigation by Forbes reporter Angel Au-Yeung, the corporate headquarters of its majority owner is a different story for women. At least 13 women who worked at Badoo, Bumble's parent company, say that they've been faced with an office culture that casually denigraters women, names internal engineering updates after porn actresses, and circulated a video of a staffer engaged in relations with a sex worker. And at its top is Andrey Andreev, who is widely credited as a founding partner, and who owns as much as 79 percent of Bumble.
Alright, stop messing around trying to reactivate your Hinge account for 'ethical reasons' and let's jump right in.
The one thing to watch this week
1) This Amazing Miniseries Satirises Adland as The Office Did 9-5ers [Little Black Book]
It's August. It's Friday. I'm looking around and like 65% of the office appears to be out today. So rather than start with a thought piece or some kind of strenuous thinking activity, let's watch 6 episodes of the realest advertising live I've seen in a very long time.
Commercials is a comedic web series about the humorous, ego crushing, overanalysed silliness that plagues the world of commercial filmmaking and everyone involved. There are 6 episodes and each is about 5 minutes. I know you have a half hour free today. You're going to want to watch all of them.
“As commercial directors and former advertising creatives, we’ve experienced hundreds of completely ridiculous moments during productions where we looked at each other and said, ‘this needs to be a show,’” says Natalie Prisco of JEAN.
Need more convincing? Check out The Story Behind Adland’s Very Own Version of ‘The Office’ also from LBB.
AND FROM THE ARCHIVES: Mad Men Integrated - where you can get Mad Men gifs updates for every experience you've ever experienced at an agency in the last 5 years.
2) More is Less [Dave Trott's Blog]
Media companies have decided it doesn’t really matter what an ad is saying, as long as it’s getting its message in front of you every possible second.
Interrupt whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re up to. It’s called ‘targeting’.
Doesn’t matter whether you’re interested or not – gotcha.
Doesn’t matter whether you’re busy – gotcha.
Doesn’t matter whether… – gotcha.
Doesn’t… – gotcha.
Does it make you listen to the boring guy just because you can’t escape him?
So why would it make crappy ads work any better just because they target you every second of the day? But that’s media thinking – gotcha. And again – gotcha.
The only thing that will make us put up with being interrupted by a stranger is if he or she is interesting and entertaining. If they contribute to our evening in some way. In which case, we’re perfectly happy to enjoy the diversion and listen to it.
Why shouldn’t it be exactly the same with advertising or anything else? If it’s fun, charming, enjoyable then we’re happy to listen, maybe even share it.
Advertising and marketing used to understand this. Even salesmen knew the door would get slammed in their face otherwise.
They didn’t think the answer was ‘targeting’: to keep ringing the door-bell every sixty seconds, to call through the letterbox, shout down the chimney, knock on the kitchen window, yell through the cat flap.
Pester people every possible second of the day whatever they’re doing. This ‘targeting’ with dull annoying intrusions is actually a giant step backwards. Instead of improving the quality of what we do, we’re just concentrating on increasing the quantity. It doesn’t matter if it’s crap, as long as we hit them with it often enough.
I think we’re wasting a lot of money finding out quantity doesn’t beat quality.
3) Wall Street Journal's Creative Leader's series [Dave Dye - Stuff from the Loft]
The haircuts have dated.
The clothing looks dated.
The puns feel very dated.
The page layouts look dated.
The screen treatment of the photographs look dated.
But a lot of the thinking, not so much.
Why should you read this mountain of ads from the late 80's slash early 90s? Just ask Ron Anderson
“I’ve never worked for Bernbach, Ogilvy, Ally. But I’ve learned from reading their speeches. I’ve never worked with Bob Gage, Helmut Krone, Bill Taubin. But I’ve learned by studying their work. The way I see it, I’ve learned from the best people in the business.”
As Bill Bernbach said:
“It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man.
A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.”
Sounds pretty similar (minus the gendered pronouns) to a lot of conversations we're having about how the internet has upended human decision making. Spoiler alert: it hasn't.
Click through to the link above and get some inspiration. I've put together a PDF of all the interviews here - my goal has been 2 a week at least. There's great content in here! Check it out
4) A Week in the Life of Popular YouTube Channels [Pew Research Center]
An analysis of every video posted by high-subscriber channels in the first week of 2019 finds that children’s content – as well as content featuring children – received more views than other videos
Guys - this is a really interesting deep dive that I strongly encourage you to check out. There are a ton of useful charts & data points in here. Here are the highlights:
Just 10% of the popular channels identified in the Center’s mapping produced 70% of all the videos posted by these channels during the first week of 2019.
Similarly, the 10% of popular-channel videos that had the most views in this period were responsible for 79% of all the views that went to new content posted by these channels.
The total number of high-subscriber channels increased dramatically in the second half of 2018. The Center’s mapping process identified 9,689 channels that crossed the 250,000-subscriber threshold between July and December 2018
The average video posted by high-subscriber channels during this time period was roughly 12 minutes long and received 58,358 views during its first week on the site.
Seven-in-ten videos cross-linked to other social media platforms. Twitter (58% of all videos), Facebook (51%) and Instagram (50%),Snapchat (9%). Social gaming services Twitch and Discord were also mentioned in the descriptions of 8% and 6% of all videos, and 34% and 21% of all video game-related videos, respectively.
Overall, just 17% of the nearly quarter-million videos included in this analysis were fully in English.
And also really interesting - certain keywords in YouTube titles really helped goose video views. Check out this chart:
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Chase commits to AI after machine s outperform humans in copywriting trials [AdAge] Watch out Droga! Chase says that ads created by machine learning performed better than ads written by humans, with a higher percent of consumers clicking on them—more than twice as many in some cases.
Streaming and the Law of the Claw [Doug Garnett's Blog] Interesting and short think piece about what happens when Doug's kids (who only stream shows) are exposed to commercials on cable TV. And the need for the ability to separate advertising from editorial. Smart consumers help the good companies grow and prevent the bad ones from gaining a foothold. But good consumers don’t just “happen”, they develop when they are engaged in the market. And that includes being engaged with advertising.
Meet the industry's $1.3 billion problem: Fake influencer marketing [Campaign US] "We're seeing an almost institutionalized fraud industry within influencer marketing, with standard market rates for purchasing fake followers on leading platforms like Youtube, Instagram and Twitter ranging from $15-$50 per 1,000 followers"
At the Fortnite World Cup, Slurp Juice, Zip Lines and a Teenage Millionaire Winner [New York Times] A friendly reminder that even though you don't play video games (and even if you do) eSports is absolutely massive. Did you know there was a Fotnite competition at Arthur Ashe stadium this weekend? Epic Games gave out $30 million in prize money, including $3 million to the winners in both the solo and duo competitions. That is more than Novak Djokovic and Simona Halep earned for winning Wimbledon this month. A 16-year-old won.
The U.S. could ban social media apps from using ‘psychological tricks’ like infinite scrolling and autoplay [Fast Company] There's a bill in the senate right now that will try to stop social media giants from capturing user attention “by using psychological tricks.” Just one aspect of the proposed ban, infinite scrolling—would radically alter how popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest work. And banning autoplay would do the same to YouTube
6) Department of Great Work
Big week for platforms launching new campaigns off their own platform. Interesting.
Why we need Trader Joe's YouTube channel now more than ever [Fast Company] The Trader Joe’s YouTube channel is unexpectedly amazing—and very weird. In an irony-saturated culture, Trader Joe’s points a way forward—by being itself. Oh, and they also have muppets. And you know how much I love muppets.
Snapchat features 'real friends' in debut global ad campaign [Campaign] As part of the launch, Snap staged a “hashtag takeover” on Facebook-owned Instagram, filling the #realfriends and #friendshipquotes pages with quotes from notable figures about friendship. Done by their in-house creative team. Nice.
Tokyo 2020 unveils Olympic medals made from old electronics [The Verge] The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee launched a two-year campaign in April 2017 to collect donated electronic devices from members of the public in order to harvest the necessary metals. 78,895 tons of gadgets were received in total, including 6.21 million mobile phones
Mastercard recreates 'Priceless' restaurants from around the world in immaculate detail [AdAge] Creative shop Spring clones Lyaness, The Rock and Teruzushi in Tribeca, New York. Mastercard calls the installation a "restaurant residency." The space is dedicated to Priceless indefinitely, and when a restaurant and its owner heads back home, another restaurant will rotate in to replace it. The Rock and Firman, for example, will be in New York for 45 days.
What Is Nitro Cold Brew? Starbucks and Bill Nye School You on Today’s Trendiest Coffee [AdWeek] Apparently people are still very unclear what Nitro cold brew is. So Starbucks enlisted the help of its creative partner, Big Spaceship, who came up with the idea to work with a man who has been breaking down scientific concepts—specifically for people with short attention spans—for nearly three decades. Who else, but Bill Nye the Science Guy?
Twitter shows off its brutally honest users in playful jab at rival platforms [The Drum] The platform is itself as a social media platform where people are more real than they are on other social sites with a new out-of-home (OOH) campaign. It's clever. Check it out
Huge London Created a Satirical Set of Brand Guidelines for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson [AdWeek] They even made him a website! If nothing else, you have to appreciate the dedication. But yeah, it's really good.
7) Platform Updates
Snapchat Launches New, Streamlined Ad Creation Process [Social Media Today] So it's basically three steps - there are a couple of additional elements within each, but the process is very straightforward.
‘Swipe to Visit’ has arrived on Google Images [Search Engine Land] Google released a new images search feature that displays a preview of an AMP-enabled website’s header after a user selects an image result. The user can then swipe up on the preview to load the image’s corresponding web page.
Verizon Media Says 69 Percent Of Consumers Watching Video With Sound Off [Forbes] This is Online Video - not social. Our industry has long treated pre-roll video like traditional TV. This article as some interesting implications for how we design regular old-fashioned online video and what we need to do to make it more effective in sound off environments.
Mamma Mia, Facebook Is Killing Thousands Of Unused Ad Targeting Options [AdExchanger] Bad news, disco fans: Advertisers will soon no longer be able to target people on Facebook based on their love of ABBA’s 1977 hit “Take a Chance on Me.” That’s just one of several thousand infrequently used targeting options Facebook is getting rid of in an effort to declutter its ad system, the company said Tuesday.
Has Instagram increased its ad load? Marketers report as many as 1 in 4 posts are ads [MarketingLand] Instagram’s increased ad load puts advertisers in a difficult position. In an already cluttered stream, how many ads will be too many before it effects user engagement or users choose to stop seeing branded content from advertisers that show up too often in their feeds?
Google takes another run at social networking with Shoelace [The Verge] It's apparently got much more modest ambitions than Google+, their last horribly failed attempt at a social network. As the kidnapper says in Taken, "Good Luck"
Ad Blocking Growth Is Slowing Down, but Not Going Away [eMarketer] In the US, roughly one in four internet users will block ads this year on at least one of their internet-connected devices.
Amazon Prime Wants to Be Your New Personal Shopper [Glamour] The company is announcing a service that operates more like a subscription box: Called Personal Shopper, it's essentially a stylist that makes recommendations of brands and products you might like based on a survey that lets you detail your preferred aesthetic and fit, curating your box accordingly. It's available exclusively on the Amazon app and will cost Prime members $4.99 a month.
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.vThanks for sticking around as always. See you next week!