This Week in Strategy: "I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious" - Michael Scott
Hi Strat Pack,
It's Friday the 13th today. It's a full moon. Which is basically the perfect opportunity and the only time it makes sense to share Tracy Jordan's Werewolf Bar Mitzvah (Spooky, scary!). And I recently learned that there's an insane oral history from LAist of how the song evolved from a two line cutaway to a full blown song mostly sung by Donald Glover doing “a pretty amazing” impression of Tracy Morgan to help fill in some of the vocals.
Although you might not have triskaidekaphobia (which is a word I learned how to spell for the sole purpose of this newsletter), you might remember those trypophobia memes from a few years ago. And now it's back with a vengeance! For reasons that make me go 'lol', the camera lenses on Apple's iPhone 11 Pro are 'triggering' fear of holes. This is impressive to me as the iPhone hasn't been released yet and people are only seeing photos of it from a keynote. The BBC chose not to investigate whether or not this was just an elaborate ploy put on by overzealous Android aficionados, but what can you do.
Hard pivot. Do you know Scott Galloway? If you have any type of connection to him - can you please drop me a line?
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out why the US Fish & Wildlife Service (Pacific Region) is tweeting about Triskaidekaphobia. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Better Creative Briefs — Writing Propositions Is All About The Writing [Mark Pollard]
Propositions are the middle bit of planning — in a phrase, they focus all the research into a single idea that seeks to solve a problem — but we’ll start there all the same. They complete a brief and, as many planners still write briefs that travel between departments, they are a crescendo in a planner’s day.
If you work with creative teams, they want propositions to:
Combine a truth about the company with a human insight
Appear in short words — not long, intellectual drivel
Surprise them
Feel true to them based on their lives and experiences
Help them see ideas immediately
What they don’t want: Marketing language, Taglines, Creative ideas (even though a good proposition is a lateral thought)
A proposition is a cousin of an insight — it helps you understand the world differently — “Huh, I hadn’t thought about it like that before?” And if you make work from propositions, the next question a visual thinker will have is, “Can I see this?”
Three techniques and flavors to play with:
Write a strategy story — starting your thinking in a brief is too truncated, in Keynote — too shortcut-ty. I write one-page stories as part of my process and I read them to clients. All very low-fi. With this example for Somekind, a company that helps businesses work better together, the key thought is “full-hearted change”. I could write other words around it but I’d look for work to showcase the problem (half-hearted change initiatives) and “full-hearted change”.
Write a longer strategy statement — in this joke New York Knicks example, the strategy sentence is long so as not to compete with a creative idea (eg. “Shout It Out”) but also for clarity’s sake. I’d rarely use “best” in a real brief but this is hypothetical. “Show that the New York Knicks are the best anger management in town” is a strategy statement that works by itself or you could choose to follow it with a shorter proposition.
Write a proposition — in this example for an app that gives people access to various co-working spaces (Croissant), the proposition is “When you move around, doors open.” I like this. Could it be sharper? Probably. Is it an insight? Perhaps — but I like planning riddled with insights. Is it true? Yes, based on my experience using the app, which I’d convey at the briefing. Could a creative idea and tagline come from it quickly? Yes — and that’s not a problem for me. I quite like “Open doors” but this proposition isn’t trying to compete with a tagline and crowd it out.
Don’t forget — propositions are the middle bit. They are critical until they aren’t. You get good at them by writing a lot of them and then rewriting them. If you can love writing, you’ll get there faster.
2) Experience strategists are the new brand guardians [Tom Morton - Warc]
Today’s most valuable brands are ecosystems. They come to life in their interface and innovation. They take user data to expand their services. Their ultimate aim is to turn customers into members. They do have a purpose and a narrative, they just bake it into their design as much as they share it in their communication.
As Jeff Bezos says: “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” Their businesses and their brands are entwined in their experience.
And if experience is the new high ground for brands, experience strategists are the new brand guardians. That expanded role brings added responsibilities. The job of brand strategy expands from telling the brand story to building the brand system.
Human-centered design alone can miss the powerful nuances of the brand. It misses the difference that distinguishes brands – we should expect a Disney service to behave differently from an HBO service. It risks becoming the service equivalent of a wind tunnel, from where every brand emerges frictionless but indistinguishable.
The strategist who leads the experience needs to factor in the role of the brand. Purist design thinking filters ideas on Desirability, Feasibility and Viability: do users want it, is it technically possible, is there a business case? We need to add a brand filter that distills what is authentic to the experience. And if we want the experience to propagate the brand to more people, we need to add a cultural filter to see what real-world trends and conversations the experience relates to.
Brand story and brand system aren’t opposing forces. We can’t decouple brand thinking from experience thinking. The people we design for have technical expectations – like how seamless the experience should be and how they can access it – and brand expectations – like what experience the brand can authentically offer them. We have to work with both in mind to deliver a meaningful experience.
Picking up the responsibility for factoring in brand story to the brand system, and factoring an ethical dimension into the brand experience will make better strategists. It will also make better brands.
3) Reflections on an Ad Industry at War With Itself [Media Village]
The advertising industry, struggling to find ways to generate growth, has instead turned on itself, extracting value from partners rather than finding better ways to provide value to customers. The civil war within the advertising industry developed quietly and incrementally but has been no less devastating over the past two decades.
Before digital and social, chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their agencies of record (AORs) had a confident view about their brands' media spend, media mix, and creative requirements. With the onset digital and social, the marketing world fragmented, and whatever unity of purpose or knowhow that previously existed went out the window.
The first casualty was the AOR relationship. "We need best-in-class agencies by media discipline," went the client argument, "not one integrated agency with mediocre skills." Agency rosters were expanded significantly, and client marketing organizations grew and fragmented to provide oversight of their highly diverse portfolio of agencies. The center of power shifted from agency to client as individual agency voices were diluted and muted. Clients reveled in their newfound power to create scopes of work and divide them among agency vendors.
Thus began the current era of client appeasement rather than intellectual rearming.
Brand growth remained stagnant after 2008, so clients accelerated their efforts to lower costs and increase quality by increasing the frequency of agency reviews. Procurement, previously involved in agency fee-setting, began to run these reviews, thus increasing their power and prestige at the expense of marketing. Procurement went further by disintermediating production and promoting the development of in-house agencies for programmatic media, digital, and social creative — shifting work away from outside agencies and into their own company.
What we now have are a list of troubling issues:
Enfeebled agencies with understaffed, underpaid resources
Passive agencies that cope rather than lead
SOWs plagued by excess work and complexity
Continued confusion about what spend levels, media mixes, and creative SOWs will deliver results
Eroding credibility of CMOs, agencies, and holding companies
Fragmented marketing organizations that their CMOs can't control
Holding companies, individual agencies, industry associations, CMOs, and procurement compete and criticize one another in the face of marketing spend levels and strategies that, as yet, do not deliver improved brand growth. Lurking in the background are Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, and a host of consulting firms focused on problem-solving that see client confusion as the basis for their future client development programs.
Who's in charge of finding a way to cut through the fog and generate increased revenue from customers? Is it the CMOs? Agency CEOs? Agency office heads? Agency client heads? Other executives? No one? The industry is too busy fighting with itself to mobilize for this important task — fighting to exhaustion — and faking it without making it.
4) What’s wrong with loyalty ladders? [Byron Sharp] From the archives, in Byron's usual dry/lightly ascerbic tone:
Here is what is wrong with loyalty (conversion) ladders:
The ratios of non-buyers, to light buyers, to medium, to heavy, are perfectly predictable (by the NBD-Dirichlet). So they are set. If a brand gains in share/sales, the ratios all move in a predictable way. All loyalty ladders do is show these ratios – but they imply that you can change the ratios through particular strategies. This is wrong, they will only change if you increase or decrease in market share.
Loyalty ladders imply that you should target particular levels of the ladder. This is wrong.
Loyalty ladders imply that some brands are stronger or weaker – when really they are reporting brand size.
Loyalty ladders are a waste of money spent on market research and reporting. Most of the tiny changes and differences they report are sampling (and other) error.
Loyalty ladders imply that awareness is a “once off battle”, that once someone is aware they always notice, recognise, recall your brand – this is nonsense.
Loyalty ladders imply that 100% loyals are a brand’s most valuable customers, whereas far more volume comes from heavy category buyers who buy a number of brands.
AND REALLY IMPORTANTLY…..Loyalty ladders distract marketers from the real issue which is how to grow penetration (reach all sorts of category buyers).
5) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
A Weekend Spent With Beautiful Minds: From Client Brief to Strategic Idea (Part 1) [Lara Redmer - Medium] This is a 9 minute read and would have been the one thing to read this week if I thought you'd tolerate me copying and pasting Lara's entire article into this email. It's absolutely brilliant and whether you've been in the business for decades or are just starting out it's a valuable read and contains loads of great artifacts to pick up and make your own.
Moving abroad made me a better strategist [Jesper Norgaard - LinkedIn] Most of it comes down to the increased sense of empathy that comes from spending a significant amount of time truly immersed in a culture that isn’t your own. To me, that’s where you’ll find those significant life-changing moments; moments of realization, clarity and most importantly, growth. And empathy is imperative - because despite all the extensive data sheets floating around our inboxes, we are still in the business of understanding humans and their weird and wonderful ways.
The Memes Are Pouring the White Claw Down Your Throat! [New York Times] The brand doesn’t care if you’re buying “ironically.” You’re still buying. “We want to let consumers have the conversation they want to have,” said Sanjiv Gajiwala, 39, the senior vice president of marketing at White Claw. “I’m not interested in forcing myself into a conversation they’re already having about me. I’m grateful they’re having that conversation.” Like Drake’s video for “Hotline Bling,” which, with its empty background, lent itself perfectly to memes, White Claw’s avoidance of niche marketing — its refusal to market to a specific customer base — left a blank that the content creators of the world have rushed to fill.
Strategy is a must but strategists are a luxury. Yes, work gets done without strategy but strategy makes the work a hell of a lot better. There’s no one right way to do strategy and this leads to a lot of funny shaped people doing it. [Twitter] Ben Shaw - Head of Strategy @ BBH. Click through for the tweet thread.
6) Department of Great Work
I absolutely need this KFC dating sim in my life [TheNextWeb] KFC is killing it in the great work department recently. ‘I Love you Colonel Sanders!’ is described as a ‘finger lickin’ dating simulator’ that should see the brand turn keyboard warriors in the keyboard lovers. The game has been developed by Psyop – best known in adland for their animation, but with a growing indie video game division. Published by KFC, it will be released on the PC gaming platform Steam on September 24th.
David Wilson Is 'It' in This Electric Nike Kids Spot [Little Black Book] First campaign for Nike Kids by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam. Although the spot is a little long at :90, I really like it because it takes every convention of Nike advertising and turns them on their head. And it's just really fun.
Airbnb now lets you book wacky Atlas Obscura trips, from scavenger hunts to food adventures [Fast Company] If you're not familiar with Atlas Obscura and have any interest in travel, I highly recommend checking them out. Adventurous travelers will be able to book Atlas Obscura multiday trips and single-day experiences exclusively through Airbnb. According to Atlas Obscura, trips usually have a dozen or fewer participants and usually start around $1,300. Experiences tend to be capped at 10 people and go for about $20-$60.
This tweet from Cookie Monster is amazing [Twitter] If you think this isn't advertising, you're dead wrong.
Branding Blocks [Instagram] Yunke Xiao, a graduate student of SVA’s MPS Branding program, is turning brands into cubes with the purpose being “to reveal the value of a brand’s visual identity system and to reveal the brands’ iconic assets."
Department of Bad Work
This week's award for bad work comes from Rudy Giuliani's 9/11 Tweet. What, and I mean this sincerely, the actual fuck. I mean that from the bottom of my heart as a New Yorker. And also who produced this?
7) Platform Updates
TikTok Teens Are Glueing Their Upper Lips In New Challenge [New York Mag - The Cut] Know your meme! This is important stuff guys! Every so often, a social media challenge comes along that makes you say: “Why?” Some are harmless and fun, many are dumb, and others can have dangerous consequences. the internet has generated a new lip-related challenge, this one born from the bowels of TikTok. This time, the challenge requires some sort of sticky adhesive, like eyelash glue, which is then applied to the person’s Cupid bow. After letting the glue dry for a few seconds, the person presses their top lip against their Cupid bow, resulting in the appearance of plump lips.
What Instagram and Facebook’s Algorithm Changes Might Mean for Marketers [AdWeek] Removing likes has some nervous, but it isn’t necessarily a negative for brands
Your Private Instagram Stories Aren’t Exactly Private [Buzzfeed News] A shockingly simple work-around allows your followers to share private photos and videos posted to both Facebook and Instagram.
Instagram appears to be working on a new video tool, and it's a clone of the feature that made TikTok so successful [Business Insider] Facebook has seen some usage drop off among younger users. To that end, it's unsurprising that Facebook is trying to take a page out of TikTok's book. However, while Facebook's Stories feature deeply harmed Snapchat, it's unlikely the Clips tool would have a similarly detrimental effect on TikTok
More Details Emerge Around Facebook's Coming News Section [SocialMediaToday] This week, The Information got hold of an internal memo which provides some insight into how the new section will operate, including notes on how Facebook will choose what content to display, and the role that human editors will be playing in that chain. Click through to check it 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!