This Weekend in Strategy: A guy knocked on my door with a big wad of cash. He said, "I'm looking to buy a chimney." I said, "Put your money away, this one's on the house."
Hi Strat Pack,
Trying something new this week and releasing on Sunday night instead of Friday morning. This is totally to try out a new format and not because I decided to have a few drinks on Thursday and had too much going on on Friday. I swear...
What's new with me this week? I'm glad you asked! I recently downloaded COVID Alert NY (get it from the Apple App Store or Google Play store), New York State's contact tracing app. Basically the way it works is that if you're within 6 feet of someone for more than 10 minutes, it uses Bluetooth to anonymously exchange random codes. If you test positive for Covid, you can choose to report it to the app and then people who exchanged codes with you over the last 14 days will get a push notification that they were potentially exposed.
It's totally anonymous, they don't track location data, and the only way the app works is if a critical mass of people have it. If you live in New York, please download it! If you don't live in New York, your state/country probably has an app as well! Just look for Exposure Notifications in Settings and it's a very simple process to get set up.
In other news, what a weird media world we're living in right now. This week there were dueling presidential town halls (ED Note: I did not watch even a little of it, but I heard that Savannah Guthrie was the winner of the night, and there's a very real possibility that even Rupert Murdoch is off the trump train. Rupert Murdoch!) Which is, IMO. problematic. Jon Stewart put it really well when he told Chris Wallace in 2011 that "the bias of the mainstream media is towards sensationalism, conflict, and laziness." I would go further, and say that the bias in the media is very late-stage capitalism of extracting as much financial value as they can regardless of the impact on society. Is having each nominee on at the same time good for the public discourse? Of course not. Is it a great PR driver for your event (cough, NBC)? Absolutely. I'm sharing this with you not to get political, except to say PLEASE VOTE. Please vote. Please. Vote. Vote please. Thank you.
But also, now that the election is beginning to overshadow, well, everything, I'm starting to get the distinct feeling that the movement for racial justice is beginning to lose steam. Hell, even Reddit finally changed their logo back from black to red this week. Which is why I think is so timely to share this Op Ed from the New York Times: Jacob Blake Is My Nephew. My Family Is Suffering. This is an incredibly erudite, impassioned plea for justice--and for help--with a very simple thesis: When the cameras stop rolling, the lights fade and public attention turns away, [Black families are] left with our pain and we return to the battle against racism and for justice and reform.
Alright, stop messing around how often I check my exposure notification app. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Ad Agency Founder Fires Himself After Making Racist Remarks [Bloomberg]
You can click through and read the article, but I want to editorialize on this for a second. To set the stage: Stan Richards, founder of the Richards Group, is in hot water because he said a Motel 6 ad was “too Black” and wouldn’t resonate with the chain’s “significant White supremacist constituents.” So far, at least 5 clients have walked away.
I've seen a lot of takes on this - many supporting ex-clients decision to walk away, others bemoaning that a lot of good regular people are going to get swept up in this.
Personally, I think it's fantastic that clients are taking action. While I absolutely feel for the people caught in the middle, I also know how our industry works. I remember when once agency I worked at landed a large client and needed to get staffed immediately. The best solution: hire everyone from the last agency that used to work on it under the title of VP. These things happen.
But we can't be expected to talk about the importance of brand purpose, and doing the right thing, and our morals as an industry, and then expect it to be totally different when it happens in our backyard. We ask people to vote with their dollars, every day. Our clients included.
Stan Richards isn't the only partner at the Richards Group, but he is the only one with his name on the door. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when someone tells you the types of ads their agency creates, believe them.
Unrelated - this was a big week in C-Suite shakeups at agencies. Besides Richards, CEO Nick Emery was fired from Mindshare for a video call 'prank' that breached their code of conduct, Harris Diamond is stepping down as CEO of McCann at the end of the year to retire, and Tiffany Harris is leaving her role as Omnicom's chief of diversity to take a leadership role at Sony Music, which will leave a huge hole.
2) How to Present a Strategy in 6 Slides [Shea Cole - Medium]
This is a Medium members-only article, which means if you're getting paywalled, just open it in an incognito window. Or a different browser!
There are many ways to present a strategy. There are also many wrong ways. If you’re unsure of how to approach it, this article is for you. A great strategy can be delivered in as little as six slides, which [Shea] will outline below.
First, please note: a strategy is not a plan.
A list of tactics with a timeline attached is a plan. A strategy is much more than that. It’s how you convince your audience that your plan is great so they’ll buy-in to your approach.
Think of the tactics as the “what” and the goal as the “why”. The strategy is the “how”. It’s the guiding principle — the elevator pitch for your tactics, backed by research and data whenever possible.
You really only need six slides.
There is no single right way to build a strategy, but there are certain elements that lead to a well-received strategy presentation. If you’re new to building this type of presentation, the outline below is a great place to start.
Slide 1: Job to be done - Your first slide should be a clear and concise articulation of the job to be done, including the specific goal or business problem. Aim for impact through brevity. You can elaborate verbally to provide context, but try not to make your audience read too much here. You don’t want them reading because you want them to focus on you speaking as you open up the narrative, and most people can’t do both at once.
Slide 2: Insight - Every great strategy starts with research, and if you’re at the point where you’re creating slides, then you’ve already spent some time researching and collecting data. Data alone does not make an insight. An insight is data plus storytelling. It’s observation plus understanding. “Coors Light has higher market share in the summer” is an observation. An insight that might come from that observation is: “When the weather is hot, people prefer to drink something crisp and refreshing — like light beer.”
Slide 3: Principles - This is the first slide that actually illustrates your strategy. This slide needs to be impactful, so make it clear and concise and use language that is sticky. What do I mean by “sticky”? If there is one slide that you want your audience to be able to instantly memorize and carry with them after your presentation, this is it. Your word choice matters. Grammar matters. Font, slide layout, your pace and tone of voice when you read the slide — it all matters because it impacts your ability to make it memorable. The timing of a succinct and sticky guiding principle slide is important. Think about a typical 60 minute meeting slot. The first 5–10 minutes you might still have attendees trickling in late from other meetings. Most of them will be there by minute 10, but some might get called out early — especially if they are executive level.
If there is one slide that cannot be missed, make sure you present it between minute 10 and 20 of the meeting, because this is when you’re likely to have the highest attendance.
Slide 4: Visual Model - A strategy assumes that if a problem is approached in a certain way then a desired outcome can be achieved. It’s a prediction of what could become reality, based on data, experience, insights, and creativity. A visual model can facilitate understanding of that potential reality.
Your visual model should show how variable inputs, steps, or actions are prioritized or stand in relation to each other in a process or system built to deliver the desired outcome. It could be a statistical model plotted on a graph, or it could just be words and shapes that show theoretical relationships or steps.
Some examples of model formats are 4-quadrant, 3 pillars, a funnel, a pyramid, a venn diagram, and a flywheel. Google them for inspiration.
Slide 5: Tactics - This next section is where you include all that detail that you’ve been holding back since the beginning of the presentation. Lay out the exact steps or tactics in your plan. The format can be plain, and your writing should be clear and concise.
This part of your presentation might actually be more than one slide if you have a complicated task at hand, but keep in mind that less is more. Include only words that are necessary for understanding — no fluff!
Slide 6: Timing - Set realistic expectations and then try to over-deliver by doing it all sooner.
3) The truly high cost of media efficiency [Forbes]
Written by Dr. Augustine Fou who has been looking at ad fraud for 25 years. Kinda shows what a racket programmatic ads are.
Unfortunately “cost efficiency” has come to mean simply “low cost.” Media agencies have been touting “cost efficiency” as the key benefit of using programmatic ad tech to buy and place digital display media. And who doesn’t love a good deal, or low prices, as it were?
But of course there’s a catch, as with anything that’s too good to be true. How can there be continuously more ad impressions to buy, while the CPM prices go lower and lower? As far as I’m aware, the number of humans on earth hasn’t exploded recently and the amount of time they spend online, on mobile devices, and on social media has been at a plateau since 2013 (i.e. fully saturated). Juxtapose that against the half-a-quadrillion display ads that are now transacted programmatically annually — yeah, “how many zeroes?” in 500,000,000,000,000? This leads us back to the original question — is it “efficient” to invest your ad budgets in programmatic media, even if the prices are lower, sometimes much much lower?
Is It Efficient If It Produced No Outcomes?
First off, we should look at whether programmatic digital ads are producing business outcomes. Virtually everyone assumes it does; that’s why $150 billion are spent on digital ads in the U.S. annually, and $350 billion worldwide. But when P&G turned off $200 million (of their $2 billion) in their digital spending in 2018, they saw no change in business outcomes. Similarly, when Chase reduced the number of sites that showed their ads from 400,000 to 5,000, a 99% decrease, they saw no change in business outcomes. When Uber paused 80% of their paid marketing aimed at getting more users to install the Uber app, the installs kept happening at the same rate. These are just a few of the large, publicized examples of digital ad spend not driving incremental business outcomes, or any outcomes at all.
Marketers should run their own “pause digital spend” experiments to truly see whether digital dollars are performing for them. The pandemic has already led many marketers to do just that; and we are waiting to see the “receipts.”
Is It Efficient If Pennies on the Dollar Goes to Showing Ads to Humans?
When buying through programmatic channels, marketers might be getting cheaper CPM prices. But what is hidden from them is the portion of every dollar that goes into the pockets of ad tech middlemen instead of towards showing ads. After all, these intermediaries have to make money and keep their investors happy, right? Three industry-wide studies over the years have shown that at a minimum, 50 cents of every dollar goes to middlemen, leaving only 50% for the publishers to show ads. Wouldn’t it be better if you just paid the publishers directly to show your ads? The smart marketers that have realized this already have started initiatives which include “supply path optimization” — reducing the length and complexity of the programmatic supply chain, to reduce these middlemen costs and the associated risks of fraud.
Is it efficient if your ads are shown to bots instead of humans, especially if the fraud detection tech companies can’t detect the bots? Is it efficient if your ads are not viewable — e.g. in pop-unders, hidden windows, invisible 1×1 pixel iframes, etc? Is it efficient if your ads are not on target, even if shown to humans, considering how inaccurate programmatic targeting data is.
Is It Efficient If You’re Pitching Too Much And Forgetting to Catch Entirely?
Previously, I used the baseball analogy to describe digital marketing. You are “pitching” when using tactics like display and video ads to drive awareness. You are “catching” when using tactics like search and content to harvest demand. Consumers now have many choices of products similar to yours, and they have many places to buy such products. So whoever is the most efficient at “harvesting” will win the sale. In other words, even if Canon were doing the advertising, Sony could be harvesting the demand if they have more content and better reviews that help the user decide to buy the Sony camera instead of the Canon one.
The allure of the “cost efficiency” (incorrectly used to mean “low prices”) of digital programmatic ads has caused many-a-marketer to lose their heads, and shift too much of their digital dollars to programmatic digital channels. So they are pitching too much and neglecting to do any catching, or harvesting of the demand. In fact, some of the largest advertisers have even shifted too much of their total advertising budgets to digital programmatic at the expense of good old fashioned branding, via TV ads and billboards in the offline world.
This irrational chase of “low cost” might be averted if marketers realized the truly high cost of buying too much programmatic digital. These costs — of middlemen, fraud, and “imbalance” between pitching and catching — are hidden, but there. Don’t let the incorrect use of the word “efficiency” trick you into being one of THOSE marketers who are known to be an easy “mark” for ad tech companies.
4) Quick Hits
The future of Fandoms [Zoe Scaman - Musings of a Wandering Mind] Back in August, Scaman did a fascinating talk on Fandoms and why she believes that they’ll be a dominant force, culturally and commercially, in the next decade. She was gracious enough to share the full slide deck along with a bunch of links. Highly worth a read.
Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time [Quanta Magazine] Fascinating read that obviously has implications for what we as marketers and advertisers do for a living. “Everyone knows the saying that ‘time flies when you’re having fun, but the full story might be more nuanced: Time flies when you’re having more fun than you expected.” Last month in Nature Neuroscience, a trio of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel presented some important new insights into what stretches and compresses our experience of time. They found evidence for a long-suspected connection between time perception and the mechanism that helps us learn through rewards and punishments. They also demonstrated that the perception of time is wedded to our brain’s constantly updated expectations about what will happen next.
5) Department of Great Work
Bud Light Pays Tribute to Cardboard Fans in Epic 2-Minute Film [Muse by Clio] Look I am honestly just impressed that this was able to get sold in and made. It's got the aesthetic of a 3rd grade Flat Stanley film project that never got further than the inside of my skull. And it tells a cute story of a flat lil guy that just wants a bubbly lil beer. From Wieden+Kennedy New York
Pizza Hut Creates a Pizza Box With an Integrated Foosball Table [Hypebeast] Tied to the current soccer season in Europe underway, the "Twelfth Man" campaign reminds fans watching at home that pizza is the best food to eat while supporting their teams in isolation. The best part of the campaign is a special pizza box that integrates a mini foosball table into the lid of the pizza box — a fun little accouterment to play with in between commercials. Wendy Leung, Marketing Director of Pizza Hut Hong Kong explains: “The Pizza Hut Foosball Pizza Box was a great opportunity to remind football fans that pizza goes best with their football. From Ogilvy Hong Kong
This Remake Of Monster.com's Classic 'When I Grow Up' Ad is a Plea to 'Make America Decent Again' [AdAge] Burn an AdAge article view to check this out. Monster.com’s “When I Grow Up” Super Bowl ad from 1999 was a splash of ice cold water in the face of disgruntled workers around the country. The iconic spot from Mullen Boston and directed by Bryan Buckley is widely considered one of the Big Game's finest. It featured black-and-white scenes of kids revealing their “dreams” for the future—only they turned out to be the mediocre occupations that many have settled for once they reach adulthood. But now, ahead of the election, a group of creatives who say they're from from both sides of the aisle have united under the banner of “Partnership for a Trump-free America” to spoof the classic commercial in a new anti-Trump message. The original Monster spot is at the bottom of the article. Watch that first and then watch the Trump spot. It's a gut punch that we need right now. Original spot from Mullen Boston, this version produced from LA-based Partnership for a Trump-free America
In Germany there are no getaway cars [Twitter] I had a hard time finding credits for this ad but my guess is it's from the early 80's because it screams DDB and they resigned the account in 1984. Just shows the power of a great headline + visual. I love it. h/t @adland
Chipotle sells out of QR-enabled shirts to drive voter registration [Mobile Marketer] The burrito chain's "Chi-Vote-Le" shirts have a pepper-shaped QR code on the sleeve that points to the TurboVote platform run by nonprofit Democracy Works. Chipotle sold the shirts at its Chipotle Goods online store for $11.03, a reference to the election date of Nov. 3, in a variety of sizes. The brand turns unique branded merchandise into a mechanism for political engagement through mobile technology. After scanning the QR code, mobile users see a microsite with Chipotle's branding that asks people to enter their name and email to receive reminders on when to vote and the location of a local polling place.
6) Platform Updates
Platform Updates is on hiatus this week
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