This Week in Strategy: I had a dream I was swimming in an ocean made out of orange soda last night. It took me a while to work out it was just a Fanta sea
Hi Strat Pack,
I have such a wonderful Valentine's Day present for all of you to make up for this week's absolute groaner of a one liner: It's 78 new complex emotions from the geniuses at New York Magazine! For example: Abundamort: When you love someone or something so much you feel like you will die, and Ambivatained: How you feel when you keep watching prestige-TV shows even though you don’t think you actually like them very much. (which is coincidentally the tone I strive for in this newsletter), and most importantly: Textual Dread: The nausea of knowing those three blinking dots are going to say something you don’t want to hear. This is 100% the best article in this week's newsletter.
Two more internet items that I think you should know about before we jump in:
I discovered Surrealism Today's Instagram account this week, and so should you. Because the world is getting weirder every day. I can't explain it. I just need you to click on that link.
Huckberry asks Twitter What's your go-to hot sauce -- local or that we've probably never heard of? Friends of the show know that I am a huge hot sauce aficionado. I literally went through the anxiety of checking a bag on a recent flight back from New Orleans just so I could bring home a really-delicious-yet-larger-than-3oz-container of hot sauce I purchased at a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon. If nothing else, click through to read the names of these niche sauces
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how many Scovilles you'd rate Dali's Persistence of Memory (probably a billion though, amirite?). Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week (ok, two things..they're both great)
1) Giving Creative Feedback [Julian Cole]
Mind Surgery - Giving Creative Feedback [GroupThink]
Feedback. The name of the meeting already implies that there's something wrong with work. Which means that creatives are prepared to be on the back foot the second you walk into the room.
Become a pro at delivering creative feedback at the right time. I think at some point in everyone's career we find out that it's not enough to be right about something, we need to deliver our thinking in a way that is palatable to the recipient.
These two decks provide complementary approaches to how to frame your feedback, and guidance on what your feedback should be. It’s crucial to use the creative review to build a link between the strategy and the creative idea Creatives need problems, not solutions. Give them a chance to get it right: explain why you don’t like something.
Julian looks at the approach from a Head --> Heart --> Body approach.
Head: What we’re trying to solve, who we’re talking to and what we think we need to say to them. This is figured out before we see creative ideas, it informs the brief.
Heart: The actual things we’re saying, how and where we’re saying it. When we see creative ideas for the first time this is the feedback we look to give.
Body: The specific mechanics of how it works, the copy, the visuals, the color, font, visuals. When we like an idea, we give this feedback once we’ve bought off on an idea.
Groupthink looks at the mechanics of the creative review process itself:
The context for giving feedback
The session: expectation & outputs, understand what to judge before you're judging
Know the right time to give the right kind of guidance
Both are wildly useful decks. It doesn't matter if you've been in the industry for 10 minutes or 10 years. We could all use a refresher on this
2) Bring me Fools & Geniuses [BBH Labs]An oldie but a goldie from Jim Carroll former chairman of BBH London. A few years ago I listened to a talk from Theresa Herd, then head of Intel's in-house agency and she said something that really stuck with me: Strategists are sense makers. I think it's so easy to forget that our job is to take these wildly complex products/value propositions and boil them down to their essence so creatives can make great work. We, as strategists, have so much pressure to show evidence of industry that it's too easy to come up with 40-slide deck of frameworks and marketing jargon. But that's not our job. Nor should we want it to be.
Like many people I was amused by Rory Sutherland’s recent piece in The Spectator, in which he suggested it might be a smart strategy for Agencies to recruit graduates with lower class degrees.
Sutherland argues that there is no evidence that ‘recruits with first-class degrees turn into better employees than those with thirds’. Graduates with lower class degrees are in fact undervalued by the market and as a result they’re less expensive and more loyal.
I thought I might contribute my own perspective to the debate and indeed my own trusty Recruitment Tool:
In my many years of working with Strategists, I have established that very smart people can reduce highly complex conundra into quite simple challenges. In this respect they have something in common with the less-than-intelligent, who see the world simply despite its many sophistications.
I have also observed that those with moderate-to-medium levels of intelligence can perceive complexity in every aspect of every problem.
This has led me to conclude that the only useful Strategists are fools or geniuses….
3) Marketing and media's troubled future: Mark Ritson, LinkedIn-backed global think tank and IPA UK's Fran Cassidy have a solution [Mi3]
“You can be extremely efficient at being useless as a marketing organisation. You can be incredibly effective as a marketing organisation without being very efficient. Effectiveness should come first. Efficiency is a nice thing and you should continue to strive for it. But efficiency for the sake of efficiency is a terrible, terrible way to live.”
- Jann Schwarz
Short-term tactics have trapped marketers into just one ‘P’ – promotion – in marketing's “4P’s” lexicon of Price, Product, Place (distribution) and Promotion (communication). But even “Promotion" is in credibility decline with senior business management. In a tour de force for B2C and B2B professionals, Mark Ritson, Jann Schwarz, global director of the New York-based B2B Institute and IPA advisor Fran Cassidy nail what needs to happen - now.
A survey conducted via the Financial Times should seriously worry marketers. It found that the vast majority of business leaders have lost faith in brand and its power to drive growth. If that’s the case, they may well be asking what is the point of marketing.
Meanwhile, B2B marketers have painted themselves into a corner by focusing on short-term sales metrics. They are so tactical they don’t even have time to think about brand, let alone long-term strategy.
Without concerted corrective action, the outcome does not look good.
“It’s time to stop rearranging the deck chairs,” says Jann Schwarz, global director at LinkedIn-funded think tank, The B2B Institute. “You have to really turn the ship around and focus on long-term growth and the drivers of long-term growth.
These are: “Brand, emotion, and aligning marketing with finance.”
Driving short-term sales will always have a place, says Schwarz. “But you don’t win the respect of the C-suite and the boardroom by being very good at tactics. You have to have a long-term vision. You have to build the brand.”Learn to talk money“The continual use of marketing metrics and jargon by the marketing team doesn’t do them any favours and it doesn’t make them look more important. It just makes them irrelevant. It means that their peers cannot assess whether they’re contributing to what really matters, because they don’t understand what they’re talking about,” suggests Cassidy.
“So, in my view, we should be not saying things like, ‘We’re having three campaigns this year. Why couldn’t we say something like, ‘Our strategic program has three phases’? Instead of saying, ‘We want to put 50 per cent of our money into brand activity’, we should be saying something like, ‘To reach 5 per cent margin objective, we need to widen our customer base’,” Cassidy explains.
“We need to convert all of our marketing phrases into commercial benefit.”
Effectiveness departmentsSome corporates have realised the symbiosis between finance and marketing and are now creating “effectiveness departments”, says Cassidy. Those partnerships are born of internal relationship building and Cassidy advises marketers to initiate advances.
“In the most successful companies, the marketing department doesn’t just communicate with the finance team by emailing them a monthly report,” says Cassidy.
“They invite them in to understand how they came to that budget and very often, as a result of that strengthened relationship, it means the marketing team can get more money - because the finance team understands what it will do for the company.”
This whole article is great and worth a check out. Or if you have 45 minutes - listen to the podcast!
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Banned Insights: Any use of these insights means we can make fun of you [Corey Kindberg - Twitter] This is canon.
Female Directors Were Frozen Out of This Year’s Oscars, so They’re Stealing the Broadcast’s Ads [AdWeek] The #GiveHerABreak campaign used an online portal to watch the Oscars, replacing commercial breaks with trailers for over a dozen of the buzzworthy and blockbuster films directed by women last year—to remind viewers that the Academy voters that collectively snubbed female directors.
Some Advice on Doing Your Own Thing [Only Dead Fish] Neil Perkin shares some advice on what to expect when you make the jump to freelance, based on his 10 years of experience. An excellent, interesting read. My favorite: it can be unsettling, but wonderfully energizing. My second favorite (but maybe the most important): don't work with dicks.
Brandless shuts down operations, becoming SoftBank Vision Fund's first failure [Protocol] The idea was a clever mix of marketing and anti-marketing: Major brands pass the costs of ad campaigns down to consumers, the pitch went, but Brandless wouldn’t have to. But one way or another, the math didn’t work out. It still had shipping costs to deal with, for one thing. For another: Advertising is a good way to get customers.
5) Department of Great Work
I'm doing something a little different this week: most of the work featured more art than advertising. I use this section to highlight outstanding creative, and that's what I think all this is. Even (and especially) work from the likes of the Times and the Post shows how important creativity is for keeping your brand alive and salient. We'll be back to more traditional ad-like objects next week.
This Amazon parody dating site is hilarious… and also kind of creepy [TheNextWeb] An Amazon Dating site cropped up this week, and it looks almost exactly like you’d imagine such a site would look like were it actually Bezos’s company making it. Its GUI looks almost exactly like that of Amazon‘s desktop site, with the smorgasbord of products replaced with smiling human faces. As satire goes, this one is pretty elaborate. Every potential paramour comes complete with a price and reviews. You can select them by height and love language (“acts of service,” or “physical touch”). Created by conceptual artists Ani Acopian, Suzy Shinn, Morgan Gruer, and animation studio Thinko.
Nintendo Opens Game Lounges at U.S. Airports [Motley Fool] Everyone could use a smile while going through TSA security. Nintendo has a solution, at least for the short term. The Japanese game maker will open Nintendo Switch On The Go pop-up lounges this month at select U.S. airports. On Feb. 17, pop-ups are currently scheduled to open at Dulles International (Washington D.C.), Tacoma International (Seattle), and O'Hare International (Chicago). A pop-up will open at Dallas Love Field on Feb. 13.The pop-ups will offer charging ports and playable Switch demos in both handheld and TV mode. Some of Nintendo's most popular games will be available, including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Super Mario Odyssey.
The Best Oscars Red Carpet and After-Parties Photos [New York Times] New York Times caption game is with Oscar photos. A photo of Janelle Monáe in her shimmering dress was captioned, “Beep beep boop.” Other gems include “Who’s going to drive you home, Adam Driver?” and “Martha Stewart, unbothered.”
We sent disposable cameras to 25 women across the U.S. Here’s what they captured. [Washington Post] I seriously love this. The Post sent cameras to 25 women across the country, along with a simple task. Photograph their lives over the course of a few weeks: their loved ones, their Friday nights, their quiet moments alone. These women are mothers, Hollywood actresses, retirees. They are cookbook authors and NASCAR drivers and college students. They span four generations, live in the Midwest and the Northeast and the South.
KFC Celebrates Its Signature Fried Chicken With Crocs Collab [Hypebeast] For those who always wanted to wear a bucket of fried chicken on their feet, KFC has now collaborated with Crocs on a playful Classic Clog. Celebrating its signature fried item, Kentucky Fried Chicken looked to create a footwear option that authentically representing its food experience.
6) Platform Updates
Can’t find the perfect emoji? Google will now mix and match them [FastCompany] The update, called Emoji Kitchen, already came out on most Android phones. We’re talking a kissy face with pleading, child eyes. We’re talking a ghost wearing a cowboy hat. We’re talking about a poop and a heart, together at last. “A lot of it is based on how we communicate digitally,” says Jennifer Daniel, creative director for Google emoji, about the project. “We see people wanting to play with emoji as they do with words, mashing them together . . . to make new concepts.” Emoji Kitchen takes this idea to the next level, replacing the short phrases of emoji that you might use into single images that convey multiple ideas into one.
Canada Is Cracking Down on Influencer Marketing [Hypebeast] The Canadian Competition Bureau has confirmed that it will be enforcing these rules much more strictly, specifically in the health and beauty, fashion, technology and travel industries. In December 2019, it reportedly sent formal letters to around 100 brands and advertising agencies asking them to “review their marketing practices to ensure compliance with the law.” Additionally, the Bureau told the companies that influencer reviews must be based on actual experience using the product or service, otherwise they will face false advertising action.
Snapchat introduces new interventions for mental health [FastCompany] The company is adding a new tool called Here For You to the service. So if you search topics ranging from depression to thinspo (the “thinsperation” content that can promote anorexia), Snap’s results will intervene with helpful content written by experts. The move is meant to protect the particularly young and malleable users of Snapchat—90% of all 13- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. use the service (which Snap readily points out is more than Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger combined)
WhatsApp now has 2 billion users [The Verge] WhatsApp used the milestone to reiterate the importance of encrypting its users’ messages, a practice that is coming under increasing amounts of pressure from lawmakers around the world.
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!