Last Week in Strategy: Someone ripped a bunch of pages out of both ends of my dictionary, so now it just goes from bad to worse.
Hi Strat Pack,
As many people were taking the day off to commemorate Juneteenth on Friday, I didn't think it was appropriate to send a newsletter out (slash I didn't think anyone would read it). And then what can I say, it was not a productive weekend. So it's Monday and here we are. Regularly scheduled programming will resume this Friday.
I think just one thing to tee you up with this week... Crows are watching your language, literally. Did you know that crows can identify distinct human faces? Me neither! A recent study from Japan showed that they can also identify different languages being spoken. Why is this important? I'm glad you asked. It may help tip crows off to tourists, who may be more inclined to share or easier to take advantage of, than locals. Fortunately the lead author on this study, Sabrina Schalz, will be starting her PhD on this topic in the coming fall. You can find her on twitter at @Sabrinaschalz, where she’s promised to keep us abreast of her future discoveries.So the next time you’re hanging out in Japan, don’t forget to literally watch your language around the local crows. And to be safe, I wouldn’t divulge any secrets to them either. They’re not called large-billed crows for nothing.
On another note, I'm sure you've seen that Gen Z has been roasting Millennials on TikTok recently. If not - here's an excerpt from the Vox article I linked to that feels very of-the-moment:
While I stand by my long-held conviction that generations are fake — I have not heard a single descriptor of Gen Z that sounds any different from what millennials are supposed to be (“cares about authenticity!” “wants to feel part of something!” It is not an accident that these descriptors are literally only of use to marketers!) — I think what’s actually going on is that some millennials are reaching their late 30s now, which is not usually a particularly cool time in one’s life. You’re past the “figuring it out” years but not yet at the “fuck it” years, which means you’re just sort of stuck with whatever you’ve got going on and there’s no end in sight.
Of course, this is a massive generalization. All of these things are generalizations, which is why people take it so personally when you talk about this stuff. The hilarious part is that the general response from millennials to the screenshots of the comments has been, “it’s true.” Millennials are so brow-beaten and desperate for the approval of those younger than us that we’re ready to agree with anything they say. To be fair, most millennials know a 28-year-old woman whose personality is coffee and wine and has a Harry Potter tattoo. Am I only writing about this because I’m turning 28 in exactly nine days and have absolutely considered a Harry Potter tattoo (well, before J.K. Rowling ruined it with her terrible opinions) at several points in my life? Who’s to say! Anyway, let the teens live. We’re all in this economy together.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how to radicalize crows against Boomers. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Derek Walker: advertising has no stomach for a fair fight [The Drum]
Please click through to read this article in its entirety. If you get paywalled, drop me a line and I’ll send you a PDF. There's language in this piece that I have no right to use, even as a copy/paste of someone else's words.
[Derek] wonders what advertising would look like if the careers of so many people of color were not so restrained? I look at entertainment as a point of reference — the music, movies and TV industries — and see the answer: the work would be so varied, different, and unexpected. I can only imagine how great it can be.
Oddly enough, I feel sorry for advertising as an industry. I mourn for what we as an industry could have been - especially the work we could have created for clients. We should be ashamed, and clients should be pissed. The work could have been so much better.
2) The Curve of Bullshit [Praveen Vaidyanathan - Twitter]
[ED Note: I feel this deeply.]
Junior people in advertising and marketing want to sound more senior..
So they use a lot of jargon and buzzwords
Then, as people become more confident in their ability and experience, they park bullshit terms and speak like people again.
3) Personalisation will be 2020’s most overhyped marketing practice [The Drum]
Personalisation was the US Association of National Advertisers’ 2019 marketing word of the year, but the idea’s popularity has been largely the result of martech companies successfully promoting their own personalisation technologies.
Accenture created an Interactive personalised Marketing Index (PDF) claiming that “almost 70% of consumers want companies to personalise their communications”. And what does Accenture sell? Marcom personalisation. Seismic commissioned a report stating that personalised customer experiences are the biggest opportunities for effective sales enablement. What does Seismic offer? Website personalisation.
WebEngage claimed in a webinar that “hyper-personalisation is the future of marketing”. Not surprisingly, the company sells messaging personalisation. Evergage’s 2019 personalisation study found that the practice “is clearly a top priority”. Of course, it is a personalisation platform. Pros creates personalised selling solutions and – no big shock here – commissioned a report stating that B2B buyers want personalisation.
I could list many more.
The discourse within the marketing industry is too often poisoned by companies that are selling something to marketers. The result? Many marketers believe broad statements that they feel must be true even though the objective information states otherwise. “TV is dead” is a classic example. That we are on an unstoppable march towards “mass, one-to-one personalisation at scale” is another.
Ignore studies from personalisation companies
Companies selling widgets put out ‘reports’ showing the increasing importance of widgets. But that data is rarely credible. To obtain real insights into industry trends, look not at businesses that sell products or services but at those that sell information. Such firms live and die based on the quality of their findings rather than the popularity of products or services. (And that is one reason why I rate their marketing predictions every year.)
In March 2019, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) in the US conducted its second annual privacy study. The findings contradict our industry’s enthusiasm for personalisation.
“People seem to understand the benefits of personalised advertising but do not value personalisation highly and do not understand the technical approaches through which it is accomplished,” the report states. “Participants did not indicate a higher likelihood of sharing data if they would receive more personalised advertising as a result.”
“People seem to understand the benefits of personalised advertising but do not value personalisation highly and do not understand the technical approaches through which it is accomplished,” the report states. “Participants did not indicate a higher likelihood of sharing data if they would receive more personalised advertising as a result.”
“Are those claims credible? Are the data really good enough? Does a marketer’s investment in personalisation make economic sense, generate positive ROI and fit with the larger long-term strategy to build brand equity? Does personalisation benefit the consumer in tangible ways that overcome the liabilities of seeming creepy or of running afoul of increasingly stringent privacy regulations? These are all open questions that will be sorely tested in 2020.”
According to Gartner, personalisation efforts currently comprise roughly 14% of marketing budgets. But read just a few of the analyst firm’s predictions in a November 2019 report:
By 2021, one-third of marketers will reduce spending on personalisation as a line item in the marketing budget and 40% of marketers still employing personalisation will prioritize digital commerce use cases over marketing, customer experience or both.
By 2022, 50% of personalisation vendors will report lower projected revenue growth.
By 2025, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalisation will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both.
“Some of the key challenges that retailers face are that they have limited data (ie only their own first-party data), they get infrequent visits even from their best customers, and their product catalogues are often small (ie a few thousand items),” the report states.
“For years, clients have asked Forrester analysts whether there are any great solutions to measuring consumer behaviour. Because few retailers have mastered this skill, personalisation continues to be a challenge. The retailers surveyed told us that the top two inhibitors to personalisation programmes are their inability to track shoppers across different touchpoints and their inability to attribute sales accurately to marketing programs when shoppers touch multiple channels.”
Personalisation is just extreme segmentation
The debate over marcom personalisation is actually a discussion about segmentation. Should marketers communicate one message to everyone, a different message to each individual or something in the middle?
Peter Weinberg, a global lead at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, has rightly called personalisation “the worst idea in marketing”.
“You shouldn’t personalise because it’s unethical and dystopian for marketers to collect mountains of personal information about their customers,” he wrote in a post on the social network.
“You can’t personalise because most third-party data is garbage. Studies show the leading programmatic vendors can’t guess your age right 75% of the time. You wouldn’t personalise, even if you could, because all the best creative (movies, books, ads) is impersonalised [and] grounded in universal human experiences that we can all relate to and enjoy together.”
To see the power of mass messaging, just look at the recent US and UK national election results.
Quick: what was Donald Trump’s election slogan in 2016 and Boris Johnson’s in 2019? I bet everyone reading this column remembers. Now – without looking them up – what were those of Hillary Clinton and Jeremy Corbyn? I bet no one can recall. One single, powerful message communicated to all potential category buyers can win elections and build brands.
The best thing in long-term brand advertising today might simply be doing what has always been done. Craft a single striking and simple message. Communicate it creatively, emotionally and memorably. And maximise the reach as much as possible. Too much personalisation will only get in the way.
I agree with doing what Byron Sharp calls “sophisticated mass marketing” – the practice of segmenting only when absolutely necessary. Say that you sell clothes for men and women. You would create two sets of ads. Now, say that you want to segment the men and women each further into blondes, brunettes and gingers and create different ads for each gender and hair colour. You would create six sets of ads.
Segmenting by gender makes sense. Segmenting further by hair colour makes little sense and only triples your marcom cost by forcing you to create six sets of ads rather than two. Using too much segmentation and personalisation falls victim to what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences”. (See this interesting Twitter thread by Rouser chief executive JP Hanson for more background.)
People generally have more commonalities than differences between us, but unfortunately it is human nature to focus on what separates us rather than what unites us. Marketers should remember that fact. Instead of obsessing about numerous segments, think first about what all potential category buyers of all types have in common when it comes to your product or service. You might just need to create one advertisement that highlights that one, single thing for everyone.
Taken to its logical end, personalisation leads only to segments of one person. And the necessary technology to do “mass one-to-one personalisation at scale” is likely as much a fantasy as the Fountain of Youth, the Holy Grail or Victoria Beckham thinking she could have a prosperous solo career away from the Spice Girls.
Still, personalisation can be useful in a different context. In 2013, Coca-Cola launched its Share a Coke campaign, which led to better consumer perceptions of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero. US sales increased by 0.4% year-over-year after 11 straight years of declines. Today, people can purchase personalised bottles online. Nike By You – formerly NIKEiD – offers shoes that buyers can personalise by choosing from colour and design palettes on the company’s website. Next month, Snapchat will release Bitmoji TV, a personalised cartoon programme that will include each user’s individual avatar.
Advocates of personalisation – whether through these examples or those of platforms such as Netflix and Spotify – cite product personalisation as evidence that marcom should also be personalised. But product and promotion are two extremely different things.
Much of the discussion in the marketing industry paints with too broad of a brush and ignores specific contexts. As a result, people see personalisation in products and think it should apply to promotion as well. But in general terms, people want personalised products but not personalised and targeted marcom.
The future of personalisation might actually be companies using mass messaging to sell an inventory of customised products. Nike By You’s tagline is a perfect example: “Just you, us, and a million possibilities.”
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them
25 Branding Models for Strategic Planners [Baiva Matisone - LinkedIn] A deck worth saving in the archives. All the most common frameworks for planners all in one place. Very useful!
Brands and Black Lives Matter: a Labs reading list [BBH Labs - Twitter] I love this example: "Just like how we normalised tobacco and sexism, we can normalise the marginalised groups in our society. Think of it as making amends for all the wrong turns we’ve taken in the past." The entire list is worth a perusal.
Language is a telling clue to unacknowledged racial attitudes [The Economist] When racialisation happens, words do not change their dictionary definition; rather, they take on associations with other words. Brains are statistical machines, in which learning involves a gradual strengthening or weakening of different synapses. Introduce one concept and related concepts are “primed”, or made more quickly available to the consciousness. Just because these associations are hard to prove conclusively does not make them less real. The difference between “racist” and “racialised” helps explain why Americans often talk fruitlessly past each other when discussing words such as “thug”. With overt racism waning, it has become painfully obvious to some people—though not all—that the submerged part of the iceberg, implicit racial beliefs and associations, plays a bigger role than was once realised. Overcoming those is particularly difficult because of their semi-conscious nature. A long struggle has made “racist” one of the worst things you can be. That counts as a great success, but the corollary is that the remaining problems are hard to talk about. Some fear being branded racist just for trying. Seeing the bias in even innocently intended language is a first step towards understanding that there is still work to do.
5) Department of Great Work
Arby's Pecan Chicken Salad Sandwich TV Commercial, 'Last Year's Commercial' [iSpot] In Arby's typical no-BS style, they very cleverly address Covid production realities while hammering home their chicken sandwich RTBs. Reminiscent of the Pepsi spot they did to meet contract obligations. I'm 90% sure this was done by Fallon but sourcing credits for this has been difficult
Telecom Company Shows That a Bit of Imagination Can Create a Better Future [Little Black Book] What can I say, I'm a sucker for off-the-wall telecom ads. "It’s not about determining exactly what the future will look like, rather it’s about playing with the idea of what is possible. We are convinced that the future will continue to astonish us and improve our lives – something that many of our customers seem to agree with." From Nord DDB
New York Made OOH Covid Ads Now That People Are Finally OOH Again [Muse by Clio] To remind denizens of Gotham and other cities around the state to stay vigilant and avoid infection, Gov. Cuomo's office and TBWA\Chiat\Day New York have created colorful, hand-drawn OOH ads that just hit the streets. Themed "Stop the spread. It's up to us, New York," the campaign includes thousands of transit posters—appropriate, as cramped subways and buses pose higher risks of transmission.
This Tulsa Newspaper Ad Is Also a Protest Sign [AdWeek] As Tulsa, Okla., prepared for President Trump’s Saturday night campaign rally, Courageous Conversation Global Foundation bought a full-page ad in The Oklahoma Eagle, one of the nation’s oldest Black-owned newspapers. The ad, which reads “Being black is not a crime” in stark white letters on a black background, is intended to “inform and equip people in Tulsa with a poster that can be used to make their voices heard,” said Glenn Singleton, president of CCGF. From Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who earlier this month emblazoned the same message across its office building in San Francisco
This Split-Screen Film Shows How Little American Racism Has Changed in 50 Years [Muse by Clio] Same as it ever was? History's unheeded lessons return with a vengeance in this short Black Lives Matter film that shows footage from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s on one side of the screen and scenes of modern racial unrest on the other. I love the message at the end "Join the movement, not the moment." Very powerful film. Developed as a passion project by 72andSunny creatives Jon Krippahne and Justin Joo, with an assist from agency talent coordinator Alex Brueggeman, the two-minute video dropped this week on social.
Support Black Designers [Instagram] I've never seen this format from Instagram before. It almost looks like a twitter moment. I don't even know how to find it; this was a link that was shared with me. Do you know? Drop me a line!
Department of Bad Work:
This Snapchat Juneteenth Filter [Mark S. Lucie - Twitter] Smile to break the chains? Oh no no no.
6) Platform Updates
Read the letter Snap’s head of diversity sent to staff about its offensive Juneteenth filter [The Verge] In an internal email, Oona King says black and white employees collaborated on its “smile and break the chains” filter. Read this article. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe you do?
North Face, REI join Facebook ad boycott organized by civil rights groups [CNET] Outdoor goods retailers North Face and REI sign up for the #StopHateforProfit campaign. More than 55 percent of Facebook users reported experiencing hate and harassment on the platform, according to the ADL's survey of Americans using social media.
GroupM Forecasts 13% Drop In U.S Ad Spending In 2020 [Media Post] GroupM is now forecasting a 13% drop in U.S. ad expenditures for 2020 (excluding political) to about $208 billion, followed by a rebound of 4% in 2021 to $216.6 billion. With political dollars factored into the mix GroupM estimates that total 2020 ad spending will be down 7.6% to $223 billion with 2021 down 1.7% to $219 billion. Digital advertising is expected to decline by only 3% during 2020 on an underlying basis or be flat including political advertising. Television advertising is expected to decline by 7% in 2020 and falling by another 12% next year. Out-of-home advertising is expected to take a 21% hit this year. The full revised forecast can be accessed here.
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!