This Week in Strategy: Did you know Yoda had a last name? It was Layheehoo
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Hi Strat Pack,
I don't know about you, but I had an absolute monster of a week this week. Which is definitely my justification for why I didn't have a chance to write last week's newsletter and why this one is coming out closer to the end of the day than the beginning.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen in on a Gen Z brand consultant use a very large brand microphone (I'll let you guess which brand's) to inform us old people about how Gen Z is the most connected to technology, the most creative, and the most organized generation ever. And while I don't think it's fair to paint an entire generation based on the experience of one very atypical, very cocky human being, it got me thinking about whether this was true or not.
And I've decided that while Gen Z may be the most amazingest special, most ingenuitive generation, they're probably not. How do I know? Because I'm a product of an American public school education, duh. (Oh and also Google, but mostly Google)
Did you know there are Giant Concrete Arrows (intentionally) all over the United States? And it wasn't Gen Z that put them there! [Content Warning: this website looks like it hasn't changed since 1996] I think this is awesome TBH. In the 1920s, the first regular Air Mail service routes began operating in the US but radar hadn't been invented yet and radios couldn't quite fit in the plane. How were pilots supposed to know they were on the right track? Giant, lit-up concrete arrows in the ground. What a smart and elegant solution. A lot of these arrows are still visible even though they're no longer used (I hope!). Click through and check them out. I love this reminder that sometimes the solution to the problem is to think about something in a new way; we don't always need to reinvent the wheel.
The Apollo guidance computer was not created by Gen Z. It is maybe one of the most important pieces of modern technology ever created. On the 50th anniversary of the moon landing a lot of pieces came out that noted the entire NASA program had about computing power of an Apple 2 (which came out 10 years later). But one question is, if you had to go back to the moon today, would you rather go with a couple of iPhones or the Apollo Guidance Computer. What's so cool about this computer is that it was literally designed to be crash-proof. If the system got overloaded, it was designed to purge lower-priority tasks so that only the most-important tasks (like navigating to the moon) could continue on. My 2018 MacBook pro slows down & locks up if I have too many chrome tabs + a video call open. You could make the case that Apollo basically created silicon valley. Which would effectively make the guidance computer the basis of all modern computer & chip design. Oh and also the memory on the lunar module was literally called core rope memory and was made out of braided wire. Which I think is pretty cool.
While I'm just using this as an opportunity to nerd out on old things I find fascinating, let me just also draw your attention to the fact that the Hoover Dam was built to last for 10,000 years and it was the the first man-made structure to exceed the masonry mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Crazy! (note: neither of these engineering marvels was built by Gen Z)
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out what exactly Gen Z has accomplished besides 6-second TikTok dances. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Paying off and paying forward: What really drives advertising profitability? [Alex Steer - LinkedIn]
Alex Steer is the Chief Data Officer, EMEA at Wunderman and this article is an absolute fucking ripper. Bookmark it, print it out, staple it to the inside of your forehead. Share it with your clients. Share it with my clients. But whatever you do, just please click through and read the whole damn thing.
Right, let's talk about Kantar's excellent recent study, Reviewing the Top 10 Drivers of Advertising Profitability, which revisits Paul Dyson's landmark advertising effectiveness paper on the same subject. Fortunately, the Kantar paper generously gives us enough information to look at the actual and perceived relative importance of each factor at predicting profitability. So let's look at that - and, for a more balanced perspective, let's group the factors into three macro categories, to counter the (useful) tendency of the study to split comms/media planning into many different tactics:
Marketers systematically overestimate the importance of comms/media planning, and underestimate the contribution of brand and creativity. But would any individual group of professionals in our industry - brand planners, creatives, performance marketers, media planners, etc. - correctly guess just how evenly matched these factors are in reality? This is not a beat-all-comers victory for brand positioning or for creative execution, any more than it is for implementational planning (media laydown, targeting, etc). They all matter, and they matter in roughly equal proportion.
If we gleefully swing towards our pet favourite factors, we miss the most important nuance of all: that the balance of sustained brand-building, specific creativity and the optimisation of communications delivery is critical to profitability. Saw off any leg of that stool and you fall over.
The reaction to the study also highlights our own biases. Because this is a study of advertising profitability, I've seen a lot of responses that immediately assume the 'brand' element refers to some sort of 'brand-ness' in the content of advertising (a focus on establishing brand image or purpose, perhaps, rather than selling). It doesn't - at least, not directly. This single giant predictor of profitability is in fact brand size - the current number of users the brand has. The clarity of brand image in consumers' minds is one of the major drivers of this, and communications are a major contributor... but so are salience at the point of purchase, availability to buy, customer experience, product/service quality, price, and so on. Many of these influence the profitability of advertising, but are hard to influence with advertising (note, hard does not mean impossible).
So if marketers are underestimating anything, it is less the importance of creativity, and more the difficulty of growth. This is understandable - most of us, whether advertisers or agencies, have relatively little control over the current size of the brands we work on. When planning this year's advertising budget, Irn-Bru cannot suddenly decide that it is a brand the size of Coca-Cola, and reap the benefits of existing predisposition among millions of buyers that its big red competitor enjoys. While there are certain tactics that can rapidly grow the size of a brand's base of recent buyers (distribution and price promotion are among the biggest), most of these have costs that scale in proportion to their impact: a brand with £100 million annual revenue cannot conjure a £200 million marketing budget unless it can tap into venture capital funding or get lucky on the lottery.
Naturally, then, we tend to focus on what we feel is within our control, and discount the importance of things that are not. Looked at this way, the narrative of this study alters, as should our response to it.
Because many of us feel like the current size of our brand is something we can't control, let's temporarily exclude it from the analysis. When we control for current brand size, we can see that comms/media is a slightly bigger relative driver of profitability than creative, but also that the importance of creative to campaign profitability is underestimated. There is a case for investing more time and effort in getting creative right:
This is not a matter of declaring comms/media planning a waste of time, though. It remains the larger component of effectiveness on average. Each part of it also, naturally, has less variation. The gap between the best and worst creative is greater than the gap between the best and worst deployment of any individual media planning tactic - it is a larger single lever, though the combined effect of all the media planning levers is greater. The sheer number of levers in comms/media planning, and the relative predictability of each, may be what biases marketers towards paying attention to these factors.
But if we turn this into a 'creative vs media' spat, we not only embarrass ourselves as an industry that does both; we also miss the point, which is that there is a whole aspect of advertising profitability, brand size, which obviously feels out of the control of marketers, and which is (perhaps consequently) underestimated. Because advertising budgets are set at a point in time (annually or even quarterly), it's easy to treat the size of a brand as just one of those things that is outside the control of advertising planning, a sort of law of physics.
There is a tendency to assume that current decisions only affect current performance; and, indeed, that current performance is only affected by current decisions. The right name for this is short-termism. Unfortunately, when we use this word as an industry we are more often than not using it as a weapon, to imply that our clients are buying the wrong type of creative or buying the wrong type of media. The latter of these, at least, is probably incorrect: one of the most valuable findings of the Thinkbox/GroupM Demand Generation research is that the optimal media mix for driving immediate sales response (over weeks) is not all that different from the optimal mix for driving sustained brand size and share growth (over years), as long as the investment is sustained. There is not 'short-term media' vs 'long-term media', there is (largely) just good media planning and bad media planning. The Kantar research demonstrates eloquently just how many factors are involved in good media planning, without us making ludicrous general claims like 'out-of-home only drives long-term effects' or 'Facebook only works in the short term', both of which collapse under basic scrutiny. (As a thought experiment, tell me how an ad's effectiveness could increase the longer ago you saw it, unless your propensity to buy in the category has changed meanwhile, which has nothing to do with the ad. The idea of 'delayed-reaction media' is transparently mythical.)
This naturally implies that if there is a component of today's advertising that will have an impact on the size of your brand tomorrow, it is the creative. This can happen in two ways - by building brand preference that predisposes you to buy a brand in future when you are next ready to buy in the category; and by being memorable in a way that makes the brand come to mind more readily at that point. These two factors - what you think of a brand, and whether you think of a brand - both matter independently, both decay over time, but both benefit from compound effects. So, for example, if BMW has spent decades occasionally reminding you that it is a high-end car, and making you think positively towards it for various reasons (high performance, sophistication, attitude), by the time you find yourself able to buy a high-end car the odds may be shifted in BMW's favour by those sedimentary layers of prior exposure. Even so, the proportion of people who end up buying the brand they were most predisposed to when entering the market is between about two-thirds and three-quarters in most categories - short-term factors matter significantly, and only some of these are communications effects. (See what happens to short-term sales if your competitor cuts their price by 50%.)
How, then, do we help our clients maximise the profitability of their advertising? Right now (in-quarter or in-year) the priority should be to balance attention between creative development and the various dimensions of comms/media planning - there is no either/or. Secondly, we should be making it easy for our clients to balance their efforts between advertising and other parts of the marketing mix (pricing, distribution, etc), which can influence brand size quickly. An advertising strategy that pays no attention to other marketing tactics that grow brand size is counter-productive. (This doesn't mean you need to advertise your promotions or talk about your customer experience, but don't work against them with your creative or media planning.) And finally, we need to be clear on the elements that are important in this quarter's advertising that will also continue to be important to brand size in years to come. There are two elements to this:
A broad effective media mix, ensuring that next year's buyers have seen this year's advertising.
Memorable creative that people recognise as being from the brand, and that builds or reinforces the perceptions that influence what people think of the brand, and whether they think of it.
The good news for marketers is that neither of these involves any significant trade-off. The media plan that works today works tomorrow; the things that sway today's buyers sway tomorrow's. There is a need to set aside some budget to point people who are ready to buy towards places where they can do so: this now looks more like media spend and less like shelf wobblers and salespeople, but otherwise hasn't changed much. Beyond that, sustainable advertising effectiveness is largely a matter of making this year's advertising memorable enough that it is remembered by next year's prospective buyers.
None of this is rocket science, nor is any of it new: it is merely the art of consistency, that generates what Jeremy Bullmore calls advertising that sells 'both immediately and forever'. But the trick with consistency is to be consistent about it. We make life difficult for ourselves and for marketers if we insist that there is a trade-off between 'long-term' and 'short-term' advertising, that our creative must either be universal in scope or awash with price-points. No forced choice exists: improved creative and media planning, together, pays off now and pays forward into future quarters and years. A valuable agency partner does not simply tell its clients the destination, but advises on the route, course-correcting and trading off where necessary. The Kantar research, rather than prompting another fracas between enthusiasts of creative and media/performance marketing, should remind us of the need for continued balance, and of a sustainable (rather than 'short vs long') approach to planning not just advertising but the marketing investment as a whole.
2) Creating inspiring briefs - a note to clients [Richard Huntington - AdLiterate]
This is a short paper Richard wrote for Clients to help them create better briefs for their agencies. But I think there's a lot in here that we agency strategists can take to heart. It's so easy to fall into bad habits and this document is a nice recentering of what we (and our clients) should and should not do. My (Jordan's) favorite passages below:
The starting point must be write a brief, always write a brief, no matter what the project is. They discipline your thinking forcing you to articulate exactly what is needed and they act as a reference point to go back to when evaluating work.
And don’t start by trying to write a brief, start by thinking about what you need and how communications can deliver against this, this latter point is absolutely critical. Then sit down and write a brief. The famous sculptor Eric Gill once said “first I think my think, then I draw my think”, we should all think our think first and only then write our think.
Don’t write briefs by committee, we can spot it when the edges are knocked of good client briefs by multiple stakeholders all pursuing their own agenda. Sure it’s important to hear everyone’s voice in the process but one person should be responsible for delivering the final brief.
All briefs should be both inspirational and directional. Inspire and direct.
Inspiration is far more about the ambition of the task than it is about flowery language. The most inspiring part of the brief for an agency is the objective, the problem that you are seeking to use communications to solve.
Advertising agencies are problem solving companies, albeit that they solve commercial problems by applying creativity to the task. Nothing gets an agency’s rocks off more than a juicy problem.
T-Mobile – take the lion’s share of the £30+ monthly contract market
Teenage binge drinking – reduce the harm that comes to young people when they drink too much
Police recruitment – attract quality recruits to the Metropolitan Police by making 999 out of 1000 people realise they could never be a Police Officer
Raising awareness doesn’t count as a credible objective.
Briefs should give us every piece of information that we need to find a solution to the task at hand and nothing else. They are not the place to parade your prejudices or invent mandatories that are not absolutely mandatory. Creativity comes from clearly defined parameters but also from space to play, you can always rein things in later on.
Use the agency [or in our case, creative directors] to help frame the brief. They will probably have been working with you on the strategy anyway and they will be clear on what is going to be helpful. The planner [or creative director] is probably a good person to bounce stuff off anyway and it avoids push back from the agency when the brief is issued.
Take pride in your briefs. They aren’t the end product of what we all do together but they are an important stepping-stone and the critical moment when responsibility for solving the problem moves from client to agency. You should love the brief that you have written.
3) Sales Impact of Advertising [Marketoonist]
As David Ogilvy wrote in 1983 (more than a decade before the first digital display ad):
“For all their research, most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. Too many other factors cloud the equation. But direct-response advertisers, who solicit orders by mail or telephone, know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells … I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar. Every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response.”
Tom Roach recently wrote:
“Brands should be aiming to create long-term communications engineered for immediate success. Advertising that, in the words of the great Jeremy Bullmore, sells ‘both immediately and forever’” [ED Note: for those of us keeping track, yes that is the second Bullmore "immediately & forever" reference this week]
And as David Ogilvy put it, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
4) Quick Hits
Translating Brand Strategy to TikTok [Julian Cole - Planning Dirty] A lot of brands struggle when it comes to translating their brand strategy to social media. They end up following trends and best practices, rather than their brand strategy informing their content. Colette Ussery, Savannah Simms, and Julian highlight three brands that are doing a great job at bringing their brand strategy to life on TikTok
Why stand out when you were born to fit in? [BlandBook] I considered putting this is Great Work but honestly its too good: So many brands default to bland, so they’ll never be noticed or remembered. If you like to be bland and stay safe with no distinctive direction or attributable assets, Copywriter Vikki Ross and Designer Paul Mellor will make sure you never stand apart from the competition, or stand out. Vikki and Paul get by with a little help from their friends. They invited industry experts in Creative, Strategy, Diversity, Trends, Social, SEO and PR to be bland too. As you’d expect, everything’s totally mundane.
5) Department of Great Work
Yes, Those “Vote the Assholes Out” Patagonia Tags Are Real [GQ] This past weekend, Twitter went wild over a photograph of the backside of a Patagonia tag. Instead of anodyne intel about fabrication and ironing directions, it read, in clean, sans-serif stitching: “VOTE THE ASSHOLES OUT.” Patagonia director of copy Brad Wieners, who presumably had a hand in bringing the anti-Trump tag to life, said that it was real in a Tweet on Saturday. Amazing. I love it. Take my money, Patagonia.
Certified Young Person Paul Rudd Wants You To Wear A Mask [YouTube] It's cringeworthy, it's so aware of the "Hello Fellow Youths" trope that I can't tell if it's embracing it or mocking it. It wouldn't work if anyone but Paul Rudd tried to pull it off but what can I say, I like it. And it really just hits home around 1:36 when Rudd breaks character and is genuinely exasperated at needing to tell urge people to save lives by wearing a masks. The AdAge credits don't list any agency just the State of New York. Do you know who produced this? Drop me a line!
This VitaminWater Tweet Thread [Twitter] I like this because it reminds me how quickly memes rise and fall but also memes' ability to imprint in our memory. Check this out: "my boss didn’t let me tweet for the past 6 months, but he couldn’t stop me from writing tweets and making memes in secret. and i def didn’t do all that work not to post them. so, yeah, here’s a bunch of stale memes. like them all so my boss doesn’t take away twitter again."
Ikea retells the tale of the tortoise and the hare [Creative Review] Aesop’s fable gets a prequel in Ikea’s sleep-focused new ad campaign, which celebrates the benefits of getting a good night’s kip. Mother created the Tomorrow Starts Tonight campaign, which features a hard-living hare and a sensible tortoise, shown on the eve of their famous race. Except this time the hare isn’t bragging about his speed, he’s spending the night hanging out with friends and playing video games into the wee hours. Meanwhile, the tortoise is tucked up getting a full night’s sleep in a tidy bedroom bedecked with Ikea goods. This spot seems to be channeling the same energy as that great Lamp spot from (yeesh) 13 years ago. It's just really well done. From Mother.
Department of I can't believe this is still on TV in 2020 Work
Lumiday Radiance Within TV Commercial, 'You Don't Age' [iSpot] This script for this anti-aging cream developed ostensibly "for women, by women" was almost certainly written by a man. The spot starts off as a generic infomercial hitting all the standard notes: contrived interaction, b-roll of yoga, CGI-ed product shot with CGI-ed flowers. But then boom: the whole damn spot is anchored around the fact that having more sex because she looks better to *PAUL* who it's implied is her husband, and yes the protagonist is wearing a ring on her left ring finger but it doesn't have a stone on it, and it's 2020 so I don't want to make any assumptions, you know? Anyway this commercial is 100% trash and you simply must watch it if for no other reason than to learn from it.
6) Platform Updates
Facebook Announces New Campus Pages To Connect College Students Amid Coronavirus [Forbes] That's right folks, Facebook invented The Facebook. Facebook Campus will be a dedicated section within the regular Facebook app, in which students can have separate Campus profiles from their regular Facebook profile and join school-specific groups and events, as well as access a campus directory and special chat rooms. Students will need to use their college email as verification in order to join their school’s page.
US will ban WeChat and TikTok downloads on Sunday [CNN] The Department of Commerce said today that as of Sunday, any moves to distribute or maintain WeChat or TikTok on an app store will be prohibited. While users who have already downloaded the apps may be able to continue using the software, the restrictions mean updated versions of the apps cannot be downloaded. "The only real change as of Sunday night will be [TikTok users] won't have access to improved apps, updated apps, upgraded apps or maintenance," Commerce Secretary and confirmed skeleton covered in burlap Wilbur Ross said Friday morning on Fox Business. The restrictions targeting WeChat are more extensive. Beginning Sunday, it will be illegal to host or transfer internet traffic associated with WeChat, the Department said in a release. The same will be true for TikTok as of Nov. 12, it said.
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