This Week in Strategy: I hate typos in the subject line because one mistake and the whole joke is urined
Hi Strat Pack,
First things first: yes I have been getting much worse at getting these out on time lately. I'm sorry. I always go into the week with such high aspirations and then it's Friday at 3:30 and here we are. I can and will do better, but until then....you get what you pay for!
Friday again! So soon. Long time readers might say that I've gone a little space crazy recently and maybe you're right. But I have been experimenting with something new: playing the Interstellar soundtrack on headphones over particularly uninteresting meetings. I can't take credit for this idea (thank you anonymous CD) but let me tell you, it is great. You'll be amazed at how much you're hanging on each word. And yes it's on spotify but also here's 10 hours of that one docking scene, you know the one.
In other space news, Space Camp, a place I've been to *ahem* more times than I care to admit which double saddens me to announce that they need to raise $1.5 million to survive the pandemic. (For the record so do I...venmo me @jordanweil). The educational program has been attended by almost a million aspiring astronauts from all over the world since it opened 1982, and several went on to become actual astronauts and cosmonauts. My application must have gotten lost in the mail. And plus, how will kids have context for the Space Camp Movie (please click through and watch the trailer) which stars a shocking number of famous people including Lea Thompson (Marty McFly's mom), Tom Skerett (Viper in Top Gun, the captain in Alien...he was also in M*A*S*H), a 12 year old Joaquin Phoenix, Tate Donovan (you'd know him if you saw him, he was in Argo!), and Kate Capshaw (the blonde love interest in Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom). Locke from Lost even had a role! But seriously don't watch the movie. It is terrible and from what I recall nothing like the trailer.
Alright stop messing around trying to figure out if John Wren was serious when he said that Omnicom's 21% drop in organic growth was their low point. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The wrong and the real of it [Gracious Economics]
This chart is probably the most famous theoretical illustration of how advertising works. But in the seven years since it was first published, there has been very little serious discussion of how it actually reflects the experience of everyday brands. You know, the ones that sell functional products using average creative, the ones that don’t end up in the IPA awards databank.
It’s not because of a shortage of experience. Behind non-disclosure agreements, econometricians like me see the real world long and short of it week in week out. We engage with the messy reality of life on marketing’s frontlines, where budgets are limited, CMO’s don’t last in their jobs, and CFO’s are sceptical. We see the role that advertising actually plays.
And the truth is that although the chart is right about how advertising works, it’s often wrong about what the real world looks like. Many marketers, with an eye to costs, tend to focus first on the sales activation, then on brand building. There are always a number of potential customers researching or shopping online who are in the market and not loyal to a competitor. Businesses with a reasonably strong product offer and a well targeted message can convert these people into a sale very cheaply.
However, this approach can only go so far. Once brands reach a certain size, continued growth means reaching outside the readily available pool of customers. In turn, this means converting people who are loyal to competitors or bringing different people into the market, tasks that typically can’t be done with sales-activation. Further growth means wider reach, richer creatives, and media channels that can hold attention – in short, brand-building.
The conclusion is the same as Les and Peter’s – you need brand-building for sustained growth – but the picture is very different. That’s why communications strategist Tom Roach and I came up with the modern steps chart below, which we hope will prove to be a useful complement to Les and Peter’s one.
In the real world, brand-building is uncertain and risky. Not every advertiser’s pockets are deep enough to sustain experimentation until they hit a successful formula. In our research, there were many more cases where advertisers tried brand campaigns on TV only to find like neither long-lived effects nor a positive return on investment than trouble-free take offs into sustained growth.
The uncertainty creates a catch 22. Businesses don’t know in advance whether their creative is good enough or whether they’re using the right media channels, and this makes it very difficult to commit the budgets needed to make a success of any creative/media channel combination.
Communications can drive growth, and brand-building is the only way to sustain it over the long term, but it is hard.
As an industry, we should do more to help. So far, we are guilty of focussing on success stories and repeating narratives that are not easily attainable for many businesses. We don’t celebrate the long and often frustrating work that advertisers and their research partners carry out in search of the right blend, but perhaps we should.
Even more importantly, we should do a better job of drawing out the lessons from this work. Commissioning a great creative and putting a lot of money behind it may be a route for growth, but as a piece of advice its not helpful. CMOs need to know how, and importantly they need to know how to make the whole thing a lot less risky.
In the real world, that’s where success comes from.
2) Marketing iconoclast Bob Hoffman: Advertising's 'lost decade' now moving into dangerous territory; why industry conferences are 'bullshit' [Mi3]
Bob Hoffman has made a second career calling bullshit on the ad industry's rush to digital mediocrity. But now it's becoming a danger to itself and society, he warns. The one-time Mojo USA boss skewers the collective gullibility that has brought advertising and marketing to its current nadir, but also offers some solutions: Don't fire older people; Hire top notch creatives and let them do what they do best; Accept that precision guessing is as good as it gets. And never listen to people being paid to talk about the future at conferences.
Below are some choice passages from Hoffman - click through for the whole article (and to listen to the podcast)
“Anyone one who says ‘yes and no’, who says ‘definitely and definitely not’, who says ‘this will work and this will not’, is full of shit, because they don’t know. Understanding that we are dealing with likelihoods and probabilities is one of the deep insights that marketing people need to get." - Bob Hoffman, Ad Contrarian
Naivety is causing all sorts of problems
Advertising and marketers, he argues, have been suckered. New digital tools “were sure to make advertising more timely, relevant and likeable. And it all turned out to be bullshit. The truth is that advertising has got far worse and consumers hold us in lower regard than ever before”.
With peak advertising bodies flagging corruption - “billions of dollars are being stolen from marketers”, he says - and regulators around the world starting to crack down on surveillance marketing, “the advertising and marketing world is lost in space right now,” says Hoffman. “We are delusional. We need to get back to reality and start seeing the world as it really is, not how we would like it to be.”
Questioning perceived wisdom would be a good start, he suggests, especially around tech.
“The ad industry used to be the most skeptical in the world. Yet all of a sudden the tech and digital people came riding into town with a load of baloney and we just pulled up our skirts. We bought all of this without saying, ‘yeah? prove it’. How many billions a year are being spent without proof?” asks Hoffman. “There is so much bullshit and nobody challenges it.”
“It is very hard to explain to people who have been taught and groomed by logic that they need to put their logic aside sometimes. An ad is not a court case. The brands that are successful do not have a better court case than the brands that are not as successful; it is not about that.” - Bob Hoffman
Hoffman accepts there is a role for personalisation and tech - that brands have to deliver on customer experience and walk the walk, while the advertising does the talking. “But it shouldn’t be driving the bus,” he says.
The industry, he suggests, has been indiscriminate in its thirst for validation.
“We are like a sailor that has been at sea for two years who comes into port and immediately gets drunk and a sexually transmitted disease. Tech came along and we wanted all of it,” says Hoffman.
“We weren’t discerning in what was real and what was bullshit. Of course we want information. You have to have information to make the decisions, no question we need that. But data and tech is not what is going to make advertising what it should be.”
Hoffman is sympathetic to why marketers have sought digital validation. But he suggests they are not going to grow brands that way.
“It is very hard to explain to people who have been taught and groomed by logic that they need to put their logic aside sometimes. When you talk to senior business people, they have been successful because they have been good logicians. They know cause and effect and they apply logic to all problems,” says Hoffman.
“But advertising does not work that way. An ad is not a court case. The brands that are successful do not have a better court case than the brands that are not as successful; it is not about that.
“In my career I have had to stand up in front of boards, financial people and CEOs and try to explain to them why this is a good idea, even though it is not logical, and it is very hard to explain that to those kind of people.
“I understand that. They want to know why. But if you are a good marketer, you find someone who you trust, whose creative instincts you trust, someone who has worked in advertising who has been successful, who has a feel for what works and doesn’t work,” Hoffman suggests. “That is more important than all the logic in the world when it comes to advertising.”
“The best thing that can happen to the agency business is that the holding companies fall apart and we have an industry of entrepreneurs rather than an industry of Wall Street wise guys. That would solve a lot of our problems.
“Another problem to be solved is tracking. We need to stop supporting the idea that tracking is a healthy thing for either our society, for us as brands, or for individuals. It has to be stopped. “The third thing is that we need to reinvigorate the importance of creativity in what we do. We have spent so much time on data, technology and mathematics, and we have spent so little on improving the quality of what we are doing creatively,” says Hoffman.
“That means hiring really talented, creative people and letting them do what they are good at.”
So what does great creativity look like? “Here’s how I describe it: good advertising appeals to us as consumers. Great advertising appeals to us as human beings, and that is what we need; advertising that is not just a bunch of facts, a bunch of insights about buying behaviour.
“We need advertising that makes us feel good about ourselves and the world that is entertaining, that is beautiful, that is interesting, that is funny,” suggests Hoffman. “We all know it is hard to describe what we mean by creativity,” he says. “But we all know it when we see it.”
3) The power of framing your request: how Danny Boyle got 60,000 people to keep a secret [Richard Shotton - Twitter]
I love this. Words matter, as every planner I've ever worked with is fond of saying. From How Not to Plan by Binet & Carter
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them
End of the Office: The Quiet, Grinding Loneliness of Working From Home [The Guardian] TL;DR Remote Work makes us more productive but much lonelier. Before Covid-19, many of us thought remote working sounded blissful. Now, employees across the world long for chats by the coffee machine and the whirr of printers. Lockdown has not so much redrawn the workplace of millions as it has chewed it up like a broken printer. Working from home, a mode traditionally viewed with suspicion by bosses and with envy by commuting bureausceptics, has become the norm for those whose livings are tied to computer screens.
Our remote work future is going to suck [Sean Blanda] There are a lot of compelling arguments in here and I highly recommend you read the entire thing. It even has solutions at the end! Here's my favorite business focused argument: Remote work breaks large companies. Remote work supporters often return to the “interruption culture” at an IRL office as an argument for distributed work. First, clearly people that believe remote work creates an interruption-free zone have never used Slack or email. Second, those interruptions often exist for a reason: They often communicate information that ensures everyone is working on the right thing. For companies that have strong product/market fit, have reached scale, and have a clear product roadmap, remote works swimmingly. A distraction-free environment means everyone can focus on “what matters” because “what matters” has been clear and consistent. But what happens when “what matters” changes? Because it will. Eventually, the market shifts. There’s a competitor or a Black Swan-style event in the industry (like, say, a global pandemic). Suddenly the well-oiled machine needs to adapt and change course. For companies larger than 100 people, this is tremendously difficult in an in-person environment. Working remote, it’s damn near impossible. Twice-a-year in-person meetups are not enough to disseminate brand new strategies. And I'd bet that as formerly IRL companies go remote, it will have a negative effect on their ability to iterate and adjust to market conditions making them vulnerable for a smaller, co-located upstart.
5) Department of Great Work
The USPS Celebrates the 80th Anniversary of Bugs Bunny [USPS on Twitter] The post office, believe it or not, is the most beloved government institution. And I think these stamps are very cool and the only thing that isn't great about this work is there is no link to purchase. Oh well can't win em all. "What's up Doc? 🥕 It's the 80th anniversary of Bugs Bunny and we're celebrating with a brand new collection of #BugsBunnyStamps! Each day leading up to the reveal on July 27, we'll be sharing a new stamp with you. #BugsBunny80" With a major shout out to the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee which I learned about from a West Wing episode and really hope is real
This Chrome plugin lets you go all 'Space Invaders' on your Video Conference Colleagues [AdAge] Agency B-Reel has a solution for desk jockeys stuck in in Google Meet and Hangouts. The “Meeting Intruders” Chrome extension turns colleagues’ video boxes into enemies to destroy, a la classic arcade game "Space Invaders." The user’s video becomes a valiant defender, firing tiny blasts at the phalanx above and destroying them one-by-one with each hit. It’s a surreptitious plugin, so no one else needs to know what’s happening. The actual meeting still shows up in the background, just in case something actually important happens.
He’s 83, She’s 84, and They Model Other People’s Forgotten Laundry [New York Times] The owners of a laundry shop in central Taiwan have become Instagram stars for posing in garments left behind. No one is more shocked than their 31-year-old grandson and unofficial stylist, Reef Chang, by the couple’s newfound fame. “I was really surprised,” the younger Mr. Chang said recently. “I had no idea so many foreigners would take interest in my grandparents.” He originally came up with the idea for the Instagram account, he said. Their business had slowed during the coronavirus pandemic, and his grandparents were wary about going outside even as Taiwan took highly effective measures to fight the virus. With nearly 24 million people, Taiwan has reported only 458 cases, 55 local transmissions and seven deaths. “They had nothing to do,” he said. “I saw how bored they were and wanted to brighten up their lives.” On Thursday morning, for the first time in nearly seven decades, something unusual happened at Wansho Laundry. A customer who had dropped off clothing more than a year ago and saw the couple in the local news finally came back to collect the garments — and to pay the bill.
Google Fakes Own Pixel 4a Leak With Unfinished ‘Lorem Ipsum’ Site To Pick Apart [DesignTAXI] Among smartphone greats, Google seems to suffer the most laughable leaks, with suspected prototypes appearing in retail stores and the back of a Lyft cab. The company is being an amazing sport about it, even going so far as to jump on this notoriety to tease the Pixel 4a. Taking a jab at the numerous leaks it has suffered, Google created a seemingly half-finished webpage with “lorem ipsum” filler text—casually peppered with phrases like “lowlightena capturum,” “Ac megapixelum,” “blurtutate bokehus,” and “longlastingis batterum”—as well as a “transparent” PNG mockup shaped like a smartphone. And that’s not even the fun part. It turns out that the web design is far from incomplete—it’s been meticulously constructed so you can investigate for details and make your own deductions about the next unveiling, somewhat like how tech leakers prod around for clues.
Domino’s Is Launching An Online Film Fest And The Winner Will Score Free Pizza For A Year [MarketingDive] Yes, that's right, Domino's has created its very own Homemade Film Festival, but instead of showing off the latest artsy film, they want you to submit a home movie made by your fam. Submissions are open right now and can be entered until August 21. Once the submission period is over, you can vote for your favorite video during the "fest" period of September 7-11. From Crispin Porter + Bogusky a very smart way to capitalize on the millions of americans still hanging out at home
Dunkin' and Post Join for Caffeinated Coffee-Flavored Cereal [HypeBeast] Dunkin’ has partnered up with Post to create two different caffeinated coffee-flavored cereals. The two options include a Dunkin’ Caramel Macchiato flavor and a Dunkin’ Mocha Latte flavor, both infused with roughly a tenth of a cup of caffeine per serving. Both use chocolate cereal as a base, mixed with accordingly flavored marshmallows. I gotta level with you, I'm much more into the packaging than the actual cereal, but here we are.
6) Platform Updates
All the major platforms are on Capitol Hill this week so I'm sue we'll cover then next week. But here's a little in the meantime to hold you over...
Apple, Facebook, and Amazon All Just Obliterated Earnings Estimates [Motley Fool] Quarterly updates from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) perfectly illustrate how tech is thriving, as people all around the world practice social distancing. All three of these companies crushed analyst estimates, sending their shares sharply higher in after-hours trading on Thursday as big tech scored a hat trick.
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