This Week in Strategy: My friend got his PhD in the field of Palindromes. Now I call him Dr. Awkward
Hi Strat Pack:
It's my birthday tomorrow (seriously)! And all I want for my birthday this year is some honest goddamn feedback. (Ether that or this $450 Carbonite Han Solo™ frozen into a 5 1/4-Qt Le Creuset Cast-Iron Signature Roaster that nobody got me for christmas...)
We've grown a lot over the last year, together, I hope. And in truth besides the occasional "your newsletter is too long" I really don't get a lot of feedback on this. In all seriousness, I compile these because I genuinely love our discipline and want to see advertising as an industry thrive. So! Can you do me a favor and just drop me a line with what you think? How often do you read This Week in Strategy? How much do you read? What do you want to see more of/less of? How can I improve? I would really really appreciate it.
Guys. Onto some seriously important stuff. Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue And It Has Ruined My Day. As a neurotic New Yorker, I can confidently tell you that I was absolutely gobsmacked. How could one get through the day without a running Ron Howard-in-Arrested Development inner monologue that evaluates, re-evaluates, and re-re-evaluates every interaction I've had over the last 20 minutes and 20 years.
How do they think? How does this affect their relationships, jobs, experiences, education? How has this not been mentioned to me before? All of these questions started flooding my mind. Can those people without the internal monologue even formulate these questions in their mind? If they can, how does it happen if they don’t “hear” their voice?
Do you have an inner monologue? Doesn't everyone? My world is literally thrown off its axis.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out if the voice in my head sounds more like Ron Howard, Jerry Seinfeld, or Keanu Reeves constantly discovering that he just learned Kung-Fu. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Marketers must break out of the ‘expertise trap’ [MarketingWeek]
Expertise combined with experience is seen as the holy grail in most job descriptions. But what if expertise ends up giving us blind spots?
Experience often deeply embeds assumptions in our minds that need to be questioned. We are not even conscious of how the ways we experience things might make us vulnerable to this. The classic trope to demonstrate the limitation of expertise is the tech and telecom vendors who pooh-poohed the iPhone when it came out. Microsoft said a device without a keypad had no chance.
Could it be the case that when we begin to identify ourselves as experts, our outlook can narrow? If the dynamics in the market change, do we notice or are we taken by surprise? Do we keep proposing the same familiar ideas to address new challenges?
Experts stick with their beliefs because they identify with the fact that they are ‘smart’ or ‘the best’ in their area of focus. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, talks about the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset: we can all see ourselves in the book when it describes a fixed mindset as a “person who doesn’t want to move – it’s all about preservation”.
A fixed mindset only wants to go after the right answer, rather than understanding how things really work and develop. A fixed mindset wants approval over experience and believes its talents are innate.
A growth mindset, however, worries less about looking smart and puts more energy into learning. To break the pattern of a fixed mindset, you first have to be self-aware. Are we aware of our intellectual limitations? Do we even know that we have ingrained ideas or ‘theories’ about how we approach our marketing roles?
Personal marketing effectiveness means breaking out of the professional ghetto of the ‘expertise trap’. Changing your mindset and inner narrative has to be the start. Author Daniel Kahneman writes that “the confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct”.
The goal for 2020 for all of us must be to understand how we see ourselves and our own story, check our assumptions and engage with diverse minds. Most of all, we must cultivate a beginner’s mindset to go along with our expert perspective.
2) A Slice of Lemon [IPA / System 1 Research]
The advertising brain has stopped working properly. It has lost its power to persuade, its ability to make people feel, and its talent to entertain. How has this happened? Has advertising’s brain turned sour?
Lemon opens with a focus on the “Crisis In Creativity” identified by analysts Les Binet and Peter Field (among others) and outlined in their recent work for the IPA. Creative effectiveness is in decline. The “effectiveness multiplier” for creatively awarded work has fallen, and campaigns produce fewer large business effects.
If creativity is under threat, then what’s responsible? Accounts of the crisis look to a variety of factors – like shifts in spend towards digital channels, greater emphasis on the short-term, and structural changes in the advertising industry. Lemon asks – what if there’s a deeper pattern influencing these? Might the answer lie in psychology and the science of how we perceive and relate to the world?
Lemon, by Orlando Wood, was published by the IPA in October 2019. This white paper mixes some of Orlando’s charts with a written summary of the book for a digest of Lemon’s key points.
Lemon offers a diagnosis and a cure. It reveals the cultural changes we’ve seen this century and explains the febrile world of today. It identifies the structural shifts in advertising that make left brained work more prevalent. It describes the emerging gulf between advertisers and the their audiences. And it shows how brands and agencies can make more effective, right-brained ads.
There's a lot of great charts and information in this PDF. Check it out! However, for the full Lemon experience we strongly recommend buying or reading the book itself!
3) Edelman Trust Barometer: 20 Years of Trust [Edelman]
Guys. This is a giant resource, easily an hour's worth of reading. I'm a big fan of the Edelman Trust barometer; it's influenced many briefs I've written over the years. This year, they include a lot more reading and exploration of the data than usual. It's another resource to bookmark and keep coming back to.
Trust is out of balance. The big four societal institutions are interdependent entities, but, outside of the developing markets of Asia, the balance between them is nearly as important as good functioning at the individual institution level. Business can be doing great, but if government does not hold up its end, you can’t have a healthy society. The same is true for media or NGOs.
The old adage that trust is easy to lose and hard to earn is true. In fact, the price of progress in modern times is that it’s easier and quicker to lose and it’s harder and takes longer to earn. The political and media forces pushing us apart, destroying reputations and vandalizing institutions are increasingly powerful.
Social media has upended trust in institutions. It’s put a very exciting and visible amount of power in the hands of the smartphone user, but also a worrying and much more opaque degree of power in the hands of the network operator, i.e., the social media platform. Noise and nonsense. Misinformation and exaggeration. Filter bubbles and extremism. The new media marketplace has proved more polarizing and unreliable than any media that’s gone before it. And while one-party states have used technology to reboot social control, investing more in propaganda and state messaging, the Western democracies have stood by and watched the digital Wild West aghast. People don’t know who to believe and believe what they want to. It’s the age of truthiness.
Trust suffers too when hard truths have been exposed. It was not only Lance Armstrong who was doping. During his seven Tour de France “wins” (1999-2005), 87 percent of the top-10 finishers (61 of 70) were confirmed dopers or suspected of doping. Volkswagen’s diesel cars may have expelled 40 times the allowed levels of toxic nitrogen oxide; 11 million cars may have been fitted with software to cheat diesel emissions tests. The company has already paid $30 billion in fines. After the exposure of sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein in 2017, #MeToo became not just a hashtag but a movement: 54 percent of American women told The Washington Post and ABC News that they had received unwanted and inappropriate sexual behavior and 95 percent of people thought such things went unpunished.
We live in a more networked world with more of us having greater access to the same information than ever before. But the picture on trust is anything but united. We live in two trust realities.
As the elites in developed countries have become relatively better off, their trust in institutions (business, government, media, and NGOs) has increased markedly. Trust is at lower levels and particularly among the mass population has risen more slowly than among the informed public.
Social capital, the asset identified by Francis Fukuyama as the key ingredient of success in our hyper-competitive age, is going to be more prized and more powerful. In the past 20 years, we have seen a fracturing of trust, but an increase in its value. Trust has emerged, like freedom and security, as itself a barometer of a successful society
“We cannot live only for ourselves,” wrote Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. “A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” Trust is the tie that binds us in our shared quest for a better future.
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
The marketing genius of Lil Nas X [Marketing Examples] A fascinating case study on the rise of Old Town Road from a marketer's POV. Most musicians think like failed startups. Too much time creating. Not enough time promoting. When Lil Nas X dropped out of college to pursue music he didn’t create much. Instead, he lived on Twitter, made online friends and got popular posting memes. His account quickly grew to 30,000 followers. The plan was to use his following to promote his music. But it wasn’t that simple
10 Briefs From 2020 SuperBowl [Julian Cole] Check out the strategy behind 10 of the biggest Super Bowl ads. Julian&co reversed engineered the creative briefs for Snickers, Google, Michelob Ultra, Amazon, Squarespace, Cheetos, and more.
Can the Weird Web make a comeback in 2020? [It's Nice That] When Flash slowly died in the 2010s, the weird web went with it. Social media became the 800-pound gorilla that slowly swallowed up independent creators. That said, there are a few trends today that give me hope that the weird web will make a comeback. Not only that, but I think it’ll be even better this time around.
How do you make successful social content? We asked Buzzfeed [Social PR Chat] Three reasons why people share content: Identity, Emotion, Information. People share content based on their ability to connect and identify with it. If they are emotionally connected or if the content is informative and gives them advice to potentially better their lives, they are more likely to share with their friends. People are taking content that is created on the web as a communication device. It allows people to communicate over vast spaces quickly and efficiently.
5) Department of Great Work
This AI-Operated Piano Converts Business Law Text into Unique Musical Pieces [Little Black Book] This is so cool. Vinge has built an AI-operated player-piano which converts legal text into music. Infrastructure agreements have their own melody, as do transactions in the telecoms sector and spin-offs of business areas. The AI instrument contains a large number of neural networks all of which are unique. When legal text is input into the machine, sensors are activated that scan the documents and, depending on the letter scanned, the AI chooses a suitable neural network which employs its own ‘understanding’ of how they wish to be expressed in music. From ANR BBDO in partnership with designer and musician Axel Bluhme.
KFC sneaks ads onto Spotify Premium by taking over artist profiles [DesignTaxi] ‘The first campaign ever on Spotify Premium'. Instead of interrupting tracks in a similar fashion to the commercials in Spotify’s basic service, KFC teamed up with three major artists from the region—Flipperachi, Moh Flow, and Shébani—to place imagery of Kentucky Burgers in their cover photos, bios, profile pictures and events. The artists’ playlists also sneakily nudged customers into enjoying the new menu item with song titles spelling out, “Discover, New, Kentucky, Burger, Come & Visit, KFC. Get It, Before It’s Too Late.” Like the Awkwafina 7 Train ad, I do not love that advertising is making nothing sacred. But as a marketer, this is such a clever way to 'hack' a platform. Like actually, not the way that 99% of us talk about platform hacks. (This isn't universally loved: Fast Company, for example, called it arrogant). But I'm sticking with it - very clever use of platform. From Memac Ogilvy.
Hotels.com "Another Vacation" TVC [iSpot] This ad has been out for a while but what can I say, I'm just seeing it now! Please just click through and watch this :30 from seemingly Y&R and CP&B (the credits list both - weird!). This is such a great example of insight-powered creativity.
Seventh Generation buys first crack at State of the Union response with ad across ABC, CBS, NBC [AdAge] The Unilever brand focused on climate change in an ad immediately after address and before Democratic response. The State of the Union address has never been a major marketing platform, other than for the president. Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union, sort of, thanks to Unilever’s Seventh Generation, who tapped a speech by the four-term president to narrate its 60-second ad against a backdrop of scenes from September’s Climate Strike and a shot from a 1945 VJ-Day celebration. This is a great example of creative and media working together to create a multiplier effect for the work. So smart. From Opinionated, Portland.
Special Feature: Super Bowl Creativity
The Super Bowl literally feels like it was 8 weeks ago to me. Before we jump into my personal opinion, check out this New York Times article that hits on one of the core issue of measuring effectiveness: we have literally dozens of success metrics that don't play nicely in the sandbox with each other. Are we measuring total views (YouTube), popular sentiment as expressed by voting (AdMeter), creative bravery (Clios) comments & images on social (Salesforce), feelings (ipsos) feelings but slightly different (Unruly) or sentiment on Twitter (Twitter)? Each can come out with a different result. And ultimately, these measures are only part of the equation.
Here's my hot take:
Moving away from purpose advertising: good! Last week, I mentioned that I really liked Google's Loretta spot. And I still do. But as Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, the medium is the message. And watching the spot a few (ok, several) beers deep, at a party in a jovial atmosphere, I didn't love that this spot was trying to make me cry. I still think it's excellent creative on its own, but it did not fit the context.
Celebrity is not creative strategy. Wow there were a lot of famous people in commercials this year. Smaht Pahk was great, not because it had Rachel Dratch, John Krasinski, et al., but because it fucking nailed the product RTB. Bill Murray's Jeep ad (link is to the superior, extended version) again was great because it used a cultural reference to convey the feeling of driving a Jeep. But so many brands wrote commercials around celebrities/famous IP that really didn't say anything at all or were just confusing. Looking at you: Audi's Let it Go, Coca-Cola's Show Up, Squarespace's Winona, and especially the two Discover ads that must have cost them a fortune
Overall, this year was a solid B. Not great, flashes of genius. Some real stinkers. But the trajectory is moving in the right direction, and hopefully marketers will see that great ads are the product of great creativity, not the main topic of conversation on the yachts at Cannes this year.
6) Platform Updates
‘Increasingly an awareness platform’: Amazon advertising is moving beyond search [Digiday] That Amazon is now seeking to strengthen its advertising offering beyond lower-funnel conversion ads is no surprise. As Amazon’s ad business has matured, the company has sought to add more capabilities beyond search advertising to position itself as a more serious player and compete with Facebook and Google. “Amazon’s really rising to the challenge and increasing ad inventory as marketing costs continue to increase on Facebook and Google".
Instagram Now Lets You Respond To Stories With GIPHY GIFs [WeRSM] Another small update, but a cool one nonetheless! Instagram has announced that you can now reply to Stories with GIFs from GIPHY. This is really going to force me to up my Meme-response game.
Messenger Launches One-Time Notification API to Enable Businesses to Send Important Follow-up Messages [Facebook for Developers] The update has tons of to potential use cases like price drop alerts, back in stock alerts, and other important follow-ups that people have requested notifications for. I think that especially for embattled customer service brand like *ahem* telecom, this could really help us improve customer experience.
Snapchat Q4 19: Revenue Increases 44% YoY, but Rising Costs Remain a Concern [SocialMediaToday] Basically, Snap's results are okay, but not great. It's adding users, but it needs to add more, and faster; it's improving its revenue position, but it needs to be making more outside of North America. How can Snap achieve these things? One thing's for sure, slow and steady will not end up winning the race in this respect. Expect to see Snap ramping up its monetization efforts over the course of 2020.
YouTube Reveals Revenue for First Time: $15.1 Billion in 2019 [Hollywood Reporter] For the first time, Google on Monday revealed just how big of an advertising machine YouTube is. The company said that YouTube generated about 10% of Google's ad revenue in fiscal 2019, including $4.7 billion in the fourth quarter. Interesting to compare that Instagram, which brought in $20 billion in advertising revenue last year, accounting for more than a quarter of Facebook’s overall 2019 revenue.
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!