This Week in Strategy: My neighbor said he slipped on my gravel but it was his own dumb asphalt
Hi Strat Pack,
It's Shark Week this week. And because I both could not find a good Shark pun AND the San Jose Sharks are out of the NHL playoffs, here's a tweet from one of my favorite Twitter accounts: @thelifeofsharks. Also I DVRed "The Bride of Jaws" and am excited to watch that this weekend. Mostly for the title.
First let's start with some record keeping: It's August which means everyone hates working. And that means I'm probably going to take next week off writing this newsletter. So, that should be one less email for you to ignore.
NON SPON CON ALERT: (that's non-sponsored content for the rest of us) I just got Mark Pollard's Strategy is your Words this week and am so excited about it. Not only is it gorgeous but, only like 5 pages in it's so goddamn smart. I took Mark and Julian Cole's Strategy Super sizer class and was honestly so impressed with it; Mark is one of the smartest, most empathetic, and mots helpful people in the biz. Pick up a copy of the book here (US only right now). Need more convincing? Straight from the author: "It's 392 pages. It's hardcover. It has yellow edges. And it's everything I urgently wanted to write about strategy." How can you say no? You can't. You shouldn't. Buy the damn book already
I love when people wear masks. I hope you love it too. But this is interesting: Study Of Face Masks Finds One Type That's Worse Than No Mask At All Dule University researchers found that speaking into some masks, particularly a neck fleece or gaiter often worn by runners, actually dispersed the largest droplets of potential virus into small droplets. The study examined the degree to which masks blocked droplets from entering the air, not whether the mask successfully blocked droplets from entering the mouth of the mask wearer. Knitted masks and bandanas performed the most poorly. Fleece masks, as mentioned above, were rated worse than wearing no mask at all.
In other news, Planters' Baby Nut Is No Longer a Baby, for Some Reason. Baby Nut -- or perhaps we're supposed to refer to him as Peanut Jr. now? -- offers no explanation for this exponential growth spurt other than "it's been a weird year," with which we can only agree. Peanut plants take about four to five months to reach maturity, so, as a nut born at the end of February, Peanut Jr.'s development is actually right on schedule, in peanut years. It's maybe a little slow, but Peanut Jr. is no average nut: As we can see from his driver's license, he is 5'8", 150 pounds, and an organ donor -- which honestly raises more questions than it answers. Is this the work of an unhinged Vanyer team or of an even more unhinged Kraft Heinz brand team? Either way, along with Kraft Mac & Cheese for Breakfast, I don't love what's going on over there.
Last but not least, please please read this thread on systemic racism and bias in healthcare. From the thread: "What's the goal of our anti-racist pledges over the past summer? It's that [any family of color] can walk into a hospital with full confidence that their loved one is valued and cherished here and that we will fight for his life with everything we have, no questions asked." This was beyond eye opening to me.
Alright stop trying to figure out how many times I've had Kraft Mac & Cheese for breakfast (zero but I did have cold pizza for breakfast this week...) Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The 48 Laws of PowerPoint [Russell Davies]
I don't know about you, but if I'm not in back-to-back Zoom meetings or writing emails (including this one!), I'm writing decks. Or I'm being presented to. And let's be honest, there are a lot of bad presentations out there. So without further adieu, I present 48 laws of PowerPoint (or Google Slides, or Keynote, or when the art director does the slide in InDesign then drops a PDF into the Google Slide so I can't edit it...you know who you are). Because whether you've been working for 1 year or 30, we can all improve our deck writing skills:
1. Don’t read the screen*
2. Lists
3. Use lists
4. Lots of lists
5. But 48 items is way too many - who thought this was a good idea?
6. Start with a story
7. End with an ask
8. Fill up the rest with ideas and images
9. Repeat the important things
10. Remove the word ‘key’
11. Make it shorter
12. Repeat the important things
13. Don’t read the screen
14. Arrive early
15. Respect the AV people
16. Be a bit bigger
17. Make it clear, concise and catchy
18. Or freewheeling, unpredictable and magical
19. Just be sure which one you’re doing
20. Repeat the important things
21. Arrive early
22. Double-check the tech
23. What will you do if your slides don’t work?
24. Press B
25. Make something very big
26. Make something very small
27. Make something rhyme
28. Finish on time
29. Actually, finish early
30. Never outshine the master
31. Sorry, wrong list
32. One hour of prep per one minute of talk
33. Repeat the important things
34. Demand change
35. Make it readable
36. Make it accessible
37. Make it memorable
38. Make it bigger
39. Remove the word ‘holistic’
40. No 3D
41. No pies
42. Slow down
43. Speed up
44. Repeat the important things.
45. Start with a story
46. End with a bang
47. Don’t read the screen
48. BANG
2) Moments of Truth [Faris Yakob - Medium]
In 2005 P&G coined the term “first moment of truth” to describe the importance of packaging in their marketing model.
Provenance marks on products only became necessary when mass production and transportation enabled producers to sell across the entire country. Before that, local stores dished out local produce from vats to local people who knew the retailer. This provided the trust necessary when you are buying food and cleaning products. If you get sick, you take it up with shopkeep. Branding replaced that relationship with a promise from a distant producer that you could do the same.
Mass advertising following in the wake of the mass production. This allowed manufacturers to build familiarity and thus hopefully favorability before the potential customer entered a store.
Richard Gertsman, former Chairman of Interbrand used to say “packaging is branding” but advertising is a core part of building that brand. The key became making sure that the packaging ‘paid off’ the advertising, which is to say that the customer saw the product and then consciously or subconsciously recalled the advertising, leading to an increased propensity to purchase. The two became enmeshed and as shelf space in supermarkets began to heave under the weight of new brands and variants, manufacturers began to consider that relationship more seriously.
In 2005 P&G coined the term “first moment of truth” to describe the importance of packaging in their marketing model. The first point of contact is encountering an advertisement, the second is when they take an action towards the brand such as visiting a store or searching the web, the third is when they find it. Then all prior brand communication comes to bear on a single moment: the three to five seconds when the consumer stands in front of the shelf and decides what to buy. Interesting and innovative packaging can make up for lower media weights, as with craft beers or companies like Method soap that focused on making their bottle something people would be proud to display in their homes.
All this packaging came with unintended consequences. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that packaging makes up 23 percent of landfill waste and plastic pollution is now strangling life out of the ocean. Last year, consumers all over the world were eschewing straws to save the turtles, even though straws make up less than half of one percent of the waste in our waters.
Ultimately, the best solution for the environment may be going all the way back to the beginning. Zero waste stores have started popping up in the USA, South Africa and Hong Kong. Shopping at packaging free supermarkets requires a significant shift in behavior but it can work. Unpackaged originally opened as a store in London in 2006 but now operates as an in-store service at Planet Organic and many independent health stores. Should the trend take off further, the extensive packaging used to catch a customer on shelf could become socially unacceptable, and marketers will have to dramatically reconsider their moments of truth.
3) How social justice slideshows took over Instagram [Vox]
This is a really interesting read and I'm only including a small portion as summary. Be sure to click through and check out the whole thing.
PowerPoint activism is everywhere on Instagram. Why do these posts look so familiar?
In addition to growing interest toward social justice content, there’s a unique stylistic uniformity among these activism slideshows that earn them virality — an element I struggled to put my finger on. The fonts and colors of these guides aren’t necessarily similar, but there’s an inexplicable familiarity to these posts, making them approachable and extremely shareable when they first floated across my Instagram feeds in late May. Hu noticed that successful graphics tend to be heavily over-designed, featuring whimsical, colorful, and even “grotesque” typefaces and illustrations.
“From a design perspective, they’re pretty horrible, but it is that type of Instagrammable graphic that the platform favors,” he said. And what Instagram favors, coincidentally, has been used for years among many millennial-facing, direct-to-consumer brands. Design-wise, the brands got there first: Think of advertisements and Instagram posts for products from Casper (mattresses), Buffy (bedding), Tend (dentistry), Glossier (beauty), and Kin Euphorics (booze).
“A lot of this stuff, you can swap the text out for anything, and it’ll completely change the message,” Hu added. “There isn’t much of a relationship between content and aesthetics; if anything, the content is just interchangeable like an ad, for better or for worse.” He later direct-messaged me a slew of corporate made-for-Instagram advertisements, and sure enough, the parallels are shocking and potentially problematic when considering how integral design is in “selling” consumers a product, a vision, or even an ideology.
Historically, artists haven’t shied away from the political; if anything, some have sought to subvert or degrade corporate aesthetics and design choices in an attempt to disrupt and craft a new visual language for their own movements. On a platform like Instagram, however, playing against the rules might not necessarily be rewarding, even if it does make a stronger statement of one’s politics. By borrowing the stylistic elements popular within the capitalist sphere, creators are co-opting them for a greater, arguably more moral cause.
Coincidental or not, creators are applying this millennialesque visual language to their work, which makes it easy for savvy brands (or anyone who can replicate that design style) to jump on and pervert the movement by using it to further their own corporate mission. Then there’s the question of whether it’s even appropriate to aestheticize these human rights-related issues. As corporations and individuals become attuned to the widespread adoption of memes and certain creative aesthetics in online spaces, they could further be used to “commodify tragedy and obfuscate revolutionary messages,” wrote the Instagram creator @disintegration.loops, later referencing how Breonna Taylor’s death has devolved into a meme.
Many creators acknowledge that posting on social media itself is an inherently performative act; yet, the scale and scope of Instagram’s reach make it irresistible, especially during a time when coalition-building and encouraging solidarity is crucial. The intent, identity of the creator, and accuracy of these guides matter a great deal, but more often than not, that nuance is lost on the average Instagram user — flattened into a quick share or repost with a hasty tag as they scroll on and on.
4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them
Mock-Up 1.1 [Google Slides] For your creatives, here's a google slide deck full of mock up slides. Mockups for Press, OOH, Social, Digital Display, Devices, etc. Bonus that it's in French. H/T to @juliancole, created by @julienmcfly
Long term, short term, wrong turn: how the ‘consumer journey’ metaphor is leading marketers up the garden path [Lumen Research] We find that ads are consumed in both a ‘long’ (in the broadest sense of the term) and a ‘short’ way. On average, brand ads tend to get far more attention than direct response ads: ‘long-term’ ads get slightly longer dwell time than ‘short term’ ads. But there is a big exception. Amongst people who are actively searching for a particular product, the situation is reversed. In-market buyers pore over the details of offers and financing and warranties – the sort of stuff that sends most of us to sleep, most of the time. The attention data clearly backs up the idea that if they are engaged with at all, ads are largely consumed as entertainment, except amongst those precious few in-market consumers, who use them for information and education. Depending on what stage of the purchase journey, advertising can shift from pollution to utility (and back again) at the drop of a hat.
Digital Ad CPM Benchmarks [Dr. Augustine Fou - Twitter] This is fascinating. Where does your brand stack up?
5) Department of Great Work
Make it a Blockbuster night by booking an in-store sleepover on Airbnb [AdAge] The booking option is a way for the privately owned store—which has been the only operating Blockbuster since 2019 and was recently the subject of a documentary—to build buzz at a time when many consumers are staying home. The Blockbuster location also offers curbside pickup and has bolstered its video library with recent titles. The listing could also be a good promotion for Airbnb, which, like many hospitality businesses, has struggled during the pandemic.
This Skittles Brand Book [Efektyvus dizainas] This strange and inspirational manifesto crystalizes the personality of a brand whose average consumer is “12–17 years old,” “wears large hats and other popular clothing,” and “fears long-limbed animals, such as giraffes.” By TBWA who actually lost the account to holding agency frenemy DDB, but not before creating some bonkos work. And it's pretty clear Skittles still follows this playbook
Telekom – What We Do Next Feat. Billie Eilish By Saatchi & Saatchi [The Inspiration] In this short film from Deutsche Telekom, Billie Eilish dispels the notion that members of Gen Z, such as herself, can't plug into the physical world and make a difference in the lives of others. The work is really quite nice. Good to hear from you, Saatchi!
Snickers tweaks its ad formula for post-lockdown confusion [Campaign Asia] The inadvertent show of underwear on a Zoom call has become a cliché. BBDO New York found the post-lockdown equivalent for this funny 15-second Snickers TVC. The spot is called "First Visitors" which I think is pretty spot on.
ARE YOU A BUS? [MTA - Twitter] A very New York response to a bonkos situation going on. From, you guessed it, the MTA on Twitter
Evian Serves Coors Light An Icy Diss For Utterly Familiar Brand Redesign [DesignTaxi] Evian isn’t bottling up its feelings about Coors Light’s new visual identity. Last week, the beer brand unveiled a lighter, cleaner and more modern look for its packaging, topping the new logo with a 2D visual treatment of Rocky Mountain provenance in Golden, Colorado. Coors Light reassured fans on Twitter that despite its “refreshed look,” the light beer still comes with the “same mountain cold refreshment.” Evian, a spring water brand also associated with mountains, was washed over by déjà vu from the reveal and decided to let Coors Light know about it.
RZA Wrote a New Jingle for Ice Cream Trucks to Replace ‘Turkey in the Straw’ [Rolling Stone] Ice cream giant Good Humor enlisted the help of Wu-Tang Clan mastermind RZA to come up with a new ice cream truck jingle to replace the long-used tune “Turkey in the Straw.” “Turkey in the Straw” is a classic American folk song that dates back to the early 19th century, and like many songs of that era, its legacy is tied directly to blackface minstrel shows. As the originator of the ice cream truck, Good Humor was compelled to retire “Turkey in the Straw” and commission a new jingle amid ongoing talks over systemic and institutionalized racism throughout American culture and society. Per a press release, RZA’s new jingle “drew inspiration from his childhood memories of chasing after ice cream trucks on Staten Island — blending traditional ice cream truck sounds with jazz and hip-hop elements.” The little tune is centered around an inviting melody of chiming bells underpinned with some steady but soft kick drums and rapid-fire cymbal hits.
6) Platform Updates
Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store [The Verge] Apple has removed Epic Games’ battle royale game Fortnite from the App Store after the developer on Thursday implemented its own in-app payment system that bypassed Apple’s standard 30 percent fee. The decision marks a significant escalation in the feud between Epic and one of the world’s most dominant mobile software marketplaces. It also comes at an especially fraught time for Apple as the iPhone maker navigates antitrust concerns over its operation of the App Store and the rules it imposes on certain developers. Following the removal, Epic revealed a carefully calculated series of responses, including an antitrust lawsuit seeking to establish Apple’s App Store as a monopoly and a protest video that aired on YouTube and within Fortnite itself mocking the iPhone maker’s iconic “1984” ad and calling on gaming fans to #FreeFortnite by supporting its fight against Apple. UPDATE: Fortnite for Android has also been kicked off the Google Play Store (and they're suing Google too)
TikTok found to have tracked Android users’ MAC addresses until late last year [TechCrunch] Until late last year social video app TikTok was using an extra layer of encryption to conceal a tactic for tracking Android users via the MAC address of their device, which skirted Google’s policies and did not allow users to opt out, The Wall Street Journal reports. Users were also not informed of this form of tracking, per its report. A MAC address is a unique and fixed identifier assigned to an internet-connected device — which means it can be repurposed for tracking the individual user for profiling and ad targeting purposes, including by being able to re-link a user who has cleared their advertising ID back to the same device and therefore to all the prior profiling they wanted to jettison.
We Tested Instagram Reels, the TikTok Clone. What a Dud. [New York Times] Taylor Lorenz and Brian X. Chen each tested Reels for five days and then talked about what we had found. They didn’t hold back.
TAYLOR I can definitively say Reels is the worst feature I’ve ever used.
BRIAN Please elaborate. As a never-TikToker, I feel that it’s probably the worst Instagram feature I’ve used, too, but your feelings seem stronger than mine.
TAYLOR It’s horrible. Not only does Reels fail in every way as a TikTok clone, but it’s confusing, frustrating and impossible to navigate. It’s like Instagram took all the current functionality on Stories (a tool to publish montages of photos and videos with added filters, text and music clips), and jammed them into a separate, new complicated interface for no reason. To me, it’s really unclear whom this feature is for.
BRIAN It’s totally undiscoverable without reading instructions. But OK, you find the button to create a reel. Then you can start recording videos or add videos you’ve already recorded. Then you can overlay music and some effects like emojis and color filters. Then you write a caption and publish.
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!