This Week in Strategy: Buy a man a plane ticket and he'll fly for a day. Push a man out of a plane and he'll fly for the rest of his life!

Hi Strat Pack,

New York is an inherently weird place to live. I think that's just what happens when you have a population density of over 69,000 people per square mile. I think as planners, it's our job to experience that weirdness, internalize it, and then distill it into an insight & strategy that can market our (and our clients') goods in new fun ways. That's why I love articles like this: New York’s Hottest Makeup Counter: The Port Authority Bathroom because where else on earth is that a thing. Also apparently this is the one glimmering beacon of hope in the burning hellscape that is Port Authority.

Weird New York is the best New York. I discovered this week that the Post Office used to have a system of pneumatic tubes firing cylinders containing letters, packages, and other more bizarre things around the city. What other bizarre things? I'm glad you asked! *Allegedly* a renowned sandwich shop in the Bronx used to deliver sandwiches to downtown postal stations. Also they sent a cat from from midtown to Brooklyn once. It was totally fine!

And last, but not least, Take A Ride With The Subway's 'Happiest Conductor'. I've definitely been on the train with this guy. He's great. That ability to sweeten the bitter drudgery of a subway commute is what sets Burton apart from his peers. While most conductors make announcements with studied apathy, he makes passengers—imagine this—smile.

Alright, stop messing around pretending you actually enjoy living in this cesspool of dirty water hotdogs and generic garbage smell. Let's jump right in.

The one thing to read this week
1) The Tragic Horizon: Resisting Marketing’s Drift Towards The Business Of Value Destruction [Martin Weigel]

Marketing is now increasingly characterised by growing campaign short-termism, budget reductions that make effectiveness impossible, and creative juries rewarding work that does not work.

Our collective eyes have refocused on the Right Now at the expense of almost everything else. It doesn’t take much to diagnose what’s going on. To the already heady, toxic brew of bad advice, institutionalized impatience, the strictures of quarterly reporting, and the crack cocaine of real-time data has been added the pressure on client businesses to deliver growth - in a low/no-growth economy.

The prospect of competing in a world of comparison and aggregation platforms, consumer search, consumer reviews, rapidly growing private label brands, direct to consumer business models, and in which Amazon sells everything - and doing that without a brand at one’s disposal should be surely be enough to send a chill down the back of any marketer’s spine.

But the neglecting of brands is just part of that same all-too-human unwillingness or inability to think long. And just as with climate change, once rebuilding brand equity becomes a defining issue for marketing departments, it may already be too late.

It's important to note that the power of creativity per se has not weakened at all. The report is at pains to stress that the apparent weakening of creativity is due to growing campaign short-termism and budget reductions in roughly equal measure, both of which undermine measured effectiveness. And to creative juries in turn rewarding that work.

But as the IPA’s latest report ‘The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness’ stresses: ”For those who have resisted - the dwindling group of long-term creatively awarded campaigns - the effectiveness picture is still relatively healthy. Looking at awarded campaigns since the effectiveness decline began in 2008, we can see that long-term campaigns dramatically outpunch short-term ones across key brand and business metrics”.

The report barely caused so much as a minor ripple of conversation in Cannes, it didn't even warrant a passing mention this week in AdAge’s 'Five Takeaways from This Year Cannes Lions, and no mention of it was made by any of the industry heavy-hitters asked for their ‘take’ on Cannes by Campaign.

Yet it demands our urgent and pretty fucking undivided attention because until now we could point to the series of analyses published by the IPA (of which this is the latest) as providing probably the most robust and authoritative evidence for the link between creativity and business results. Indeed, there's probably not a planner in business that hasn't at some point cited this source in a presentation to clients.

Five key findings are worth highlighting:

Creatively awarded campaigns are now less effective than they have ever been in the entire 24-year run of data. And they are now no more effective than non-awarded campaigns.
This collapse in effectiveness can be explained largely by the shift to short-term activation-focused creativity and the strategic and media trends this has promoted.
Increasingly, even longer-running campaigns are being focused on strategies and media choices geared to short-term sales effects rather than long-term growth.
There is a considerable budget under-allocation to brand building. This under-allocation is a central reason why effectiveness levels have been falling: we are allowing brands to weaken and, with that, we are losing the valuable choice-priming benefits of brand building
Probably the chief culprit for the declining effectiveness of creatively-awarded campaigns is the growing trend by creative awards judges to favour short-term creativity.

When we insist that marketing marketing’s priority is not the longer-term health of a brand and business but the short-term, we are in the business not of value creation but value destruction. Client organisations and their agencies need to start treating advertising expenditure as an investment. Not a cost to minimized.

2) Efficiency will trump effectiveness until a better success framework is established [Marketing Week]

Marketing performance is now synonymous with performance marketing. According to the IPA, the percentage of short-term campaigns receiving creative awards has risen to almost 40%. Until 2010 that figure had remained below 5%.

Short-term campaigns focus on efficiency over effectiveness, typically by targeting consumers with established affiliations to the brand and imminent purchase intentions. In order to create a sales boost, purchases are pulled forward. However, the void left is seldom wholly filled, which means an inevitable sales dip after the campaign has ended. Matters are then made even worse by competitor response campaigns.

Long-term campaigns, conversely, focus on effectiveness over efficiency and all kinds of buyers – be it light, heavy or those who do not yet have any established affiliation to the brand. Penetration is the name of the game. This in turn, due to negative binominal distribution found in consumer purchase patterns and the law of buyer moderation, tells us to prioritise net reach over targeting. Done correctly, effective marketing will increase baseline sales over time. The question is, how long you can afford to wait?

Marketing, in other words, requires management of efficiency and effectiveness.

Unfortunately, despite readily available advice on how to do it, Cannes and a seemingly endless array of industry reports tell us we are failing woefully at the task. Marketers are confusing efficiency with effectiveness, prioritising what is urgent over what is important and what is easily measured over what is crucial to know.

As Peter Drucker put it in his seminal 1963 piece on business effectiveness, “it is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all”.

If brands want to ensure they are doing the right things, not merely doing things right, they should establish an effectiveness framework within the organisation that takes both short and long into account. Once they have defined what they mean, they can identify and agree upon what is required to measure, evaluate and forecast.

Effectiveness is, clearly, a matter of marketing management. The industry needs to stop pouring money into areas where even extraordinarily successful performance ends up having minimal impact on overall results.

Sure, it may be efficient, and some might even call it effective, but it is strategically, not to mention financially, pointless.

3) Effortless writing. [George Tannenbaum - Ad Aged]
ED NOTE: Thinking, writing, and presenting are basically the only three skills of a planner. Writing is the least visible, but don't underestimate its importance.

I believe that words make a difference. I believe it because I've seen it. I believe it because I've seen it one-thousand times over my many years. And I believe it because it's what I do. I write words, or try to, that are memorable and motivating.

I also believe that good thinkers are good writers and if you can find one, you should cherish them. Cherish them to the point where you might actually listen to them as often as one time in ten.

The writer I've learned most from, however, is Robert Caro. And what I've learned I've boiled down to three things. The three things that good thinking and good writing can bring to an agency and their clients.

Good writers know how to concentrate. We know how to keep turning pages. We know how to uncover important information, feelings, and details others may miss.
Good writers understand that the world is complex and know it needs to be made simple. So we know how to discover how things work. Then we explain them to people.
Last, good writers have learned that time equals truth. It takes time to find something unique. It usually doesn't happen between the 10AM briefing and the 4PM 'full-team tissue session.'

It takes these three things to make something good. The first 23-hours of your writing might sound like everyone else’s. The trick is persevering until you write something for the brands you work on that nobody else could. That no other brand can say. Something that is true, genuine, and ownable. That shit don’t come easy.

If your job is to create something, create something with meaning. Resist cliches. Resist the nonsensical. Resist dumb. Part of our jobs in life, in advertising, as humans, as parents is to find a way to have personal integrity. It's our duty to try.

Unlike cops, or neuro-surgeons, or chemists who might find a way to actually materially improve the world, all we have is our integrity. That and an ethic that says we have to try our hardest and do our best.That’s really what this is all about.

4) A simple solution to a complicated problem [Wellmark]

The way that some marketers talk about marketing, you’d think it was more complex than neurosurgery. There is endless industry talk about automation, platforms, CRM, AI, AR, VR, ad tech, martech, machine learning, blockchain – the list goes on.

Much as it might threaten our collective ego to admit it, the truth is that marketing isn’t rocket science (and indeed some people argue that it isn’t a science at all). This is not to suggest that it’s easy – or that there’s no merit in newer technologies – but the fundamental principles of marketing are relatively simple.

The nine elements are: Diagnosis (qualitative and quantitative), Clear strategic objectives, Long, mass-marketing branding, Shorter, targeted performance, Tight, differentiated positioning, Heavy, consistent codification (i.e. use of distinctive brand assets) Greater investment than competitors, Astonishing creativity, Multiple integrated channels.

As Dave Trott once said: “complicated seems clever to stupid people”. But smart marketers will embrace the simplicity of Mark’s approach, if they haven’t already.

And that spells good news for those of us on the agency side, because “astonishing creativity” is a crucial ingredient in the mix. Despite what some thought leaders and their thought disciples would have you believe, creativity can make a huge difference to the success of a campaign. It shouldn’t be some afterthought, slapped on to the tactics like cheap cologne.

Rory Sutherland was recently asked what he considered to be the biggest challenge facing Ogilvy in the next 10 years. His typically frank response was: “I think that the whole advertising industry has totally lost the plot. It has become obsessed with that part of advertising which is a media targeting and optimisation process.”

The obvious solution is for agencies to focus on making great creative work. Simple, really.

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

Get Paid: A Strategist's Guide To Salary Negotiation [Tom Miskin] If you're like me, you're a strategist and you probably dread salary negotiations because you don't do it very often, don't know how much leverage you have and generally don't feel confident about it. Read this. Read this again. And may the odds be ever in your favor.
Why we don’t want you and your Android green bubbles in our iMessage chat [Fast Company] This quote alone sums up the smart (devious?) UX work that Apple does to lock us into their ecosystem: "While I have zero evidence of this, I’d wager a strong bet the group at Apple who designed this did extensive research on the most off-putting color of green in existence and chose that for the green bubble color."
Survey: 90% of consumers tell brands to stay away from extreme, offensive content [Marketing Land] The headline makes me facepalm and the data deep dive is disgusting. 58% of consumers would stop buying products if they appeared “next to racist neo-Nazi propaganda,” but nearly 67% would do the same for “terrorist recruiting videos.” What the fuck. 42% of people are would still buy a product advertised next to Nazi propaganda? 73% of respondents said that brands should avoid running near pornographic content, so at least we can all agree that boobs are definitely worse than Nazis. Cool. This is America in 2019.
Marketoonist on glossing over big business problems [Twitter] Because we're at that point in the newsletter when we could use some levity.

6) Department of Great Work

Ad of the Week: USTA addresses gender inequality in sports media coverage [CampaignUS] Built around a powerful category insight, only 4% of sports coverage features women. Great work from McGarryBowen Chicago for the US Tennis Association. And how can you not love Billie Jean King.
How Absolut Found the Perfect Endorser in Lizzo [Muse by Clio] The 31-year-old singer has her hit single "Juice." Absolut has a new product line called Absolut Juice. Lizzo is an avatar of positivity and self-love. Absolut for decades has championed inclusion and diversity, beginning long before it was fashionable.
Advertising icons real and imagined meet n a digital mural from the Clio Awards [AdAge] To celebrate six decades of awards, Clio commissioned an interactive, digital mural in the style of a Renaissance painting featuring influential ad men and women, brand mascots and homages to iconic campaigns from BBDO LA
T-Mobile and Taco Bell are opening combination stores called T-MoBell. No, we’re not joking [BGR] John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile described the T-MoBell idea as the “ultimate fusion” of peoples’ love for their phones and for tacos. First the hotels, now this, What will Taco Bell do next!?
Direct Auto taps Tonya Harding, Johnny Manziel for rebrand focused on second chances [MarketingDive] I've got to be honest, I think I like this more in theory than practice, but you've gotta hand it to Periera O'Dell for successfully selling in using *ahem* disreputable celebrities as your spokespeople.
Gio Compario Gets Put through the Wringer in Opera-Less Ad for GoCompare [Little Black Book] I'm not familiar with this work, but how can you not love that the spokesman for GoCompare is an Italian opera singer-esque guy named Gio Compario. Droga5 and Biscuit's Jeff Low launch the new campaign that sees the brand mascot in a radically different role. British ads are weird, man.
Marvel, Star Wars, The Simpsons & More Celebrate Move to Disney Plus [ScreenRant] Disney posted a tweet about "moving day" and asked its subsidiaries which were ready to go. Responses came from Pixar, National Geographic, Marvel, Star Wars and The Simpsons. Very smart use of organic Twitter in an authentic way to gain traction.

7) Platform Updates

Facebook pivots privacy failings into pop-up cafes [Engadget] Provided without comment: Five Facebook cafes will open throughout the UK, with the first popping up inside The Attendant coffee bar on Great Eastern Street in London on August 28th and 29th. At the cafes, visitors will be offered free drinks if they take part in a "privacy check-up".
Pinterest Provides Additional Insights into its Pin Classification Process [SocialMediaToday] The important note here is that you need to use Pinterest's "Guided Search" within your Pin preparation and planning to see which topics and searches relate to your specific industry.
Twitter and Facebook cut off China from using propaganda to influence Hong Kong protests [The Drum] Twitter is no longer allowing state-controlled media outlets to advertise on its platform. Those outlets have 30 days to offboard from Twitter's ad products, and in the meantime no new campaigns will be allowed
Twitter launches six-second viewable video ad bids [Campaign] The new format will mean that brands will only be charged if the ad is viewed for six seconds with pixels 50% in-view on Twitter’s website or mobile app.
Netflix tests tracking your ‘physical activity’ to improve video quality [TheNextWeb] Bringing Black Mirror to life in more ways than one...dot dot dot...
Facebook tries to rewrite the past by hiring journalists again [Columbia Journalism Review] Wash, rinse, repeat! Facebook has said it is planning to roll out a new standalone tab for news, for which it is cutting lucrative deals with a number of leading publishers like The New York Times and Washington Post. And it is also hiring a handful of professional editors to curate the top headlines.
The neuroscience behind the backlash to Snap’s new logo design [The Drum] A key lesson here for brands is that what may seem one small step for design to the conscious eye can turn out to be one giant leap for the unconscious mind of your loyal customers or users who are used to digesting the brand in a certain way. It’s perhaps a harsh lesson, but it’s not one that can be overlooked, now that we have decoded it.

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!