This Week in Strategy: You can't spell quarantine without U R A Q T
Hi Strat Pack,
Another week at home, another week I hope you are staying safe and staying healthy. How sick are you of hearing about coronavirus? Pretty? That's fair. I tried to do a mix of corona/non-corona articles. Hopefully this does the trick.
BUT. Leading off, in coronavirus news, I've got to hand it to Marie Claire for publishing what we've all been thinking: My Boyfriend Andrew Cuomo’s New Girlfriend Is America. Trapped in my apartment, nowhere else to focus my hormones, the governor is the only man speaking directly TO ME for miles around. Here's a choice excerpt:
Andrew Cuomo, 62 years old, Sagittarius, divorced, recently single after his tabloid break-up with Sandra Lee, a father, dog owner, and brother of the arguably (much) hotter CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Andrew’s morning briefings are literally all I have to look forward to. Unlike President Trump’s briefings, which may as well just be stock footage of Toonces driving this country over the edge of a mountain, Gov. Cuomo addresses his constituents with respect, grace, sensitivity, and a firmness which I sometimes DVR and watch again at 2 a.m. when, as the great Britney Spears once sang, my loneliness is killing me. Slow down when you’re reading me those daddy-joke laden Powerpoint slides babe.
Uch his Powerpoints!! Nothing puts me at ease quite as much as watching Gov. Cuomies sternly explain to us how f*cked we are. It honestly makes this impending societal and financial collapse a little more manageable.
The entire article is worth a read. Anyway. In hyperlocal news, Williamsburg Landlord Mario Salerno Waives Rent for Hundreds of Tenants Due to Coronavirus. Mario Salerno owns Salerno's Auto Body, a gas station/repair shop that's literally 2 blocks from my apartment. They've recently been targeting me on instagram with this ad of a dog driving a car. He's also apparently a local landlord who is waiving April rent for every one of his 200+ tenants. “I’m really not concerned about the rent right now, I’m concerned about peoples’ health. Not only are we up against an epidemic, these poor people have no jobs and they’re worried about getting sick. I didn’t think it was much on a person like me, who god was good to, to help them all out,” he said.
Let's all try to be more like Mario Salerno. And let's all click through to that article to confirm that Salerno (and his kids) are exactly what you pictured in your mind.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how Cuomo Daddy is going to pay your rent this month. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) 5 Tips From A Consumer Psychologist On How Brands Should Respond To Coronavirus [AdAge]
[ED Note: Skip down to the Quick hits to see a roundup of how brands have responded from Julian Cole. Alright already - here's the link.]
Stop with the cute logos, play up your expertise and take action, advises Kit Yarrow
As the severity of the coronavirus outbreak began dominating the news early last week, brands at first took a cautious approach. PR pitches slowed to a trickle and social media posts tapered off. But this week, brands are not holding back, with seemingly every marketer trying to get in on the conversation, whether that means ramping up philanthropy or putting out ads to show how they are responding.
But as the activity picks up, so does the risk. Consumers are especially sensitive right now to anything that looks like a brand is exploiting the situation. “Brands really do have to be incredibly careful right now because consumers are definitely taking notes,” says consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow. “In times of stress and anxiety, consumers are hypervigilant.”
Yarrow, a professor emerita at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, shares her perspective on the latest edition of Ad Age’s “Marketer’s Brief” podcast. Below is a snapshot of her advice to brands on how to communicate during the pandemic.
Be careful
First of all, do no harm. “There is a good percentage of people [that are] really angry and they are looking for a scapegoat,” Yarrow says. “They are looking for someplace to put blame and so I think companies really have to get it right right now—by not making any mistakes first and foremost. And then, secondly, by approaching their relationship with their consumers in a really, really careful way.”
Don’t make it about yourself
Some brands have put out ads that try to encourage social distancing by re-imaging their logos. McDonald’s Brazil, for instance, on social media shared images of its Golden Arches in pulled-apart form. It drew a strong rebuke from Bernie Sanders on Twitter. (The image no longer appears on McDonald's Brazil-run social media accounts.)
Coke is running a Times Square billboard featuring its brand name—normally written in tightly connected Spencerian script—with space between each letter. Chiquita bananas removed its Miss Chiquita mascot from a version of its logo posted on Instagram.
Yarrow says these messages are wrongheaded: “It’s just a mistake because it’s all about them. Maybe in a month from now it could be OK-ish. But generally speaking, talking about yourself, talking about your business, talking about your needs is the worst thing you can do. Anything that appears to be self-serving is going to be mocked and thought of ... negatively.”
She adds that because there are some “trust issues going on with government, businesses actually have an enormous positive opportunity to fill that role for consumers—but it has to be all around consumer needs. It can’t be around our company, our logo, aren't we cute.”
Talk is cheap, take action
In the last week, numerous companies are stepping up their philanthropy. Alcohol brands are making hand sanitizers, Ford is partnering with 3M to make respirators and Unilever just announced it would spend $108 million on soap, sanitizer, bleach and food for charities. This is the right approach, Yarrow says. Brands should “understand what consumers really need right now and then [offer] that to them. Anything that you say is irrelevant right now. It’s really all about what you are doing.”
Put employees out front, skip the celebrity endorsements
Yarrow acknowledges that brands must still communicate their actions—but advises brands to make their frontline workers the stars of any campaign.
“Our heroes today are the truck drivers, the restaurant employees, the grocery stockers, our neighbors—everybody seems to have lost interest in big celebrities and their phony way of offering us some sort of sense of connection.” she says. “All the sudden all these little people around the world are becoming our heroes ... all brands can attach to that somehow. They have these employees. Attaching to that human element of their brand is where I think the action is today.”
Highlight your heritage and expertise
In recent years, old, established companies ceded the spotlight to sexy startups. But the pandemic has made old companies cool again. Ford, for instance, in its coronavirus-response ad highlighted its role making tanks and planes during wartime.
“In these times of upheaval we really like things that we can look back and rely on,” Yarrow says. “We want the reassurance of an old company that has been around a long time. There is an opportunity for these companies that looked maybe a little bit stale a couple months ago to look suddenly like solid and reassuring.”
“I think we have a renewed respect for expertise,” she says. “That acquired knowledge and expertise is something to be revered and valued. I think there will be a shift towards valuing that and understanding the role of that in our community.”
BONUS Article: Brands Suffer ‘Widespread’ Outcry After Unveiling Social-Distancing Logos [DesignTaxi] “There’s a fine line between being relevant and being opportunistic…” wrote Anselmo Ramos, founder of ad agency GUT. “Everything you do or don’t do communicates. It’s a pandemic. Not a brief.”
2) The World's Best Strategy of Q3 & Q4 2019 [Contagious]
From Contagious: This report contains advertising campaigns from the past year with the sharpest insights. These are condensed versions of our in depth interviews with the people who created the campaigns. The full interviews are available on Contagious I/O, an online intelligence tool containing more than 10,000 case studies analysing the best advertising and marketing in the world.
A 15 page document (also available as a PDF) definitely worth a read. Case studies include:
Nike / Graffiti Stores - Combining tech and street art to build hype for new product launches.
Black & Abroad / Go Back To Africa - How chutzpah and data nous turned a racial slur into a powerful marketing message.
Microsoft / Changing The Game - Demonstrating the demand for inclusive messages and rewards available to those that think about accessibility.
Burger King / Meltdown - Turning sustainability initiatives into lively marketing and an excuse to troll a rival.
Coca-Cola / Phonetic Can - Breathing new life into an old campaign and using packaging to spread a message.
Financial Times / The New Agenda - Reconsidering and communicating a brand’s role in the world to ensure a fresh stream of customers
3) Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas [New York Times]
A throwback from 2009 that seems just as relevant today. Click through to check out a ton of his ridiculous yet somehow plausible ideas.
What fascinates me about Johnson is his ability to riff on anything, from a sort of frivolous contraption called a brief skate (yes, a briefcase that morphs into a skateboard — perfect for today’s unemployed boomers) to a wholly prescient formed concept like Oakville, a gasoline-and-diesel-engine free city that features a freeway for electric cars and bicycles, and a medieval-like perimeter wall that keeps polluting cars out. He can be so out there as to make one think he shouldn’t be taken seriously until you realize just how serious his thinking can be.
This is a relentless age we’re living in, a time when innovative solutions — or any solutions, for that matter — to our seemingly infinite problems seem in short supply.
So how do we come up with new ideas? How do we learn to think outside of normal parameters? Are the processes in place for doing so flawed? Do we rely too much on computer models? On consultants? On big-idea gurus lauding the merits of tribes and crowds or of starfish and spiders? On Twitter?
At the risk of sounding like a big-idea guru myself, I can’t help thinking that we’re all so mired in it that we’ve forgotten how to get out of it — how to daydream, invent, engage with the absurd.That’s why I am so enamored with the work of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson, a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller. Johnson is a former urban planner, and his work tends toward the nodes where social issues intersect with design and urban planning issues.
In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes silly, sometimes visionary concepts, he has said, “If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous . . . [It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.”As the 70-year-old told me last week, “America has been falling into a depression, a psychological depression, for many years. Yet this is a land of pioneer inventors. It annoys me that an untrained person like myself can think up products easily (in fact I usually spend energy ‘turning off’ the idea-generating machine just as psychics train themselves to turn off their capability) and yet the nation seems to sit helplessly passive and wait to be saved somehow.”Every worker would appreciate the Nod Office (1984), an ingenious desk that can be transformed into a hidden sleeping chamber, perfect for late afternoon naps. Owning such a contraption remains for me a significant yet unrealized career goal.
What fascinates me about Johnson is his ability to riff on anything, from a sort of frivolous contraption called a brief skate (yes, a briefcase that morphs into a skateboard — perfect for today’s unemployed boomers) to a wholly prescient formed concept like Oakville, a gasoline-and-diesel-engine free city that features a freeway for electric cars and bicycles, and a medieval-like perimeter wall that keeps polluting cars out. He can be so out there as to make one think he shouldn’t be taken seriously until you realize just how serious his thinking can be.
To be sure, there’s no small amount of goofiness in Johnson’s creations, but deeper exploration into his decades of inventions show not only a complex and intuitive mind but real visionary tendencies. His mental process? It’s one he describes as “Mix-‘N-Match, outrageous extrapolation, speeded-up thinking, random/lateral thinking (which comes close to the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep where some claim inspired inventions and scientific inventions come through), and so forth.”
He writes of avoiding his desk when inventing, avoiding the connotations of serious endeavor, of earning a living. “I wish instead,” he writes, “to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.” Which seems, to me, about the right strategy for our times.
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
First Brand Response To COVID-19 [Planning Dirty - Julian Cole] Planning Dirty's been doing an analysis of brands' first responses to Covid-19. Most brands have frozen comms for 2-3 weeks. The one category that is miles ahead of everyone else in terms of responses is Airlines. Month long content calendars have gone out the window, this is about being able to work on 24-hour timelines. An excellent excellent resource
The Speed Premium in an exponentially growing pandemic world [Marginal Revolution] 'If you are writing commentary, the value is being there is the morning, not the evening. The “commentary cycle” used to stretch at least a day or two, occasionally a full week. Have you perused recent newspapers and mentally noted how many of the articles — such as reviews of art exhibitions — obviously were written and planned in The Time Before (can I call it that?). Those articles are now largely worthless, though a few of them may have nostalgia value.'
Turns Out People Are Actually Buying MORE Corona [MyRecipes] I actually got this from AdAge but couldn't get past their paywall, and the second most legitimate publication writing about this is apparently MyRecipes. according to data provided to Nielsen by Credit Suisse, who found that sales for Constellation brands, the parent company for Corona, were up 39 percent for the week that ended March 22 compared to the prior week. It turns out the brand is a lot more resilient than expected. After all, Corona may be the only way we can collectively find our beach this summer.
Advertising Embraces Adult Animation’s Existential Turn [Little Black Book] From Pringles and Grey New York’s Rick and Morty collaboration to Habito’s gleeful cartoon nightmares from Uncommon and Hornet, daring brands are turning into animaniacs, writes LBBs Laura Swinton. In 1989 The Simpsons showed that cartoons could tackle serious topics like marital tensions and tight finances. In the ‘90s the foul-mouthed edgelords of South Park were gloriously – or ingloriously – smashing every taboo they could. Hell, back in the ‘30s and ‘40s Betty Boop was busy administering novocaine to clowns and horny anthropomorphised wolves were busy #MeToo-ing famous fairy tale characters.. Agencies too are finding more uses for animation and specifically animated characters, which are often able to transcend cultural and political barriers and biases.
5) Department of Great Work
The Sound of Berlin [Vimeo] A quick break and a reminder of what normalcy looks like: A Musical Video using original sounds of the city of Berlin. In only 6 days of shooting, BONAMAZE sampled more than 850 sounds. Directed, Filmed, Edited & music by Gilad Avant and Stav Nahum - BONAMAZE bonamaze.com
Interactive: How the Coronavirus Has Changed Our Lives [NBC New York] And now back to your regularly scheduled corona programming. We see statistics everyday about a staggering number of new infections, it's very easy to lose the human factor. NBC did an amazing job collecting and displaying the stories of real humans experiencing this. From furloughed workers to front-line responders, Americans across the spectrum wrote in to describe their new lives. More than 2,500 readers responded to describe their experiences with the coronavirus as cases of COVID-19 in the United States spiked exponentially. Most worried about their elderly parents and grandparents. Others wondered how they would pay their bills, rent and insurance with sudden, widespread unemployment across the board. School seniors ask if they would see their friends and the community they've known for years for the last time. These are their stories.
Burger King Is Advertising a ‘Quarantine Whopper’ You Can Make at Home [AdWeek] I know what you're thinking: Finally, some goddamn advertising work! The ad “Le Whopper de la Quarantine,” or “Quarantine Whopper,” shows an array of store-bought ingredients that the chain’s fans can use to approximate a Whopper at home. Although he’s proud of the ad and the positive response it has received, Burger King global CMO Fernando Machado says what’s most important during this time is that brands respond to the crisis in substantive ways—something he believes BK parent company Restaurant Brands International has done. “I think that before jumping on ads, brands need to take action,” Machado told Adweek. “There are lots of good examples of brands helping people via concrete actions that help communities. On times like this, we all need to help.” Given that Burger King France is already contributing in larger ways than advertising, Machado felt it was appropriate for the brand to continue its “fun, entertaining and a bit daring” marketing tone with the Quarantine Whopper concept. From Paris agency Buzzman
Facebook & Droga5 Remind Us "We’re never lost if we can find each other." [B&T] The ad which is made up of real stories and content from around the world, is voiced by British poet Kate Tempest, reading her 2019 poetic song “People’s Faces”. It promotes Facebook’s Community Help function, which serves as a way for people to request or offer help to neighbors, such as volunteering to deliver groceries or donating to a local food pantry or fundraiser.
Grab A Guinness & Stay In - One Minute Brief [Twitter] You should follow @OneMinuteBriefs on twitter if you don't. so much raw talent. This piece of spec work for staying inside, actually got picked up by Guinness. Wonderful. From @redbaloonluke
Department of Lift-Your-Spirits Creative Works
Museum Asks People To Recreate Paintings With Stuff They Can Find at Home, Here Are The Results [Sad and Useless] Even though most of us are stuck at home during Coronavirus quarantine and can’t go out and enjoy art in museums, that doesn’t mean that life has to be boring or uncultured. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles challenged art fans to post photos of themselves recreating their favorite works of art from the safety of their homes. These are fantastic.
Ina Garten - Cocktail Hour [Instagram] "Two cups of vodka--good vodka--in a big pitcher." I'm sure you've already seen this. Ina drinking a half gallon worth of Cosmos in a giant martini glass is the content we need right now. Happy Friday.
In these trying times.. [Matt Booshell - Twitter] "That's why Fruity Pebbles teamed up with the Red Cross" Every brand's Covid-19 response. Every. Single. One.
Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Quarantines, 2020 [Reddit] A funny sendoff of the annual Gartner Hype Cycles. 9 seconds on reddit. Worth a click
Quarantined man runs full marathon on balcony during coronavirus lockdown [NY Daily News] A lockdown is no time to stop exercising, but some people are more dedicated than others. Such is the case of Elisha Nochomovitz, a French marathon runner who is on furlough from his restaurant job in Toulouse, who ran a full marathon on his apartment balcony on Tuesday after France’s 15-day nationwide shelter in place order went into effect. He added he wasn’t concerned about setting a new personal best. “Part of my goal was to kill as much time as possible.” Same, Elisha. Same.
Platform updates are on hiatus this week.
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