This Week in Strategy: Two bed bugs fell in love. They're getting married in the spring!

Hi Strat Pack,

Friends of the show know that I grew up in a two-Volvo household (it's Connecticut...what can I say) and I have a lot of love for the brand. Which is why I'm so happy to announce that I have found the best online video ever. This enterprising Redditor has the auspicious honor of only Volvo 240 in the world that plays Toto’s Africa as the open door chime! It's two minutes and 32 seconds of your life that you will never regret spending. Top comment: "Very impractical. I'd never be able to close the door" And all I can say to that is, hard agree.

Onto something slightly more work focused: This drawing explains a surprising amount about your political views. In short, pollsters asked people whether they thought Sam Gilliam’s 1980 drawing “Coffee Thyme" was art. And the found that your answer was a better predictor of your support for Donald Trump than the often discussed 'college degree gap.' What interests me is not the politics, but the fact that as strategists and market researchers, we so often get caught in the trap of simple demographics rather than meaningful human insights. For example consider this photo that I love borrowed from Ashley Blanchard's LinkedIn without permission (Hope you don't mind!) Anyway read the article. It's super interesting.

Today is the Global Climate Strike and I hope you take some time to reflect on how Advertising contributes to the rise in greenhouse emissions. I thought I'd use today's newsletter as an opportunity to reflect on some of the things that we might like to change in our industry. Related to climate change in some small way perhaps? Perhaps Perhaps not.

Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out what celebrities you've inadvertently included in your audience segmentation. Let's jump right in.

The one thing to read this week
1) 23 reasons that suggest I may be getting too old for this. [George Tannenbaum - Ad Aged]

  1. I am physically incapable of sitting in a conference room for 14 hours in a single day to talk about advertising.

  2. I am mentally unable to figure out any timesheet system

  3. While the business has gotten as serious as a mortician, I am funny and often tell jokes in meetings.

  4. I don’t think I’m always right.

  5. I’ve never read an email from senior management all the way through to the end.

  6. I’ve yet to see an agency mission statement I can understand.

  7. Or an explanation of an agency’s “proprietary” method for creating “messaging.”

  8. I still believe creative agencies should be run by creatives. Not creative accountants.

  9. I don’t like fake work. Doing it or reviewing it. I especially don’t like awarding it.

  10. I’m still not convinced people won’t read if you have the skill to write something interesting.

  11. I believe it’s perfectly normal to expect a raise every year or so.

  12. I’ve never been on a customer journey and don’t believe anyone else has either.

  13. I might kill the next person that says “eco-system,” “agile,” or “disruption.”

  14. I believe that for advertising to work clients have to spend money. Not "hope it goes viral," or convince themselves that people look at social tiles and stock photos.

  15. And keep their message consistent.

  16. And maybe even listen to their agency’s recommendations now and again.

  17. I don't believe in brands (or blowhards) sending out dozens of crappy messages every day. Quality matters.

  18. Clients who look for cheap agencies usually find them. Doing so invariably costs them more than an expensive agency.

  19. I think agencies should be located within walking distance of great museums and bookstores.

  20. I believe advertising today produces too much stuff and not enough useful information.

  21. I think when advertising is well-done, funny, warm, informative, people actually like it, talk about it and buy things because of it.

  22. I don't believe in "all-hands meetings." What about those of us who have no hands?

  23. Given all that, I’m probably not cynical enough for the business today.

[Ed Note: George Tannenbaum is too clever to retire! Have fewer all hands meetings and push for quality over gross tonnage! Be the change you wish to seek]

2) What good creative strategy means to me. (This week). [Emma Perrett- LinkedIn]
This is the positive article this week, guys!

  • Danger - I look for the cultural spaces 'in between' where real attitudes and thoughts and trends and life exists. Where inspiration for ideas that deliver truth and meaning can be found. Dangerous ideas, not for just the sake of disruption but for the purpose of delivering real connection and value in people's lives.

  • A belief in and respect for people - Not B2B or B2C or millennials. People. At all gloriously complicated stages of life and needs and interests. Like my darling Dad and his dementia. My rollercoaster pre-teen daughter. My Fortnite obsessed son. My tech-mad 80+ mum

  • Brand as business driver - I believe in brand as the driver of business, informing and inspiring and motivating all lenses of a brand - from heart to head and everything in between.

  • Conversations. In the agency kitchen, around the clients boardroom table (or even on Linked In). I believe in strategy. In fact, I love it. I really do. Which is why it's really crucial for me to understand how to craft the strategic thought and idea to each audience and project stakeholder I work with. Finding the right balance between the journey of an idea and the final strategic destination. Not another bloody powerpoint (although, ahem, I do love a bloody ppt) but through talking. And through talking, listening.

Because, let's face it. Listening is one of the most important bits. In strategy - and in life.

3) A Conspiracy Of Silence [Ad Contrarian]

For several years the advertising industry has been engaged in a conspiracy to deceive its clients and the public about online advertising.

It is not the kind of conspiracy you get when bad people get together to plot a crime. It is the kind of conspiracy you get when greedy, frightened people individually decide it is safer to keep their mouths shut than tell the truth.

For the last few years we have been flooded with scandals and revelations about corruption, fraud, and lies in the online advertising ecosystem. Here is just a partial list in no particular order:

The terribly damning part is that there are only two possibilities: Either agencies are remarkably stupid and don't know what is going on, or they know and are keeping their mouths shut. It's hard to decide which is worse.

I believe they have been engaged in an unspoken conspiracy. Not a single one of the scandals involving online media were brought to light by a media agency. Not one. Let's put this another way -- not one of the scandals about online media were exposed by the people whose job it is to scrutinize online media.

As one very highly regarded media analyst commented to me recently, "agency bigwigs are notoriously paranoid and fearful. There's a strong code of silence..."

If it were left to the leaders of the ad industry, we would know nothing about any of the appalling stories listed above. By concealing their knowledge of deceit and dishonesty in online media, the ad industry has failed at one of their most consequential responsibilities - being trustworthy stewards of their clients' money.

Is it any wonder marketers are moving media functions in-house? One can only wonder what additional sleaze the media "experts" know of and are keeping quiet about.

The ad industry has allowed itself to crawl into bed with the squids at Facebook and Google and the rest of the devious adtech weasels. It makes us look like fools. Every week there are alarming reports of fraud, corruption, privacy abuse, and security failures in online media and we shrug our shoulders and duck for cover.

The ad industry, controlled by misguided and incompetent leadership at trade associations and holding companies, had better get its act together. By being lapdogs to the corrupt and dangerous online media we are quickly squandering what's left of our credibility.

We are on the wrong side of history and will continue to stay there until the silent conspiracy to protect online media ends.

BOUNS ARTICLE: Media agencies are going down in clients’ estimations due to planning and data issues [The Drum] Predictably, there was a fairly large gap between how advertisers rated media agencies and how media agencies rated themselves. While media agencies consistently rated themselves as meeting expectations across all categories – including planning, integration, innovation and data, advertisers were less effusive.

4) Incoming Apple VP Nick Law: creative agencies must learn new capabilities or they’re f*cked [Contagious]

After 17 years at R/GA New York and, more recently, a stint as Publicis Groupe’s global CCO, agency veteran Nick Law is leaving adland to join Apple. Contagious caught up with Law to discuss why the ‘Big Idea’ is hindering building new capabilities, why the creative potential of digital has been squandered and why the industry is royally fucked if it doesn’t change soon.

The whole interview is worth a read but here are my selects:

  • On agency leadership's responsibility today: "You’ve got to spend time as creative people exploring technology. And it’s not going to happen by just using the same structure we did for broadcast. It’s going to be different. We’re going to be creating lots of different things. Our revenue is going to have to be diversified. There are some things – like voice, like conversational interfaces, like using text-based interfaces to access information and services for companies – that are already scaling. If you haven’t got a capability around them, it might be too late."

  • On the gap between the reality of digital being an intrinsic part of human experience and the lackluster use of it in advertising "We always apply an old grammar to new technology. Early film looked like theatre; they just locked down a camera and filmed there, and it was theatre. They hadn’t developed the language of editing because it’s so abstract. The idea that things would appear and disappear. It’s artificial. It needed to be created. They had the technology but they hadn’t developed the language....The grammar of Instagram Stories is not being created by agencies, it’s being created by kids. If people think technology right now is being used in a mechanical and uninteresting way, that’s because we haven’t figured out how to manipulate it. It’s all technology and we need to learn how to wield it and use its potential. When we do that, then the work will be vivid.

  • What’s different about the new mediums is how democratic they are from a creation point of view. What that means is the best and worst of humanity is reflected in it because everyone can use it. This is no longer a guild. Advertising used to be a guild. You had very expensive equipment and very few people could manipulate this stuff. Now we’ve got this broad democracy. Of course you get garbage, but the best stuff is better than ever.

  • Agencies need to understand that when they create a new capability it needs some investment. They need to incubate it but then ultimately the goal should be to connect it to their whole model and integrate it. This is the single most important thing to do. Because as budgets are getting smaller and smaller, clients aren’t spending less. They’re just going elsewhere to spend their money. The advertising industry has stopped being able to create new capabilities, because somehow they think what they’re doing is primal. It’s not.

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

  • Creating Space For Our Stories [Nayantara Dutta - Medium] If you're not following Nayanrara, you need to start immediately. This article would be the one thing to read this week but it's a 7 minute read according to Medium and there's no way to summarize while doing justice: Telling the truth is not easy — it can require a level of privilege in speaking without or in spite of consequence and internal bravery to say things that people may disagree with. Despite this, I believe there has been a shift from telling the truth for others to hear to telling the truth for ourselves to realize. To explore this further, [Nayantara] asked [her] community: How do you bring the specificity of your story into your creative process?

  • For the creative freelancer not being able to find work is the hardest parts of the job. [Aaron James - LinkedIn] One of the primary selling points of going freelance is being able to set your own schedule, say no when you’re too busy and take a vacation whenever you damn well please. But when you’re planning or hoping to be working and there isn’t any work you can go from feeling slightly annoyed to pretty frustrated to having a full-on is-the-phone-ever-going-to-ring-again panic attack pretty quick. So, here are some things you can do when the work dries up.

  • The five-minute email rule completely transformed the way I work [FastCompany] We’re all drowning in email. And if you’re spending 15 minutes on every reply, no productivity system is ever going to save you. Not inbox zero, not batching, not turning off notifications—nothing. Your only hope is retirement. My rule: I never spend more than five minutes writing a work email. Ideally, each email will take 30 seconds to write—then, even if you write 100 emails a day, it’s still only an hour of your day, but five minutes is the max.

  • The 2020 Survival Guide for Brands [Morning Consult] Because I love you, I sacrificed my personal information so this now links directly to the PDF. Interesting read on consumer expecations of brands and the landmines that we will want to avoid in the 2020 US election.

  • The real reason Google Assistant launched with a female voice: biased data [FastCompany] The story of why the Google Assistant is female holds an important lesson about the ways that gender bias—among other sorts of bias—can seep into technology. In this case, a perceived preference for female voices led to systems trained on more female data that were actively worse at creating male voices, creating a feedback loop. “Looking back, it’s easier to say that’s probably why it was,” says Google’s Ward. “At the time, you’re just trying to advance the work, and it was a data-driven effort. You’re only as good as your data.”

6) Department of Great Work

  • eBay Blasts Retailers for 'Holiday Creep' Christmas Ads in September [Muse by Clio] Dec. 25 arrives exactly 100 days from [Sept 16th], but some retailers have already decorated trees and emailed holiday offers. Enter eBay with "The Holiday Chill," a commercial in which it wags its finger at stores that blast carols and display wreaths before summer's last gasp. Created by eBay with Edelman and Ghost Robot,

  • These Painfully Accurate Spotify Ads Want You to Get Back to Raging, Not Just Aging [AdWeek] The “Listen Like You Used To” campaign, from London agency Who Wot Why, contrasts the way today’s 40s-50s crowd enjoyed music back in their youth versus the comfortably bland realities of today.

  • A father lovingly cautions his daughter about the digital world in this tear-jerking telecom ad [AdAge] French mobile giant Orange is the latest telco to encourage responsible use of its smartphones, starting with a spot that touchingly charts the relationship between a father and his teenage daughter. Created by Publicis Conseil and directed by Katia Lewkowicz

  • KFC Takes Aim at Pretenders in New Campaign by Mother London [FabNews] Yes this is from March so apologies if you already saw it. But I think this is such a smart

  • Sandy Hook Promise: Back to School Essentials by BBDO New York [The Drum] This work is polarizing to say the least. I personally thought it was powerful and moving but I know that others found it manipulative and divisive. I think that's the point of it, at least partially: to spark conversations. I'd love to hear what you think . **Content warning: this spot gets dark AF

  • Meet China's official 2022 Winter Olympics mascot [TicToc by Bloomberg] Let's be clear: this is only great work because I love pandas. But look how cute it is!

  • Tweet by Kool-Aid [Twitter] TFW when you nail it on organic social. 22k likes, 90k retweets.

Department of Bad Work:
When you want to do an ad campaign in an airport and literally have nothing to say. [Tom Goodwin on Twitter] Spoiler alert: It's for Deloitte. It's so bad it's bad. Here's their :30 TVC I saw during the US Open. It gives me hope that consultancies will never be able to do what we do.

7) Platform Updates

  • Snapchat introduces 3D camera mode to add dimension to selfies [The Verge] People with an iPhone X or newer can use “3D Camera Mode” to capture a selfie and and apply 3D effects, lenses, and filters to it.

  • How CPGs like MillerCoors, PepsiCo use Pinterest to energize product launches [MobileMarketer] Three-fourths of surveyed Pinterest users say they're "very interested" in trying out new products compared to 55% of people on other digital platforms, according to new Oracle Data Cloud research

  • Instagram posts and IGTV videos can now be scheduled through Facebook [The Verge] A new update for its Creator Studio lets business account holders schedule their Instagram posts and IGTV broadcasts up to six months in advance

  • Facebook is launching a streaming device that watches you while you watch TV [FastCompany] Totally not creepy. ALso, understatement of the century: "Facebook may have a very tough time convincing people to put their new Portal video streaming devices in their living rooms—at least people who care about their privacy"

  • Instagram censorship U-turn? Female nude posted by Palazzo Strozzi finally given greenlight [The Art Newspaper] Museum officials say that the 1910 image by Russian artist Natalia Goncharova, on show at Tate Modern, was initially censored by the social media giant

  • Snapchat may add a dedicated news tab [Engadget] Snap is in "early talks" with publishers to have them fuel a dedicated news tab in Discover. The exact partners and mechanics aren't available at this stage, but Snap reportedly wants the tab to go live in 2020.

  • Facebook’s App Factory Aims for Teens With Two New Apps [The Information] The first two apps from the Facebook's 'skunkworks' group, named Bump and Aux, were both recently made available in Apple’s Canadian App Store. Bump is a matchmaking app for connecting students from the same school, while Aux integrates with Spotify and Apple Music to let people listen to the same music with their friends

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!

Jordan Weil