This Week in Strategy: Why did the hot pepper feel so left out at archery practice? Because he didn't habanero!
Hi Strat Pack,
I've got to come clean with you. I spent more time on the articles this week than on figuring out what to write in the upfront. So instead I just want to share with you three really interesting things I've read this week.
Police, protest, pandemic and the end of the 9/11 era [ESPN] The American reckoning, or at the very least the burgeoning outline of one, has come into focus, forced into view by a perfect storm of toxicity: a global pandemic claiming more than 205,000 lives in the United States alone; the ongoing use of police force against Black citizens that further undermines any notions of peace or change; a corporate class long indifferent to Black suffering suddenly aligning its brands with protest; fears of an illegitimate election further exposing the fragility of bonds generations of Americans think unbreakable -- even as the house continues to prove it cannot stand. The nation, in short, has come apart, in words and images, deadly actions and even deadlier inaction. As a global pandemic is treated as a political issue instead of a public health one, the impatience to return to normal and urgency to protest for a new normal delays the arrival of either.
Inside the airline industry's meltdown [The Guardian] Love this article because it illustrates how one thing can have so many knock-on effects. Among all the industries hit by Covid-19, aviation suffered in two distinct ways. Most obviously, there was the fear of contagion. No other business depends on putting you into knee-by-thigh proximity with strangers for hours, while whisking potentially diseased humans from one continent to another. Less directly, there was the tumbling economy. It is an axiom in aviation that air travel correlates to GDP. When people have more money, they fly more. But in the midst of this historic downturn, no one was buying plane tickets.
The Stranger Things Pitch Deck This is such an interesting look at an industry I know very little about. I really love how every tiny little item in this deck is really considered, and so on brand. It really sets the mood for the show. I don't know about you but my decks almost never look like this. Maybe they should...
These three are definitely longer reads. I recommend digesting them over the weekend with a good cup of coffee or bloody mary. But don't take my word for it.
Alright, stop messing around. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) FCB’s checklist for evaluating creative [Twitter]
Julian Cole's post on LinkedIn yesterday really resonated with me. You can read the whole post here (and you should) but the gist is "I would be checking my email the morning before a creative presentation and there being no email from the creatives. I still hadn't seen the work. I realized my feedback was not going to impact the work and I was relegated to making the set up slides an hour before the meeting."
Especially early in my career, this was something I really struggled with. I would write the brief, give my song and dance on how to make the work work in social and then wonder why I wasn't being asked to sit in the edit bay with the team. And along with Julian's advice on how to make crateive+strategy much more of a collaboration, I realized one day that I had never really learned to talk about work in the ways that creatives need to hear about it.
Which is why I love this checklist from FCB. Bookmark it, print it out, mail a copy to your clients. h/t to @rshotton for sharing this. From Alex Morris's Strategy & Planing Scrapbook
2) Mary Wells Lawrence changed advertising forever. This is a thread about her story and how she became an ad industry legend in the 1960s. [@UncleBernbach - Twitter]
Some say that Mary (92) was the real-life Peggy Olsen from Mad Men; a brilliant copywriter and a vocal copy chief. Mary was much more than that. She revolutionised the advertising industry and opened one of the trendiest agencies of the 60s/70s.
"The best advertising should make you nervous about what you're not buying." Mary Wells Lawrence
Mary’s first agency was McCann-Erickson, where she worked from 1953 to 1956. She then moved to DDB, where she eventually became the copy chief in 1963. In 1964, Wells left to become a partner at the new venture Jack Tinker & partners. At the agency, she produced iconic work for the anti-acid drug Alka-Seltzer and created the ground-breaking work “End of the Plain Plane” for Braniff airlines.
In the 60s, drug advertising was dull. The ads focused on how drugs eased pain symptoms. Mary decided that they needed to entertain the audience, not just inform, to tell the story of how helpful and innovative Alka-Seltzer’s products were. They decided to run a series of 16 funny adverts, each with a different reason to take Alka-Seltzer. This ad defied traditional drug advertising — it didn’t feature anyone in pain and it leaned on self-deprecating humour to connect with the audience.
Wells was the woman that made flying sexy. Braniff was an unknown airline with good routes before Mary. She thought they needed more than just an ad to stand out. Mary decided to paint all of their planes in colourful ways, redesigned waiting areas and the crew's uniform.
At the top of her success at the agency, Mary resigned after being told she wouldn’t be made the agency’s president because of the fact she was a woman. She left with two other partners to set her own agency, Wells Rich Greene. Upon founding Wells Rich Greene in 1966, Mary Wells Lawrence became the first woman to found, own and run a major agency, and the first female CEO of a company listed on the NY Stock Exchange. By the end of its first year, WRG had 100 employees and $39 million in billings.
They were instantly awarded the Branniff account and eventually had an amazing portfolio of clients including American Motors, Cadbury Schweppes, IBM, Pan American World Airways, Trans World Airlines, Procter & Gamble and Sheraton Hotels. WRC became an agency known for their sense of humour and creative brilliance. They became one of the fastest growing agencies of the 70s.
Throughout the 70s, Mary’s annual salary of US$300,000 made her one of the best paid executives in the world.
Wells and her team were the brains behind the “I ♥ N Y” campaign in the mid-70s increase tourism and raise the spirits of the residents of NY during a tough violent period for the city.
Mary revolutionised drug, automobile, airline and television advertising in general. She started and ran one of the trendiest agencies of the 60s/70s and was an iconic figure in a male-dominated industry.
After nearly 40 years in the advertising business, she retired in 1990 when WRG merged with the French agency BDDP. In 1971, Wells was named Advertising Woman of the Year by the American Ad Federation, and in 1999 she was inducted into the American Advertising Hall of Fame.
If you are interested, read this NY Times profile on Mary: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/fashion/mary-wells-lawrence-took-on-the-mad-men.html and find more of her amazing work on this blog post: https://davedye.com/2014/01/07/mary-wells/
3) Marketers misunderstand the two tasks of online advertising [MarketingWeek]
Grace Kite is fast becoming one of my favorite voices in marketing. She just gets it. And always brings reciepts.
Confusion over the twin functions of digital advertising could lead marketers into flawed decision making, especially when ads used to signpost customer journeys are treated as if they can generate demand.
Online ads perform two distinct tasks that need two different decision-making processes, but many marketing departments only use one.
The first task is the one that marketers are most comfortable with because it is the same task that’s done by offline ads. If seeing a compelling picture on Facebook is similar to seeing a poster on the street, and watching a video on YouTube is similar to watching one on TV, then it’s clear, an online ad is just like an offline one. It’s an investment into generating demand and producing future sales.
The second task is less familiar to marketers, albeit equally important for sales. It’s the role of online ads as signposts for ecommerce businesses. This task is the online equivalent of the name above the high street front door, the lights that stay on inside, the shelf-space and even the entry in the Yellow Pages. The task is to help people who are already on their way to a website arrive safely. It isn’t an investment into future sales, but a cost of current transactions.
The two tasks can lead to flawed decision making when ads that mainly perform the second task are treated as if they perform the first. It can lead businesses to treat signposts as if they were substitutes for true investments into future sales and, in some cases, waste money shepherding sales that were going to arrive anyway.
Counting everyone that walks past the signpost
More important for marketers’ day-to-day decision making is the way that the two tasks manifest in decision making tools. My team and I use charts, like the one below, to help make things clearer for clients. It shows the case of search engine marketing carried out by a semi-fictional, but typical advertiser.
In the chart, the proportion of total sales driven by search ads is around three times bigger in Google’s attribution tool than it is in our econometric modelling. The reason is that in two thirds of customer journeys that involve a search click, the ad didn’t actually generate the sale, it acted as a signpost, helping someone who had already made their decision to complete their purchase.
Some more sophisticated advertisers are aware of this distinction, but others treat all of the signposted sales as if they were generated by the signpost rather than the price cut, TV ad, or good weather day that prompted the customer decision. They calculate return on investment figures that are too high, and costs per acquisition that are too cheap, and they believe, sometimes wrongly, that switching off signposting would be disastrous.
We advise clients to make the comparison above for all online channels and test limited switch-offs. The test and learn should be focused on ads that mainly perform the signposting task rather than the demand building task, so that they don’t damage incremental sales, but do reveal how important each signpost actually is.
The online ads that are most often an investment into future sales are those that target new rather than existing customers and reach rather than engagement. They typically have richer creative, particularly video, and they highlight newer or less well-known products.
The future is in collaboration between marketers, analysts and other departments in the advertiser’s organisation. Experts in sales channel management and merchandising have the skills to make decisions about spending on physical signposts, call centres and high street shops. Their expertise must be relevant here.
Time will tell, but my bet is that the fully mature, fully effective role for online advertising will be very different to the adolescent one we are familiar with today.
4) Quick Hits
Both quick hits this week are really fascinating dives into human behavior. I know you like to skim over this section but these are honestly just both really good, really well written articles. I strongly recommend them.
Emoji reveal more about you than you think [Vox] Full disclosure, I am fascinated by emojis. This is a long read but IMO 100% worth it. Emoji “are powerful symbols for expressing not just the strength of your opinion, but the valence and sentiment of your opinion.” But these tiny pictures are more than just a visual way to communicate, and they reveal more than we might expect. They can help companies and platforms get a better sense of how we feel — especially how we feel about brands — and they can even be used to target advertisements directly to us. So while we might be using emoji just to rant to our followers about a favorite soccer player missing a goal, by using emoji we’re also handing companies neatly packaged, juicy information about our emotions and interests.
Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time [Quanta Magazine] New research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations and neural fatigue. It’s likely more than a coincidence that dopamine is so fundamental to both time perception and learning processes. Drugs like methamphetamine and neurological disorders like Parkinson’s alter both processes and also involve changes in dopamine. And learning itself — the association of a behavior with its outcome — requires the linking of one event with another in time. “Really, at the very core of reinforcement learning algorithms is information about time,”
5) Department of Great Work
Amason x Dante - Heartbeats [YouTube] Let's start Great Work this week with something that is real, and human, and so moving. Over 1.3 million babies are born each year with congenital heart defects, with more than 40,000 in the US alone. Indie band Amason released a cover of The Knife’s song "Heartbeats" based on recorded heartbeats from one-year-old Dante, who was born with three heart defects. This new cover was released last Tuesday, on World Heart Day. Please click through and give the song a play: all revenue from the song will go directly to Hjärtebarnsfonden (The Swedish Heartchild Foundation), a Swedish organization that contributes to research and supports children affected by congenital heart disease and their families. From Swedish agency Abby Priest.
Of course I'm going to include an article about the Ocean Spray TikTok guy [New York Times] So Ocean Spray bought the guy a truck. Guess what color? I'll give you a hint, it's cranberry red! Here's what I like about it: The reason we're talking about Ocean Spray at all this week is because Nathan Apodaca's truck broke down on the way to work, and he just wanted to vibe with us on his longboard. The truck had over 330,000 miles on it. Buying Apodaca a truck just makes sense. And hats off to Ocean Spray for actually doing something because it's so easy to look at this guy and go "oh that's not brand safe". But fuck that noise. This was a real thing that happened, Ocean Spray did not capitalize on it with a marketing blitz, they responded in a way that helps keep their name out there but not trying to co-opt the moment. Good job, OS.
Qantas' "Flight To Nowhere" Is a Seven-Hour Scenic Flyover Australia [HypeBeast] For those looking to experience the feeling of travel again, Australia’s Qantas Airways Limited recently launched its “Flight to Nowhere” package. Unexpectedly selling out in just 10 minutes, the offer is aimed at those willing to board and plane with no real planned destination. The “Flight to Nowhere” package is a seven-hour scenic flyover Australia in response to the travel restrictions brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic. Offering a unique scenic experience, the joy flight makes a loop around the nation allowing passengers an aerial look at Queensland, Gold Coast, New South Wales, the outback, Sydney Harbour and the Great Barrier Reef.
New 50-Foot ‘Wall of Lies’ in Bushwick Displays 20,000 Claims Made by President Trump [Brooklyn Reader] A 50-foot by 10-foot outdoor mural displaying more than 20,000 false or misleading claims told by the president during his term in office went up Saturday on Grattan Street, next to bar and music venue Pine Box Rock Shop. The ‘Wall of Lies’ was created by Tom Tenney, the executive director of non-profit Internet radio station Radio Free Brooklyn, and Phil Buehler, a Bushwick photographer. UPDATE: the Proud Boys already defaced the Wall of Lies with 'Trump or Die' grafitti. Cool cool cool.
Hotels.com Offers Travelers a Chance to Literally Live Under a Rock Until After the Election [AdWeek] Related to the prior item I supposed. In a bit of experiential marketing that accurately gauges the nation’s mood after a tumultuous year, Hotels.com is offering travelers a chance to literally hide out under a rock from Nov. 2-7, for only $5 a night. The five-night stay is an “off-the-grid” experience somewhere in New Mexico (the brand didn’t say where, specifically) without access to Wi-Fi, cable television or daily news to avoid doomscrolling and doomwatching election day results. The property is available to reserve on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Oct. 9 at 9 a.m. ET on the brand’s website. Here's a direct link to the listing...
#VoteResponsibly: Absolut says Vote First, Drink Second [Social Samosa] The campaign will span TV, out-of-home (OOH), digital and social, and will encourage customers to vote using messages like "Your Vote Can Shake or Stir the Election," "Save Your Drink for After the Vote," and "Drinking Can Wait. Your Vote Can't." Pernod Ricard also said it will close its offices and modify workers' schedules for its manufacturing facilities on election day to allow time off to vote. The spirits company is urging other businesses to do the same. From BBH New York
5) Platform Updates
Streaming TV Is Surging, but the Ads Remain on Repeat [Wall Street Journal] The medium faces a raft of advertising challenges, including a fragmented media-buying landscape that can lead to viewers getting hit repeatedly with the same ad. Everything you need to know comes from how outlandishly jargony and vague this sentence is: “There is a massive fragmentation of media in connected TV—and it’s multidimensional fragmentation,” said Tal Chalozin, chief technology officer of ad tech firm Innovid Inc. That complicates marketer priorities like limiting how much a viewer sees the same ad. It has been a continuing problem for marketers in connected TV, where a smaller pool of advertisers than those that buy traditional TV results in viewers sometimes seeing the same ad many times even in a single program.
Bond was the last straw: Regal and Cineworld will reportedly close all theaters in US and UK next week [The Verge] Yes Cinema is a platform. Yesterday, the 25th James Bond film — No Time to Die — was pushed back to April 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic, denying theaters one of the last major tentpole releases due out this year. Apparently, theaters were counting on Bond, specifically, to arrive on time and help bail them out of poor ticket sales.
Facebook will start surfacing some public group discussions in people’s News Feeds and search results [also The Verge] Facebook says it’ll start surfacing public group discussions in people’s News Feeds. These can show up if someone shares a link or reshares a post. Beneath that link, people will be able to click to see relevant discussions that are taking place about that same post or link in public Facebook groups. The original poster can then join the discussion even without joining the group. Recommended groups will also show up in the group tab if Facebook deems them relevant to people’s interests. Additionally, public group posts will start showing up in search results outside of Facebook, effectively giving them more reach and a much larger audience. Taken altogether, these updates set public groups to grow fast, which could backfire if extremist groups or communities spreading misinformation are promoted. Facebook says any posts marked false by a third-party fact checked won’t be eligible to be surfaced through these features.
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