This Week in Strategy: Never play tennis with a cymbal. It makes a terrible racket!
Hi Strat Pack,
Let's start on a positive: sports are back, baby! The MLB started yesterday, NHL playoffs are back starting the first week of August (NHL TV subscriptions are only $5 for the Stanley Cup qualifiers!) and the Washington DC NFL team changed their name to the Washington Football Team. Finally. I want to state my position very clearly: I am a big Dr. Fauci supporter. And I know he's been extremely busy recently. But I really wish he had spent 15 minutes in the dugout with the Nats pitching coach before walking out onto the mound. The pitch itself was....not great. But hey, the Yankees pulled off a 4-1 victory so what difference does it make?
Two additional cool things I want to share:
NASA and ESA share the closest images ever taken of the Sun [Engadget] This is so cool! Images sent back from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) show what scientists are calling “campfires.” They may be mini-explosions, or nanoflares millions of times smaller than solar flares, that help heat the Sun’s outer atmosphere.The smallest 'campfires' appear to be the size of an average European country. There's a video in the link. Click through the for the video
Pharaoh Ramesses VI Tomb [Matterport] This is basically a Google streets view of the inside of Ramesses tomb, located in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. The detail here is extraordinary. And I don't know about you but with my effectively worthless US Passport, I'm not going to Egypt anytime soon. Spend 5 minutes looking around. It's really cool.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how far down that tomb Dr. Fauci can pitch. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) 5 Creative Brief Tips [GroupThink - Twitter] It's not the only format there is, but it can be a useful one!
2) Brand purpose. The biggest lie the ad industry ever told? [Tom Roach]
Yes this article is long but please read it in its entirety. It's full of really amazingly smart thinking.
[Tom] was asked recently to give a talk answering the question ‘does brand purpose really drive profit?’. My very short answer to it was ‘yes it can, but mostly it probably doesn’t’
And the slightly longer answer to it was ‘it really depends, but on balance brand purpose is over-used in marketing today and its power over-stated, and it’s actually best used as a business tool by companies that are genuinely committed to conscious capitalism, rather than as a bolt-on by marketing teams looking for a quick sales fix’.
I suspect no robust data analysis will ever prove conclusively that it’s better for brands to be ‘purposeful’ than for them not to be. By cherry-picking case studies, you could probably make whatever argument you wanted for or against it: whether that’s highlighting examples that show purpose can drive profit or by cherry-picking examples of brands getting it wrong, in order to suggest it can’t. Or if you want to undermine the whole concept of purpose entirely, pointing to brands pretending to be purposeful, or even highlighting the many highly successful non-purposeful brands.
So it’s quite easy to cherry-pick examples to make whatever case you want. In fact one of the people who made purpose so popular in business and marketing was ex-P&G Global Marketing Officer, Jim Stengel, whose book, ‘Grow’, was founded on essentially a big cherry-picking exercise where he took the top 50 performing brands on a measure of brand strength and claimed that what linked them, and so accounted for their success, was that they all had a brand ideal to make the world a better place in some way – I recommend you look up Richard Shotton’s article and talks on this as he rips apart the data behind Stengel’s book in a way that I’m not going to do justice to. But it’s a very compelling case.
I will pick two cherries of my own though just to show you I’m not actually a purpose sceptic, just a sceptic of certain types of supposedly ‘purposeful’ brand communications. A personal favourite example is Timpsons, a UK shoe repair chain, who do amazing work employing ex-prisoners, and repeatedly get listed as one of the top 10 best companies to work for. They don’t even use the word ‘purpose’, and you’ll never see them running empowering TV ads humbly bragging about the good they do, but by most definitions they look pretty purposeful. An example close to me is Barclays, which has been on a journey of internal transformation since the Libor scandal, that has helped it discover for itself a more positive role in society via fantastic initiatives like Digital Eagles and LifeSkills. Barclays saw a return on investment from its advertising about these societal initiatives far stronger than the ROI for ads talking about current accounts and mortgages. It’s a kind of marketing alchemy that Barclays ‘purpose-led’ advertising about them helping young people with job interview techniques sold hundreds of millions of pounds worth of mortgages. That’s clearly a win-win. But for every Barclays, there’s a handful of other brands with pseudo-purposeful ad campaigns that are clearly just cynical attempts to jump on board a societal issue in order to grab some headlines and turn around flagging sales.
So overall I think there are probably 3 broad types of brands that define themselves as having a purpose that we see in the marketing world. Imagine three concentric circles containing three types. At the bullseye we see brands that are Born Purposeful, often founder-led, often small, niche, usually founded with a societal purpose and where purpose goes across the whole business operation. Toms and Patagonia are perhaps the most often-cited examples of this. No one ever seems to argue about brands like this – very clear purposes, and business models designed to balance purpose and profit. In the middle concentric circle we see a second type, which tend to be Corporate Converts – often larger businesses which have adopted the concept of purpose more recently. They usually seem to genuinely want to make a positive difference to the world alongside making money, sometimes to correct past wrongs or just to become a better corporate citizen. They’re by definition on a journey of transforming themselves and are often more complex businesses, and because of that they may have to make pragmatic decisions that favour profit over purpose in certain instances. They may not have a business model that’s built around their purpose. They may have certain voices internally who are more committed to their purpose than others, and they’re likely not to have a founder present who’s committed to keeping the business permanently in line with its purpose in all its decision-making. So they’re naturally a greyer area. Purpose often becomes a new type of business vision or Northstar for these kinds of brands – they will typically need to find a space at the top of their strategy pyramid for their new purpose.
And there’s a third kind, on the outer circle, which I would call Pseudo-purposeful brands – these are the ones for which purpose is just a new ad campaign claiming to try and solve an issue like gender or racial equality, or toxic masculinity or whatever the most resonant topic is that their social listening data says is trending with their demographic that month. This is the kind of purpose that’s least likely to become embedded across every function of a business, it was probably cooked up in the marketing department, and so is far less likely to take root within an entire organisation, be taken seriously and gain long-term investment. And so it’s far less likely to be profitable in the long-term.
So there are probably three types of purposeful brand: 1. Brands that are Born Purposeful, 2. The Corporate Converts, 3. The Pseudo-purposeful brands doing what’s recently been labelled ‘woke advertising’. And the likelihood of purpose driving a profit probably decreases from type 1 to 3.
And whilst it’s fairly obvious that, like most things, brand purpose sits on a spectrum, the debates about purpose in marketing always seem to be hugely divided, with the industry’s biggest beasts all coming down firmly on one side or the other. Unilever’s Keith Weed and Tesco’s Dave Lewis are believers. But two of marketing’s most well-known Professors, Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson are non-believers, who tend to see marketing’s obsession with purpose as a sign that marketers have lost confidence and pride in their core task – to sell.
The simplest, most no-nonsense view, is this, expressed by Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who when asked about brand purpose said simply: “A brand’s purpose is to sell stuff.”
Mark Ritson, says this: “Brand purpose is mostly nonsense talk. There are a couple of brands, like Ben and Jerry’s…they were founded with purpose first. But for most of the brands in the room, the banks and telcos, these noble purposes that all sound the same – they are not differentiated, customers don’t give a shit.” Ritson tends to see Purpose, with some specific exceptions, as bad marketing practice, unlikely to lead to brand differentiation and lacking in relevance for most consumers. He sees most purpose marketing as failing to help brands create relevant differentiation, help them stand out from the crowd in a way that motivates consumers. He also attacks purpose as a layer of bullshit applied to pull the wool over the eyes of gullible consumers. Writing about Starbucks he said this: “Time and again we encounter the lofty, admirable sheen of brand purpose only to discover it flakes off with even the slightest scratch to reveal a darker, more commercial sub-surface beneath. Starbucks’ famous mission ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time’ is about as lofty as it gets. But it contradicts mightily the company’s abject inability to align its tax responsibilities accordingly”.
Byron Sharp not only sees deception and duplicity going on with marketing’s obsession with Purpose – but also spots something a bit deeper – a level of self-deception, even self-loathing going on here amongst marketers. He says “[Brand purpose] is almost like an apology as we feel marketing is so disrespectful and evil that we have to do this other stuff. I think that’s terrible. If marketers don’t stand up for marketing, who will?
Very few people in marketing seem to disagree with the importance of brand purpose when the examples cited are companies built on progressive business models that successfully share the proceeds of growth in order to help alleviate a societal problem. But when advertising becomes a significant part of the conversation about purpose, things tend to go awry. In fact, my view is that if being purposeful means doing ads to you, then you’re probably doing it wrong.
So that’s where I stand. But how did we get here? How did we get to a place where brand purpose became simultaneously the most pervasive yet divisive concept in marketing? How can we explain the rise and dominance of brand purpose in early 21st century marketing?
My answer to that last question is this.
The dominance of brand purpose in marketing is perhaps the inevitable consequence of advertising people being told by everyone else, for about 150 years now, that they’re liars. That what they do is deceitful, that it’s of little or no positive value to society, that it doesn’t matter. Constantly hearing this view has helped give many advertising people a feeling of self-doubt about the role they play in society.
An Ipsos-Mori poll from 2018 found that ad execs are the least trusted profession in the UK, with only 18% of respondents saying they trust ad execs to tell the truth. That’s worse than estate agents, journalists, even politicians. A long-running study with over six decades of data, suggests that around 70% of the public tend to see advertising as untruthful – and that this number has stayed more or less stable for all of that time. This tallies with a finding from the Advertising Association that trust in the ad industry overall was around 30% in 2018.
And my theory is that perhaps advertising people have subconsciously sought in response – through their eager adoption of the concept of brand purpose – to prove they can be of value to society and that their work can do some good. The great irony here being that a response which has resulted in advertising people pretending, for example, that a brand of carbonated sugar water can solve some of society’s biggest issues, will actually have the opposite of the intended consequence: most of the pseudo-purposeful advertising out there just makes ad people and their output seem even more deceitful.
Advertising people have always sought to present themselves as respectable, responsible corporate citizens in the face of the strong suspicion that they’re not. You only have to look at the agency names DDB, BBDO, WPP, Ogilvy & Mather, J Walter Thompson, to see agencies trying to present themselves as respectable, professional people, to sound like lawyers or accountants. David Ogilvy’s schtick was to present himself as the refined aristocrat of advertising amongst the sharks and hucksters of New York. Despite or even because of the legalistic name, the New York agency BBDO, was nicknamed, by none other than President Harry S Truman, as ‘Bunco, Bull, Deceipt and Obfuscation’. Bill Bernbach built his agency DDB’s reputation on the idea that he was selling ‘the truth wrapped in wit’, in order to stand out against the deceitful salesmanship expected of the time, with ads that themselves told extreme versions of the truth like ‘Lemon’ for the VW Beetle.
‘The Adman’s Dilemma – from Barnum to Trump’ is a fascinating book by the cultural historian Paul Rutherford, which for me goes some way to explain why advertising has always been and remains one of the least trusted professions, and why advertising is seen by so many as a kind of licensed deception. It chronicles the prevailing anti-advertising cultural narrative since advertising’s early days in the mid-19th century from PT Barnum right up to the present day. Rutherford starts with Barnum whose skill deceiving a gullible public helped him achieve a reputation as the king of false advertising, ‘the uber-Huckster’.
Rutherford’s book chronicles the public outcry, and subsequent regulatory response, to the advertising of the patent medicine moguls in the US – who for several decades from around the 1880’s used mass communication to deceitfully claim their medicines could cure people of almost every medical problem. The most famous patent medicine born in this era of course being Coca Cola which was introduced in 1886.
The book goes on to discuss how the 1950’s and 60’s saw one of the most famous moments in the anti-advertising movement when a series of bestsellers including ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ by journalist Vance Packard caused a moral panic about the nefarious and deceitful psychological techniques supposedly being used by the newly ubiquitous TV advertisers. There are clear parallels I think between the scares of the ‘50’s and the scares we have now about the use of our personal data by Facebook as well as the use of psychometric targeting for political advertising in elections. Whatever side you’re on in the debate about Facebook, the demonization of Mark Zuckerberg clearly has parallels with this trope of the adman as public manipulator and arch-deceiver.
Perhaps the most relevant anti-advertising episode for a discussion about brand purpose is Naomi Klein’s 1999 global bestseller ‘No Logo’. Klein’s book was an unashamedly anti-capitalist attack on the negative societal impact of advertising, which pointed out the hypocrisy of many of the global brands appropriating social and moral values whilst also engaging in questionable employment and environmental practices, in a fore-shadowing of the critiques of some of today’s more obviously pseudo-purposeful advertising.
By highlighting some of the worse behaviour of global brands, No Logo played its role in subsequent efforts by big businesses to clean up their acts and become good corporate citizens. Which in turn is leading to many businesses becoming more purposeful and taking on the philosophy that’s now called conscious capitalism.
To Rutherford, Mad Men’s Don Draper is the archetypal sufferer of the ‘adman’s dilemma’, of whom he says ‘whatever success he found, he found his life empty, hollow, he searched for some experience more real, more authentic’, and quotes Don Draper’s Stepfather saying to him “You’re a bum, what do you do, what do you make? You grow bullshit.”
So given the way advertising has always been portrayed in culture, it’s not hard to see why ad people would jump at the chance to show they’re respectable professionals whose work can have a positive impact on society. But in choosing to jump so fulsomely onto the brand purpose bandwagon we may just be making matters worse for ourselves.
When what we really need to do to prove our value to society, is to prove our commercial value first and foremost – to have pride in the value we create and so demonstrate the role we play in driving the economy, and therefore society, forwards. There’s plenty of genuine virtue to be had in that.
In the final scene of the final episode of Mad Men, we see Don Draper meditating on a clifftop, and as if in a eureka moment in his meditative state, we cut to the famous 1971 Coke ad ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’. So we see a fictionalised advertising genius dreaming up a real celebration of peace, love and harmony, an idealised depiction of hippie culture, and appropriating it for a genuine commercial for the world’s most famous and valuable brand. It’s a fittingly brilliant blend of fact and fiction, authenticity and artifice.
It’s simply the most perfect ending for the show to have Don Draper, the archetypal, self-deceiving adman, whilst himself searching for a more authentic, more purposeful existence, dreaming up for a brand of carbonated sugar water, what may well have been the Patient Zero of all the pseudo-purposeful advertising that would follow in the decades ahead.
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect representation of advertising’s complex and uneasy relationship with truth, lies and brand purpose.
3) What’s in and what’s out for the future of media strategy? [Warc]
Shann Biglione, head of strategy at Zenith, explores four themes that will be on many media strategists' minds as they look for ways out of the COVID-19 crisis.
Every crisis starts with the same prophecy: this time, it’s different. It’s bigger, it’s deeper, it’s more structural, it’s a supply problem, it’s a demand problem... The reality is, it’s a crisis, and like every crisis before it, it’s never a bad idea to look back to understand what may be coming in order to frame what may be changing. Below are four directions that are likely to be on many media strategists’ mind.
IN: Protecting your brand investments
In 2008, and the years that followed, marketing saw what we could define as an effectiveness depression: a rush to short termism, fuelled by an appetite for immediate returns and the explosion of media solutions promising hyper efficient targeting without any loss to overall effectiveness. It turned out that having our tracking cookies and eating them too wasn’t necessarily the healthiest marketing diet. The good news is that the teachings of Byron Sharp, Binet & Field and Mark Ritson are becoming mainstream in the marketing industry, providing ammunition for more reasonable strategies. Marketers are now openly discussing their plans to keep investing as much as possible to protect their brands through the crisis and ready them for the next few years. Brands should never let a crisis go to waste, and for most of them it means protecting your media budgets, capitalizing on an overall market slump to grow your share of voice at a lower cost, and keep investing in brand-building communications.
OUT: Media commitments
The way we operate media budgets has changed drastically over the last decade or so, with an ever-increasing shift towards flexible media buys. Of course, the desire for more flexibility is not something new, with many advertisers trying to find alternatives to big upfront buys. But the reality is that more and more media owners are now offering very flexible ways to buy, and many of these now offer pretty sizeable audiences to build reach against. In simple terms, marketers have choice, and sometimes the way we buy matters as much as what we buy. In a world where uncertainty is so high, advertisers will increasingly value the ability to shift their budgets on a whim – and ideally at the click of a mouse. Expect a lot of 2021 media strategies to be echoing this appetite, increasing share of solutions that can be flexed in and out of a trend, and forcing some of the most rigid to loosen their terms.
IN: E-commerce taking a front seat
One of the greatest accelerations we’ve seen from COVID-19 has been e-commerce’s progress in consumer habits, growing as fast in the last three months as it was expected to grow in the next three years. This matters because it will greatly influence how media operates, and leaves marketers with some important questions to explore in their future strategies. Of course, there will be temptation to ask every media format to link back to e-commerce sales, with partnerships exploding left, right and center to offer as much “click-to-buy” compatibility as possible. But the real question will not be how we can activate everywhere – let’s be honest, we’ve been there and we know it has limits. It will be about how we redefine the way a brand is experienced on e-commerce platforms. Future-facing media strategies will obsess about ways to land the brand’s story and content to life on those apps and websites. They will support efforts to rethink the way the product is packaged (and in some cases personalized). And they will no doubt reshuffle the cards in the game of media partnerships, posing a threat to major media owners who are not able to activate in this space. Being strong on video or social will not be enough anymore, and we can expect media owners to place bets that keep them in the retail game.
OUT: Strategy’s superiority complex
It may sound trite to some, but it’s virtually impossible to do proper strategic planning without a solid understanding of the tactical side. When faced with a fast-evolving crash like we are experiencing, telling your clients to invest in brand advertising matters, but it will severely test a strategist’s tactical edge. After all, you can’t cut costs without understanding the contracts, the same way you can’t plan for reach without mastering the way video views are tracked. Thus, understanding how each media platform operates is mission critical if you want to make recommendations that are remotely actionable. Fancy an advanced audience personalization campaign on Facebook? You better be familiar with the way audiences are bid on, and how precision impacts your ability to drive reach. Feeling lucky about tackling Tik Tok’s audience of light TV viewers? You better be well versed in the inner dynamics of the platform if you want to even be noticed. There is a long list of tactical realities that strategists need to get close to, from the ways KPIs are tracked to the way the tools to buy operate. Strategy is going to have to obsess a lot with the how, and let go of this notion that strategic means “smart” and tactical means “shallow”. Tactical can often be a hammer looking for nails, but it also means capable, realistic and practical. And when it comes to media, the strategic devil will lie in the tactical details.
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them
The seduction of Bad Posts [On Posting] This is an absolutely fascinating read on the state of human behavior on the internet. Here's a sampling "Nothing a writer can achieve in print will ever eclipse the rapturous, head-spinning high of making a lot of people mad at you online. Posting, and the brain sickness that comes with posting, is one of my prime interests. Good posts, bad posts, cryptic posts, it doesn't matter. I've been on Twitter for my entire adult life, and I'm still absolutely amazed by the platform's ability to convert normal people into walking, talking grievances. How this unique dripfeed of ambient resentment, cuckold-style insecurity, and unchecked leaps of violent ego allows us to develop a vast head-canon of rivalries with people who do not know we exist. How a man like David Leavitt, burnt out on writing blogs about ice cream sandwiches, would attempt to skip the many steps of media schmoozing and brand-building by offering up a cataclysmically bad Ariana Grande take. And most importantly, how his strategy paid off, kinda. It's like that line from Citizen Kane: It's easy to get a lot of followers, if all you want is a lot of followers."
Digital Diplomacy on TikTok [Google Drive] A very comprehensive list of politicians, diplomats, governmental organizations, NGOs , charities, and world leaders who are on TikTok. Bookmark this page, it gets updated constantly.
Mobile click fraud jumped 62% during peak COVID-19 months [Campaign US] In the analysis of 1.8 billion clicks, 14% of paid search traffic was fraudulent. Of this fraud, 85% originated from mobile devices, compared to desktop click fraud (15%). Click fraud is a $24 billion global problem that involves generating fake ad clicks either manually or via bots, and the issue has been getting worse on mobile devices amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
5) Department of Great Work
Parkdean Resorts: Sandtone [The Drum] Parkdean Resorts has launched Sandtone, a creative campaign to get the nation falling back in love with the UK as a holiday destination, which is often overlooked when travellers are looking for inspiration of where to go on holiday. They color matched the sand color of 50 UK beaches with actual Pantone colors. The Drum rated this 3/5 stars but fuck that. I think it's quite clever. From Agency Rise at Seven
Round the Clock Pizza Box [Leo Burnett Design] Very clever. Worth a click through: Designed for Toronto's 7 West Restaurant, a 24-hour restaurant that wanted to boost off-hour pizza orders. So, we targeted loyal, regular-hour customers by turning 7 West pizza boxes into reasons why any time can be pizza time. If someone ordered pizza at 1 PM, they received it in a box that suggested why 1 AM is also a great time to devour pizza. 12 boxes were designed, one for every hour, and coordinated to delivery hours.
Leah Schultz from Papa John’s gives an inside look into their social media interactive promotions for their new “Papadia” [SocialMedia.org] Look, I've got to be honest. I hate the Papadia TVC. I think they're terrible. I think the way they extended this into social was super smart and featuring Shaq prominently was a brilliant move that got them a lot of extra eyeballs. Done in house
Country Time offers stimulus checks to closed lemonade stand owners [MarketingDive] This is just really adorable. Lemonade brand Country Time launched a new campaign called The Littlest Bailout Relief Fund that will send stimulus checks to kids that had to close their lemonade stands due to the pandemic. Consumers can enter their kids to receive a $100 bailout fund on a microsite. Payments will be chosen at random and will be mailed to kids in the form of a commemorative check in the mail and a prepaid gift card by email. The brand created a video to promote the program starring a little girl who is trying to sell lemonade as tumbleweeds roll by. The video points to the large corporations who have taken advantage of government stimulus bailout checks. "Now the smallest of small businesses are about to get some help," says the voice over. I couldn't find agency credits. If you know, please let me know!
Department of Bad Work
Straw or Penis? [Brand New] My main takeaway: Stop buying logos on fiverr and hire a real designer. Link is 100% Safe for Work! This new logo for a milk tea shop in Manila was meant to look like a straw coming out of the opening of a plastic lid — instead, the internet pointed out it did not look like that at all. The logo has since been edited and the fix is kind of hilarious in itself as if a kid had corrected it with a crayon.
US Space Force reveals new logo (and gets roasted AGAIN) [Creative Bloq] Just like the agency's first logo (which the agency is now calling a 'seal', by the way), many are seeing this new symbol as a Star Trek rip-off – only more-so this time. Indeed, the triangular shape containing a star is very reminiscent of the fictional Starfleet's insignia (below). With the Netflix trademark rights debacle and this new round of online roasting, it seems the US Space Force design team can't catch a break.
Hey Yeah, The New Space Force Logo Is Pretty Much The Old Pontiac Logo Upside Down [Jalopnik] A different take from the car guys: Space Force just unveiled a new logo, and, yes, it doesn’t look as Star Trekky. Now it looks like an upside-down Pontiac badge.
6) Platform Updates
After ad revenue drop, Twitter tells investors it’s eyeing subscription options [TechCrunch] Earlier today the social media giant reported ad revenues of $562M, down almost a quarter (23%) on a year ago — saying that the pandemic and “civil unrest” leading many advertisers to pause campaigns had both contributed to the decline. While the US, its biggest market, saw a drop of 25% in ad spend.
Facebook tests a new Page design with a cleaner layout and no more ‘Like’ button [TechCrunch] The updated design and feature set is meant to make using Pages less complex, something the company understands can be an issue. It also acknowledges the need to simplify the use of Pages now, in particular, with so many people continuing to practice social distancing and choosing to instead connect with their communities online. This change better reflects the Page’s true reach. Many people have “Liked” various Pages over the years, but then unfollowed them from their News Feed as they outgrew their interest. (Or they unfollowed them because they were only liking the Page as a favor, after being sent a request, for example.) The Follows count, meanwhile, indicates how many people are actually receiving the Page’s update in their News Feed.
Apple eyes new streaming strategy after Tom Hanks drama breaks records [FastCompany] One source says the streamer is discussing plans to release a dozen new movies a year on Apple TV Plus, roughly one a month. Two to four of those would be blockbuster-type titles such as Greyhound and Emancipation, the runaway-slave thriller starring Will Smith and directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) that Apple recently acquired for $120 million in a bidding war with Warner Bros., Universal, and other studio. Deadline reported that the film “turned in a viewing audience commensurate with a summer theatrical box office big hit.” Beyond being the biggest opening weekend ever for Apple TV Plus, 30% of those who watched it were new subscribers. The breakthrough was much needed. The first eight months of Apple TV Plus has seen lukewarm releases that have mostly disappeared without making a ripple in the culture. As for The Morning Show, it resulted mostly in hate-watching.
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!