This Week in Strategy: I accidentally swallowed a bunch of scrabble tiles. My next trip to the bathroom could spell disaster.
Hi Strat Pack,
I've been going super deep on weirdo subjects recently, and one I've been fascinated with is the history of malware and the concept of control. The Alluring Beauty of the Computer Virus from AIGA's Eye on Design blog has literally nothing to do with control but is a really interesting look at the history of viruses, and how they invariably transitioned from prankish nuisances and hacktivism to weapons of social engineering and destruction in today's connected world. Super fascinating. Also there's an exhibition in the Netherlands which you should go to if you're in/around the Netherlands.
Speaking of the history of things, The Original Kindle Was Crazy. It looked terrible. It has a keyboard that was atrocious. It was unwieldy and had weirdly sloped edges. It had a Blackberry-esque scroll wheel to navigate. The new York Times review of the kindle summed it up, "Are they completely nuts?"
It's a strong reminder that the first attempt does not have to be the final output. Iterate, revise, improve. It's a good mantra for strategists.
Alright, stop spending your morning ruminating on the ontology of industrial design. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The Strategy & Planning Scrapbook [Alex Morris]
Open on a Dave Trott quote - "Strategy is not about adding more and more stuff. Strategy is about taking stuff away until there is only one one thing left. One single powerful thought." This field guide is a must read for planners, creatives, and account humans.
Strategy isn't a paint by numbers game– it’s a diagnosis and a directive on how to address it. The numbers are ours to plot and the paint comes later.
But to do our job –to plot a course– we have to be catalogues of knowledge; on research, frameworks, theories and the material from those who came before us. We have to do all this while simultaneously being fully immersed in the current world, the one where our audience’s reality exists. We are both monks and crusaders, chained to the library while being required to explore the world.
If our job is to sort through the noise, using the tools we’ve gathered along the way, this book is a toolbox. A collection of fundamentals, thought starters, and inspiration– all collected from existing resources and tools into one place.
You can also buy a hard copy of the book here which I strongly recommend
2) If behavioral science is so useful why don't more marketers apply it? [Richard Shotton]
In the memorable words of Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, the rational mind “thinks of itself as the Oval Office when actually it’s the press office”.
Traditional market research is unlikely to reveal the significance of psychological biases for the simple reason that people are not aware of them. An excellent demonstration of behavioral science is a study by Adrian North, a psychologist at the University of Leicester.
Over a two-week period, North alternated the ambient music in a supermarket wine aisle between German oompah and French accordion-style. The results were significant: when French music was played, wine sales were 77% French; with a German soundtrack, 73% of sales were German.
But when asked, just 2% of buyers attributed their selection to the background music. Even when prompted, 86% of people were sure it had no impact at all. It’s not that they were lying, they were simply unaware of their motivations. The reasons they gave for their decisions were post-rationalizations.
Fear of failure
Consider the principal-agency problem. There is a divergence of interest between the principal (the brand) and the agent (the agency employee). The brand wants long-term profitable growth whereas the agency wants ongoing business – and their staff want to keep their jobs.
This difference of interests leads to perverse consequences: campaigns shaped by personal risk-aversion. There tends to be a reliance on tried-and-tested, but staid, ideas and a failure to branch into new areas.
Behavioral science is a powerful tool for marketers when it is used literally or liberally but the strongest effect comes when findings are interpreted laterally.
3) Is NPS truly ‘the growth marketer’s secret weapon’ or more ‘snake oil and fake science’? [The Drum]
“NPS is sometimes used as a proxy brand-strength metric,” he said. “And yet it tells you little or nothing about awareness, penetration, salience or distinctiveness. It might say something about ‘advocacy’ – but this is a poor signal about how to grow.”
Byron Sharp, the director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, was characteristically more blunt back in 2008 and called the analysis that made NPS popular ‘sloppy’ in a Journal of Marketing Research article that year.
"This is snake oil, fake science,” he wrote. “The lesson for market researchers and insight directors is just how easy it is to make compelling slogans from incorrect findings."
Indeed, NPS can be an example of businesses preferring to gauge what is cheap and easy to measure rather than what is actually important.
Many companies including *ahem* some you might have influence over tend to view NPS in isolation. If a client finds that it has a high degree of detractors, trying to understand why and find a solution is a core part of closing the loop on the NPS process. This is a step many businesses fail to complete.
I am on record believing that NPS is mostly bullshit. Especially because everything less than a score of 9 (out of 10) is negative or neutral.
As with most things in marketing and communications, there is the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. NPS is likely neither as wonderful as proponents claim nor as useless as detractors state.
Before companies decide on specific metrics, they should first ask themselves whether NPS is a leading indicator of the consumer behaviours that matter to the organisation, whether NPS motivates employees to improve, and whether NPS accurately measures what a firm wants to understand.
4) The scourge of short-termism comes from the top [Mediatel]
The boardroom and digital ad-buying seem to have a lot in common; there appears to be a risk of over-reliance on short-term metrics and I think the two are connected.
In digital advertising, we are constantly chasing cheaper prices for ad buying and ad creation, with every brand puff piece currently discussing how they have cut costs by; changing agency, in-housing, installing a new tech stack and so the list goes on.
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” – Warren Buffett
The Buffett quote is currently playing out in reverse. With CEOs cost cutting across the board, no trees are being planted; and the so called disruptors are taking advantage — direct to consumer being the example that the FMCG and ad industry is most focused upon.
Cheap ad buying has been proven time and again not to be the answer to effective cost cutting. Whether it’s your ads being served to bots, falling victim to one of twenty-nine other types of ad-fraud, not making it into view — which is only 48% of digital ads — or making it into view but never actually being seen — only 18% of viewable digital ads actually get looked at — rather than saving money, you are in-fact wasting it.
So the only other leaver to pull is agency costs. I am sure though that many of you have seen the Linkedin video of what can be done in 10 minutes, 1 minutes, 10 seconds. With hourly fees across all professional services increasing (legal, finance, accounting, consulting), one has to question how we can continue to push agency prices down. It takes time to make great work, and great work is what sticks in people’s memory, and ensures your tree grows big and tall, keeping the competition in the shade.
Now is the time to apply quality filters to the whole ad buying process, and to see it as an investment in organic growth. You never know — thinking about the longer term benefits may very well have the same impact on CEO and CMO tenures.
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
What Barton F. Graf's demise means for the state of adland [Campaign Live] In case you've been living under a rock, the weirdest (and coolest?) agency closed their doors this week. Campaign did a whiparound of industry luminaries for their opinions. Important.
FMCG giants still waste $50bn a year on digital despite media clean up [The Drum] A new report from AlixPartners claims that 60% of digital spend, or $47bn, failed to deliver any noticeable ROI. And half digital ad spend on Facebook & Google posted either a negative return or one that wasn’t even measured.
P&G shifts from targeting ‘generic demographics’ to ‘smart audiences [MarketingWeek] The FMCG giant claims a focus on more precise targeting of audiences such as first-time mums is helping its advertising reach “the right people at the right time, in the right place”.
A Tweet from Adweek: So, it's lunch time with the best brands on Twitter. Who you sitting with? [Twitter] Literally every brand that has a realtime social team chimed in. The results are...interesting
Millennials value unity more than diversity, study finds [Campaign Live] Millennials (18 to 35 years old) view the notion of "unity" as two times more valuable than diversity, and 55% of millennials believe diversity isn’t inclusive enough. Outside of diversity and inclusion, millennials in the study said they find brands more trustworthy than social media influencers or celebrities and more influential than the government.
'Get off the paid search drug to build brand': Hipages chief customer officer Stuart Tucker [Mi3] Former KFC, Optus and Commbank marketer Stuart Tucker has done the unthinkable for a digital pureplay targeting the $70bn market for tradies - he's cut back paid search at Hipages and gone all-in on television to build the brand. The business results are booming ... but there's more to it. "Like a lot of digital marketplaces, we built our business on paid search and we became very, very dependent on it. But the problem with that is you're not building a brand over time."
6) Department of Great Work
Ad of the Week: Keystone Light nails its demographic with free rent drive [Campaign US] Hats off to this week’s hero, Keystone Light, which is offering to pay 12 months worth of rent for 13 people to ease the burden of getting older. Because for a lot of us just graduating college, adulting is like, really really hard.
Actual Humans are HBO's newest recommendation engine [AdAge] A new project from HBO, Engine and Resn is helping to narrow the range of TV options with recommendations for good TV. Unlike the algorithmic suggestions offered by most streaming sites, HBO found real humans with real opinions about what TV shows other people should be watching
KFC’s Colonel Sanders ‘Never Gets Old’ After Using FaceApp In Cheeky Ad [Ads of the World] By BBDO Cyprus. Good use of tapping into a cultural moment
“An unfinished picture”: JKR’s identity for whiskey brand Athru [Creative Review] It’s a striking approach – and one that stands out among a sea of brands using scripted typefaces and vintage logos. The agency wanted to create something unique and looked to art galleries, museums and disruptor brands such as Aesop instead of Athru’s rivals for inspiration.
Ads we like: Lynx brings tattoos to life telling tales of attraction [The Drum] “Tattoos play such a big role in guys' lives, but so far there hasn’t been a lot you can do to keep your ink as fresh as on day one," explained Caroline Gregory, brand director at Lynx. "We want to keep those amazing stories alive and bright.” From 72andSunny Amsterdam
Galaxy Empowers Us to Make More Time for Pleasure with Unapologetic Ad [Little Black Book] The campaign, from AMV BBDO, features a woman “doing it all” – managing her career, being a mother, partner, mentor and activist – before challenging the notion of busy lives and encouraging viewers to also consider the need to take time out for pleasure.
LEGO launches 'central perk' set on 25th anniversary of friends tv show [DesignBoom] The new LEGO ideas creation features over 1,000 different elements and the entire cast of friends including ross, rachel, chandler, joey and phoebe. It is the latest from the lego ideas program, which lets fans submit their own builds. if they receive 10,000 votes from the community, LEGO considers making the ideas for production as retail products.
Department of Bad Work
The Internet Isn't Pleased With McDonald's Japan's New Plastic Cups [Delish] Japanese McDonald's locations released new cups for their summer McFizz drinks and, when held at the wrong (...right?) angle, they are deeply inappropriate.
7) Platform Updates
Another not so great week for your data privacy! And more!
Cord-Cutting Speeds Up as TV Providers Scramble to Boost Profits [Hollywood Reporter] According to a new forecast from eMarketer by 2023, the number of pay TV households will stand at 72.7 million, while the number of those without a pay TV package will number 56.1 million. eMarketer found that the accelerating pace of cord-cutting is caused by TV providers themselves as they put improving profit margins before revenues. "That is coming at the expense of subscribers, who often drop services when prices rise and promotional deals don't get renewed,"
Instagram Quietly Deletes Users With Large Followings Without Warning [DesignTaxi] “Dozens” of Instagram accounts—some of which have amassed as many as 13 million followers and report earnings of up to US$200,000 a year—have been taken down recently.
Twitter cuts off third-party data amid privacy mistakes [Mobile Marketer] Twitter will stop using third-party data sources in its ad-buying system. Marketers will be required to buy third-party data on their own beginning in early 2020. Twitter also on Tuesday apologized for using people's personal information for advertising purposes without their consent, despite offering settings to limit data sharing
Instagram ad partner secretly sucked up and tracked millions of users’ locations and stories [TechCrunch] Hyp3r, an apparently trusted marketing partner of Facebook and Instagram, has been secretly collecting and storing location and other data on millions of users, against the policies of the social networks, Business Insider reported today. It’s hard to see how it could do this for years without intervention by the platforms except if the latter were either ignorant or complicit.
Facebook to Add Its Name to Instagram, WhatsApp [The Information if you subscribe or The Verge if you don't] Mark Zuckerberg has also been frustrated that Facebook doesn’t get more credit for the growth of Instagram and WhatsApp. While studies show that Facebook’s brand has been tarnished by its many privacy scandals, and that users are increasingly becoming more aware of the firm’s data collection practices, Instagram and WhatsApp have largely remained unscathed.
A guide to Facebook's new quality rankings [The Drum] Facebook's reshaping the way it measures the performance of your ads: Its three new ranking metrics means you should rethink your social content strategy by focusing more on your advertising reach. Its ad platform has ditched its single relevance score. In its place, Facebook is offering three new relevance indicators; quality ranking, engagement rate ranking, and conversion ranking. So, what does it all mean? What do you need to do to maximize results from your advertising efforts? Click through to find out!
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!