This Week in Strategy: Why does Snoop Dogg have an umbrella? Fo drizzle!
Hi Strat Pack,
Something we've long known to be true is finally official. A new study in the Journal of International Psychology finds that many owners of high-status luxury cars are actually assholes. “The answers were unambiguous: self-centered men who are argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic are much more likely to own a high-status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes,” say the researchers in a press release. (They found no connection between female self-centeredness and luxury cars.)
In actually important news, the Museum of Chinese in America suffered a 5-alarm fire over the weekend that completely gutted the top floors of the building. The building housed the museum's 85,000-item archive, much of which will probably need restoration it it's even recoverable. The collections were "a 40-year effort by hundreds of people and families. And it's the only real formal collection that's properly assessed...we're this standout." The museum launched a GoFundMe to help with the restoration and I encourage you to donate if you're able. Every dollar you donate is being matched.
Ramping down the seriousness meter a bit (a lot)... Modern studies suggest the ‘normal’ body temperature of 98.6° is a degree too high. Um, What? Also here's the really crazy part: it's not that the original measurements taken in 1869 are wrong. It's that we, human beings as a species, are COOLING DOWN. “We’ve changed in height, weight—and we’re colder,” she says. “I don’t really know what [the new measurements] mean in terms of health, but they’re telling us something. They’re telling us that we are changing and that what we’ve done in the last 150 years has made us change in ways we haven’t before.” WHAT.
The study suggests that in the process of altering our surroundings, we have also altered ourselves. Which really puts that 2010 Jeep line "The things we make, make us" into perspective, doesn't it.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out whether the evil masterminds at Jeep were somehow able to simultaneously fund that asshole car study and lower our body temperature with marketing. Wow. That's a lot to process. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Advertising. Sometimes a yacht needs a horse. [Damon's Brain]
What is the craziest thing ever to have been built on a yacht? In my head I went through what I thought was opulent. A gym, gold plated toilets, massive bedrooms maybe a full sized movie theatre.
The answer. A stable for a thoroughbred stallion. And a riding track.
Apparently super yachts were a strange arms race for the rich. You had to have something the other rich guy didn’t. A stable was an insane idea whether or not horses get sea sick. Apparently they do. But they can’t throw up. So that sucks. And it is an idea years later I can’t forget. There is one simple reason for this: I would never have thought of it.
So, the question is how much is a stupid idea I would never ever think of worth?
I would say it could be very valuable. Invariably, any disruptive thinking starts with what many called mad or stupid ideas. All of a sudden, we launch super yachts that now come with stables standard. Horse riding holidays pop up on inaccessible unridden islands across the globe and hey presto you have the next big thing every billionaire has to do this summer. I can see it now, two billionaires racing their yachts on a reality show to some tiny Greek island to be the first to ride a horse on its miniscule beach. Crazy idea? Maybe. But not as crazy as it was 60 seconds ago.
The trick of course is to allow these ideas in the creative process. And more importantly survive. What kills these kinds of ideas? Intransigence. Thinking you know what has always worked and being unwilling to change. Fear. In many corporate structures ideas like these are killed because they can get you into trouble. There is no real space for this kind of madness to be considered in some companies. And usually they are the companies that need them the most. A single or insular perspective is also tricky. When everybody in the room has the same point of view it is very unlikely you will get anywhere new or better. And finally, bravery. The bravery to say the idea out loud and the bravery to truly listen and think about its possibilities. Many times I have been asked for disruptive thinking from people that are incapable of buying it and in their entire careers, never have. And, if they were honest didn’t really want it in the first place.
So why does this matter? The simple answer is these crazy ideas make companies grow. Especially when business models change. Which seems to be happening more and more these days. We need to make sure these ideas are able to live. Even if it’s for an extra 60 seconds. Because that can make all the difference.
Let me try and give you an example of a crazy idea that might one day be very valuable. In 2017, U2 made $54.4 million. $52.2 million was from touring. Music sales $1.1 million. Publishing $705,200. Streaming $624,500. In 2018, this number doubled from being on the road touring with the Joshua Tree tour.
Here is another interesting stat. Fortune magazine makes 40% of its revenue from events. So that’s kind of interesting. Almost half its revenue. It would seem their business model is definitely changing. People seem to like live events and live experiences and are prepared to pay. OK, what if you applied that to something that isn’t a live experience like television. Something that doesn’t really want it or need to change their business model. That would be disruptive. What if Netflix decided to build theatres around the world? Where plays of their shows could be put on. Maybe on Broadway. Where Game of Thrones, or whatever was cool that season, would become a live experience. A place where you could develop a loyal community out of promiscuous viewers. Could live events be the thing that creates a valuable difference between all the streaming services?
Building a stable on a yacht is a stupid idea. A streaming service opening a theatre on Broadway is a stupid idea.
But not as stupid as it was 60 seconds ago.
2) Advertising made easy. And insipid. [Ad Aged - George Tannenbaum]
I know it’s terribly au courant to say that we live in a post-fact age—and details and unique selling propositions no longer matter. But I’m not really buying that idea. Most of the commercials that seem to me to be effective usually impart useful consumer information in an executionally brilliant way. Apple became a trillion-dollar-brand doing essentially that in commercial after commercial, print ad after print ad. Even Hyundai’s latest commercial on a self-parking car seems to be singing from that hymnbook.
I suspect it’s much easier to create bland work about some feeling a brand creates than to dig deep and get to the essence of what makes something vital.
What occurred to me today is how few agencies today know what makes them different. Sure, they all have their proprietary nonsense about getting to the core of the ectoplasm of brands and the customer. But none of that matters or is even vaguely decipherable to anyone who doesn’t add a big pour of McKinsey to their morning coffee.
Maybe because agencies no longer dig deep and determine what makes brands or products different, they no longer dig deep and determine what makes their brand or product different either.
This isn’t about a tag line or a bunch of diagrams. This is about how you approach an assignment, what you present, what it’s based on and how it’s produced. This is about talent. Finding talent that digs deeper. That doesn’t follow formulae. Finding talent that believes that information intelligently handled can persuade people as effectively today as it did thousands of years ago when people learned of gods and war and love and loss around campfires.
In modern parlance, you could call this a mission. A mission and a belief. A mission, a belief and a core value. That, in the words of Dave Trott “a rational demonstration can have a more powerful emotional effect than something vacuous designed purely to appeal to the feelings.”
In short, “done properly, reason is emotion.”
We might, if we care to create an entity that did something different, also build on some words Bob Levenson wrote many years ago when he was at DDB. That:
“There is indeed a twelve-year-old mentality in this country; every six-year-old has one.
“We are a nation of smart people.
“And most smart people ignore smart advertising because most advertising ignores smart people.
“Instead we talk to each other.
“We debate endlessly about the medium and the message. Nonsense. In advertising, the message itself is the message.”
But to proffer any of that at an agency today would get you cast out into the wilderness. You’re old, they would tell you. Today’s consumer has no attention span. Marketing doesn’t work that way anymore.
And 99% of the industry—clients included—go along with it. It’s so much easier to take the road more traveled. To assume the consumer is a moron. To abide by the dominant complacency of the age: If I show people happy and smiling and dancing when they use my product, viewers will believe it because it shows what happens emotionally when you eat a new, nacho-cheesier nacho-cheesier nacho.
What’s more smiles and high-fives and fist bumps and spontaneous dancing are so much easier to do and what everyone else is doing so it must be right. And creative parroting will allow us to hire the inexperienced, which allows us to drive wages down, cut staffing and quality and become a low-cost provider of work that neither educates nor enlightens.
That’s how most brands, and agencies, seem to operate today. We spend our time fighting over details while the lights have gone out. As an industry we may extol the genius of Apple’s great ethos “Think Different.” And many of us might have memorized the words to Apple’s “Here’s to the Crazy Ones.”
But the reality is we hate different. And we prize, not constructive lunacy, but lockstep conformity.
3) Dusty Ads [Davis Ballard]
I'm on a creativity kick! What can I say, it's Super Bowl season. What a great resource. Bookmark this and reference the hell out of it. In his own words:
As we enter a new decade, I thought it’s worth sharing my collection of 1000+ old print ads I’ve scanned from Time, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Surfer Magazine to name a few.
Ranging from the 1960s-90s I hope these ads stimulate some ideas, laughs, pensive brow furrows, and grunts of utter disgust. We’ve progressed a long way since the mad men days of the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some gold waiting to be mined and some silver waiting to be polished.
BONUS RESOURCE: Ad Creative Cheatsheet Your place to find all the ad creative you’ll ever need, quick. Whether its display ads, TV ads or Facebook Ads, this is your rapid fire way to do competitive research on a category. Over 500 links so far from 200+ companies that will be continually updated
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Strategic Minds: Oonie Chase (IDEO) — Are Strategy and Design Even That Different? [Lara Redmer - Medium] My favorite line is right at the beginning "If I’m being reductive, I’d say strategy is thinking, and design is thinking by doing — even in this, they share a common border. The danger is pulling them apart as two separate practices — it opens the door for doing one without the other and, in doing so, diminishing both." A very interesting perspective that really made me rethink how I approach strategic development, brief writing and my role within the team.
The Future of Super Bowl Ads Doesn’t Include TV—or Football [Wired] I'm including this 2019 article because I think it's important to be exposed to alternate viewpoints. I certainly don't agree with this. Hell, even Vayner (and by extension Gary Vee, who famously thinks TV is a "waste of fucking time and money") is doing 3 Super Bowl Spots. But anyway, read this hot take whose thesis is "Now television is an optional part of the strategy, and even using the Super Bowl’s star power against it is part of the game. To advertisers, it seems, the game itself is no longer an event—it’s an excuse." And then appreciate the irony
Do Polarised Views Get More Attention? A Twitter Experiment. [Teeming Blog] Here’s a bit of modern received wisdom: in a loud world with all kinds of competing, shouting voices you need to be bold and polarised to get any attention. Lots of people say this as if it’s a fact. But is it correct and based on anything, or is it just rubbish? After running an experiment on Twitter, our new hypothesis is that if you want attention, you’re better off being nuanced. And if nuance gets better engagement on Twitter, we’d hypothesise that it would get better engagement anywhere.
5) Department of Great Work
Guys! It's the Super Bowl on Sunday! And while Christmas has been called the Super Bowl of UK Advertising, I don't think it holds a candle to The Super Bowl of US Advertising: The Super Bowl.
My initial take after seeing most of these spots is positive! I'm so glad that the industry is walking away (not entirely, yet) from purpose spots, and are actually back to making great impactful work that's doing something besides trying to make me cry. We'll get back to the traditional format next next week, but here are my highlights and lowlights of the spots that already came out.
USA Today Ad Meter [USA Today] Your one stop shop for viewing all the ads (without a paywall!)
Highlights: Mountain Dew Shining ad with Brian Cranston from TBWA\Chiat\Day, Bud Light Post Malone (both of them!) from Wieden & Kennedy New York, Pringles RIck & Morty ad from Grey, Hyundai Smaht Pahk (Don't @ me bro), from Innocean, both Walmart (specifically the Arrival homage) from Publicis Groupe Department W, & Amazon had flashes of brilliance
The purpose ad that made me cry but I'm not mad about it: Google done in-house.
On a side note - I just want to call out that the Mountain Dew credits list like 6 strategists and *ahem* no account people. And based on the number of times I've personally been bumped from the credits because the AAE filling out the form prioritized themselves, I'm going to call this the greatest work of all this week. Thank you for your sacrifice, anonymous Chiat AAE.
Department of "This is why the industry hates in-house agencies"
Secret: The Secret Kicker | Super Bowl Ad [YouTube] As Twitter user @AishaAnnHakim succinctly put it: "this spot is so bad I think secret has actually put us [women] away from equality". Done in house. My god, and the copy: "Let's Kick Inequality" GET IT??? Because it's a football ad?! This is why the industry hates in-house agencies.
Take the good with the bad...Please just remember that the Google spot was in house too.
6) Platform Updates
Winners, losers and fallout from Google’s plan to drop cookies [Digiday] Reminder: Google always wins. Google has issued a death warrant for third-party cookies, setting in motion plans to kill third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022.Publishers believe this demand for alternatives to third-party cookies will kickstart their sputtering ad businesses. In the near term, more blunt approaches to digital advertising might take root. According to the four media buyers interviewed for this article, attribution will be the most pressing issue to sort when third-party cookies no longer exist.
Pinterest’s new AR tech lets you try on makeup before you buy [Pinterest] Pinterest is taking what makes searching for beauty ideas on Pinterest great — like skin tone ranges, shoppable Pins and visual style recommendations — and enhancing it through augmented reality (AR) so Pinners can try on different lipstick shades for their skin tone, save for later shopping, or buy through the retailer’s site.
It Took One Day for Byte to Be As Spammy As the Rest of the Internet [Slate] Bot comments? Check. Fake accounts from “Taylor Swift” and “Donald Trump”? Check and check. Like the original version of Vine, Byte allows users to film and upload six-second looping videos. The new app will build on its predecessor, though, by offering creators more opportunities to monetize their content and will soon have a pilot program for revenue sharing. It’s this promise of profit that likely attracted spammers to the platform. Indeed, shortly after Byte went live, users found that their videos were being flooded by spammy comments requesting follows, which appeared to be coming from automated bots, with phrases like “follow for a follow” and “follow me for old vines.”
Facebook’s Clear History tool is now available to everyone [The Verge] Off-Facebook\ activity is the information that businesses and websites share with Facebook based on your interactions with those sites or apps. The Clear History tool can be helpful if you’re constantly getting ads for something you were just looking at online or being served suggestions for things Facebook thinks you might be interested in. Besides clearing your history, the new section also includes options to view your information by category, download the information, and select how off-Facebook activity can be managed in the future.
AT&T tried to buy out the streaming wars — and customers are paying for it [The Verge] I think the really interesting part here is that AT&T ALONE lost 4.1 million pay TV subscribers in 2019. So apparently cord cutting is real?
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!