This Week in Strategy: Where did the Terminator find toilet paper? Aisle B, back!
Hi Strat Pack,
First things first - I'm aware that we blew last Friday's 8am publishing deadline by a pretty substantial margin. Sometimes you have to choose between doing the dishes and writing a newsletter. And in these quarantimes, sometimes you have to do dishes and chill. The Strategy Editorial regrets this lapse and promises to do better. If for no other reason than compressing two weeks of work into an already admittedly long newsletter is really difficult, man! Anyway, onto the news...
Let's talk about Stanley Tucci for a second. In 2005, I once told Stanley Tucci he looks exactly like Stanley Tucci. In typical Tucci fashion he responded with an extremely dry, "I get that a lot". I died of embarrassment right in front of him. I've been a huge Tucc-head ever since [ED Note: those are soft C's] But enough about me. May this video of Stanley Tucci doing a cocktail masterclass be a blessing upon your twitter feed. I could watch Stanley mix drinks (for me, ideally!) all day. What a delight.
OK - one heartwarming Covid-thing and one not. Watch Heartwarming Videos Of Last Night’s City-Wide Sing-Along To ‘New York, New York’ The song started right after the usual 7pm clap that now takes place to thank essential workers for their service. The tribute was organized by New York Sings Along, a project of The Peace of Heart Choir, which performs free concerts in hospitals, nursing homes and more all over NYC. Very nice.
And also pretty topical: How Our Brains Navigate the City is a fascinating read from 2012. I've been taking some really extended walks recently into new and different neighborhoods in New York. It's been eye-opening to me. There are huge swaths of Brooklyn & Queens that I've gone right by either in a subway or a taxi. But when I walked through them it was fascinating to see much and how quickly the fabric of the city upends itself, reconfigures, and settles back down. Which gets back to how we navigate. Results support the popular belief that people have access to something like a map in their heads and suggest that—at least for our participants from Tübingen—this map is oriented north," Frankenstein (seriously, that's the researcher's name) and colleagues conclude. Still they found the result a bit "surprising."
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out why New York, New York is my favorite Karaoke song. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The new Low Touch Economy [Boards of Innovation]
This is one of the better Covid reports I've seen, because they focus on the medium- and long-term with several different scenarios. I thought the shifts in consumer behavior were also very useful, especially when planning for Holiday campaigns and beyond 2H. Not going to summarize the whole thing here but it's a great read. And the link takes you directly to the PDF, no registration required.
The post-Covid19 era will have an economy shaped by new habits & regulations based on reduced close-contact interaction and tighter travel & hygiene restrictions.
The current disruption will change how we eat, work, shop, exercise, manage our health, socialize, and spend our free time - at an unprecedented rate of change.
In this report we look at:
1. Why our world will be very different
2. 10 Examples of expected shifts in consumer behavior, and opportunities for businesses
3. How different Industries are impacted
4. What to do now
2) The best marketers will be upping, not cutting, their budgets [Marketing Week]
It may seem like a paradox, but recessionary periods actually provide fertile grounds for marketers to grow their brand’s market share if they’re prepared to think long-term.
“…most firms tend to cut back on advertising during a recession. This behaviour reduces noise and increases the effectiveness of advertising of any single firm that advertises. Thus, the firm that increases advertising in this environment can enjoy higher sales and market share. When the economy expands, all firms tend to increase advertising. At that point, no single firm gains much by that increase. The gains of the firms that maintained or increased advertising during a recession, however, persist. This theory is also the most reasonable explanation for all the empirical effects of GDP on advertising and of advertising on sales, market share and profitability. It is also a simple, but strong, refutation of the theory for cutting back on advertising during a recession.”
From Research on Advertising in a Recession: A Critical Review and Synthesis
by Tellis and Tellis
It’s a paragraph that every marketer should tattoo across their chest as we hurtle into a Covid-19 recession. When the strange epidemiological crisis that currently engulfs us eventually comes to its bitter conclusion, we can expect an equally serious and probably more enduring period of economic pain
Most estimates suggest advertising investment is likely to be reduced by between 30% and 60% over the rest of 2020 and beyond. Marketing Week’s latest survey suggests that around 90% of marketing budgets have been delayed or are under review.
Why brands need to think long-term amid the coronavirus pandemic
That’s terrifying news if you work in advertising, media or marketing services. But it will be music to the ears of a small bunch of superior marketers. A select few are preparing a tactical move that could set them and their brands up for the next decade. Trained marketers know more than shit ones and this is one of those moments where it counts. Specifically, these better marketers know four very important things:
Advertising has both short and long-term effects. These longer-term effects can take several years to fully manifest and they are largely invisible in the immediate, inherently short-term metric called ROI.
Less able marketers will now cut their ad budgets because their boss told them to or because they actually think that the savings from killing a campaign will be superior to any impact that advertising would have generated.
By maintaining ad budgets at current levels this year and next, the same investment will have a much greater impact because competitors have either gone bust and stopped advertising or reduced their ad spend significantly – see point two.
Ramping ad spend back up when the recession ends is relatively pointless because (and I refer you back to point one above) it takes time for advertising to achieve its ultimate, longer term effects.
The recession is, because of points one to four, an unprecedented opportunity to increase advertising and grow market share.
The reason the recession is such a fertile place to grow market share has nothing to do with the downturn itself or its impact on consumers. It’s because competitors pull back and you – hopefully – do not. When Sam Walton, the legendarily savvy founder of WalMart, was asked about the 1990 recession, his reply encapsulates best practice recessionary marketing: “I thought about it and decided not to take part.”
You need most marketers to be shit for your bold recession approach to succeed.
It’s a triply smart reply because advertising through the recession keeps your brand strong during the downturn, maintains the long-term trajectory of your marketing spend and brand salience, and allows you to enjoy a window of opportunity that will not remain open forever.
There are few things more proven in the world of marketing than the power of advertising in a recession. But we must offset that fact against another well researched statistic: many marketers don’t know enough about marketing to do their jobs well. They don’t understand ESOV, long-term effects, advertising in a recession or the lessons of marketing history that stretch back a century to Roland Vaile and a ledger of ancient businesses that have long disappeared. In a way that last sentence is not a negative one. Frankly, you need most marketers to be shit for your bold recession approach to succeed.
If you can keep your head and your marketing budget, while those around you are losing theirs, you will be a marketer my friend. And a successful one at that!
3) Use Data to be Relevant to More People, Not Visible to Fewer #DigitalSense #MediaSense [Jerry Daykin - Linkedin]
Data remains one of those wonderfully nebulous industry buzz words - dropping a mention of it into any pitch, presentation or PowerPoint is sure to attract nods of interest and approval even if half the people in the room have no idea what you really mean by it. It’s vague enough to cover just about all aspects of insight, planning, activation and measurement and yet everyone knows that we’re ‘supposed’ to be using more of it so it must be good.
Whichever half of that room you think you sit in it’s time for us to take a long hard look at how we are using data. For me it should fundamentally be about being consumer obsessed and how we take advantage of the rich information out there to better resonate with more potential customers. Often that means the ones who aren’t leaning in and wouldn’t have stopped to think about us otherwise.
In reality many data approaches do almost exactly the opposite, identifying the lowest hanging fruit that’s ripe for harvesting and focussing marketing activities on them to drive the most immediate ROI. The work of Binet and Field has highlighted that the result of this has been consistent decreases in marketing effectiveness over the past couple of decades, despite the rise of all these new technologies and approaches.
The advertising industry has allowed quality and context to be erased as a price for fetishising data & targeting but it’s a course we need to rapidly reverse, especially as we look for new ways to build personalisation and relevance.
As soon as you start talking about data it’s easy to jump to targeting, to complex programmatic campaigns or even to dynamic creative optimisation, yet data is just another way of tapping into the macro insights & observations marketing has always thrived on. My first advice for brands looking to use more data is to start at the top of their strategy not the bottom of their execution.
If you’re trying to reach fanatical football fans you can of course undertake all sorts of cunning data partnerships to find people who have spent money on football tickets, tweeted about recent games, or searched for specific keywords and chase them around the internet. Or of course you can buy advertising in contextual environments (such as around football results coverage) and be guaranteed not only of reaching fans who are focussed on their passion at that exact moment, but also of side stepping any unintended biases that might have crept into your targeting.
Might you have been tempted to only target male football fans for instance? There’s quite often a bias in our targeting decisions where we look to validate our own expectations. Those biases can be well hidden in the system - if you’re letting an algorithm optimise who sees your adverts based on who’s most likely to watch or engage with it are you still chasing your most valuable future customers, or just the most clicky people? What if the audience you need to reach is disengaged and less likely to pay attention to begin with? I’m forever trying to flag that one of the unintended consequences of ‘brand safety’ settings is that overzealous key word blocking can exclude entire minorities from seeing your content (eg Vice found that ‘Muslim’ and ‘Lesbian’ were blocked more often than ‘Rape’ and ‘Murder’, they’ve now banned advertisers using some of these words against their sites).
There’s a term in TV for the inadvertent audience who accidentally sees your adverts outside of your planned target audience and that’s ‘wastage’. Not a great name for something which fundamentally helps drive your brand and ensure unexpected people are aware of your existence. In digital the closest thing we have is probably ‘earned media’ and we make a huge fuss about that even though its scale is far smaller. When you apply targeting to digital campaigns you need to be aware not only of who you are choosing to reach but also who you are not.
Absolutely there is power to be found in this approach but in many early examples we’ve seen brands take 2 steps back in terms of creative quality, emotion and cut through just to then take one step forward in terms of personal relevance. It’s a key watch out and a practical production reality if you’re trying to find a way to make scalable multi-execution creative rather than single universal approaches. Furthermore, it’s easy to get lost in chasing these sometimes-arbitrary creative audiences and lose track of the broad category growth driving audiences you were supposed to be reaching. If you go down this route, consider the critical importance of ‘catch all’ targeting so at least some of your communication is getting to the total audience that you need. Above all consider how personalised you really want to get, it’s rarely truly 1:1 and so often you can spare the pain of trying to get and use personal data by looking at broader groups.
Rather than rushing ahead with trials to use more and more later, perhaps we could spend more time looking at context, alternatives and what we're really trying to drive? Though of course there will remain instances where access to data remains a valuable and sustainable competitive advantage.
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
Sacred 6 Elements of a Creative Brief [Planning Dirty] On a search for the holy grail of creative briefs. Antonio Frongia, Baiba Matisone and Julian Cole analyzed over 30+ creative brief templates. What we found were six components that appeared in more than half of the briefs. With the Sacred Six, we created a briefing template and then put it into action on past campaigns for Barbie, Lysol, and Seamless. You can download the template and see the cases here
Land O’Lakes Removes Native American Woman From Its Products [New York Times] The company, a farmer-owned cooperative formed in 1921, said it would replace the decades-old illustration with photos of its members on some products. Beth Ford, the Land O’Lakes chief executive, said in the statement that as the company looked ahead to its centennial, it recognized the need for “packaging that reflects the foundation and heart of our company culture.”
Internal Memo from the Old White Man Who Runs Your Holding Company and Who's Never Created an Ad.
[AdAged] Dear Colleagues, Well, let’s start again. Colleagues is too much of an over-promise, even for me. You’re not actually colleagues. In fact, of the 32,000 bipedal carbon-based lifeforms employed by Duplicicom, I only know 12 by name. Three of those I went to boarding school with and make up my usual foursome at Boondoggle Oaks Country Club, and the other nine are the remaining people in Duplicicom who make eight-figure salaries. OK, dear disposable soon to be laid-off, furloughed or strategically reassessed cost centers. That’s better, but too long.Kantar's take on Generational responses to Covid-19 [LinkedIn] In short generational reactions to COVID19... Gen Z 😞| Millennials 😐| Gen X 🤔| Boomers 😳
5) Department of Great Work
I'm sure by now we've all seen the brilliant Covid-19 supercut by Microsoft Sam that All Covid-19 Response ads are the same. But, guys, have you seen Goat 2 Meeting from the first link below? Absolutely brilliant. Goat! To meeting! Incredible! [ED Note: The Department of Great Work may be punnier than usual. We regret that you have to put up with our terrible sense of humor and appreciate you slogging through.]
Invite a llama or goat to your next corporate Zoom meeting or video call for under $100 [Business Insider] An animal sanctuary in Silicon Valley called Sweet Farm is letting people pay to get llamas, goats, and other farm animals to tune into their video calls for under $100. Since launching the service, called Goat 2 Meeting, last month, Sweet Farm has fielded more than 300 requests for animal cameos and virtual field trips in work happy hours and corporate meetings.
McDonald’s Mocks Phone Launches With ‘5G’ Smart Product—Turns Out To Be Chicken [IGN] This is by far the best work ever. On the days leading to the unveiling, McDonald’s China posted a series of ads teasing what looked like a smartphone, including sneak glimpses at a rear camera, facial recognition, and a liquid bezel-free design. If you don’t speak Mandarin, then all of this makes very little sense. But if you do speak Mandarin, then you’ll know that the world Ji - pronounced like ‘G’ - is Mandarin for chicken. Yes, the entire campaign is a pun. As for the 5, well that’s the five chicken technologies, of course: taste, freshness, juiciness, crispy texture, and multiple sizes (leg, wing, and breast).
Museum opens up art collection to Animal Crossing fans [Polygon] The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, more than 70,000 artworks, can easily be imported into Animal Crossing, thanks to an open-source online tool and the Getty Museum’s open-access collection. If you'd like to do a deeper dive, expanding your search beyond the Getty’s own collection, the museum’s Animal Crossing Art Generator will also let you import artwork from other participating museums. All you need is to hunt down an IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework)-compatible artwork from one of the institutions that participate in the program.
NZ Government’s ‘For Tomorrow’ Spot Achieves a Successful Shoot During Covid-19 Crisis [Little Black Book] The spot, from Clemenger BBDO does a good job of reminding us to stay united. What I think is interesting is how they did production for this - entirely using social distancing practices. All location and production prep done by each individual from the safety of their home. Post-production was also conducted remotely. The director, producer, agency, and client were remote, and communicated with each other via various screen sharing services. The entire article is worth a read.
IN OUT [YouTube] A simple powerful message to convince Britons to stay at home. Simple, vital, and persuasive. Share with everyone! A collaboration between Simon Ratigan at HLA, Paul Watts at The Quarry, Warren Hamilton and Parv Thind at Wave and Nick Bell. Way more compelling than McDonald's separating their arches.
Battery Park City Authority Celebrates National Poetry Month With “Raining Poetry In BPC” [NY.gov] I love this phrase: "Serendipitous encounters with poems are made easy." Raining Poetry in BPC, a temporary public art project that on rainy days will display excerpts of poetry on the paths, plazas, and sidewalks of Battery Park City. Portions of nine popular poems by luminaries such as United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and others are being stenciled on hard surfaces across the neighborhood.
Budweiser brings back ‘Wassup’ ads starring Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union and Chris Bosh [USA Today FTW] Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union, Candace Parker, Chris Bosh and DJ D-Nice are all on a group video chat like Zoom and asking each other WASSSSSSUPP! But there’s a touching end to it when they all ask how they’re actually doing and reminding everyone to check in with each other during these frightening times: ‘Buds support buds. Check in on yours’. I cannot find credits for this - if you know where this came from, drop me a line!
Hulu to ‘Parasite’ haters: ‘If you don’t want to read subtitles,’ learn Korean [LA Times] Love this! When haters began to troll the comments section with complaints about Bong Joon Ho’s South Korean masterpiece, the streaming platform’s social media team made it clear whose side it was on. “It’s not in English, no one wants to watch a movie that they literally have to read to understand what’s going on,” someone with the username “Parasite was trash” wrote. “Sound is such a huge part of movies and it being in a different language is so [weird].” Minutes later came Hulu’s snarky reply: “If you don’t want to read subtitles, you can always learn Korean!” The official Twitter page for “Parasite” got in on the fun too, effectively shutting down another user who called the Oscar winner a “pathetic movie.” “Or as we like to call it, ‘BEST PICTURE,’” the thriller’s account replied.
6) Platform Updates
Snapchat Daily Users Jump 20% in Q1, Sending Snap Stock Price Soaring [Variety] “We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our community and partners during this difficult time,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in announcing the results. Snap reported Q1 revenue of to $462.5 million in Q1 2020, up 44% year-over-year.
Wait … Is Twitter Good Now? [New York Times] Sort of.. A conversation between three Times correspondents in the Sunday Styles section. Worth a check out. Here's a sample
Choire: I think the idea that Twitter is good again is primarily just in comparison to what it used to be like, which was absolutely the worst. The part I “like” (actually find very distressing) is that it’s more extremely, horrifically earnest. I’m seeing a lot more tweets that are like “My aunt/father/co-worker has just died,” which keeps the insincere levels lower. The other element is that people are under extreme stress and are being often honest in unattractive ways, a thing that I enjoy.
Amanda: I’m intrigued by the theory that the worse we are, the better Twitter is.Facebook still plans to put ads in WhatsApp [Engadget] It sounds like ads in WhatsApp won’t be coming any time soon. Facebook has made clear that it will take years to merge its messaging infrastructure across its apps, and WhatsApp will take the longest to integrate
Quibi is the anti-TikTok (that’s a bad thing) [TechCrunch] Quibi is the inverse of TikTok, which feels fiercely alive. TikTok is designed to immediately immerse you in crowd-vetted content that grabs your attention and inspires you to spread your take on it to friends. That’s why TikTok has almost 2 billion downloads to date, while Quibi picked up just 300,000 on the day of its big splash into market. Click through for a breakdown of the major missteps by Quibi, why TikTok does it better and how this new streaming app can get with the times.
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!