This Week in Strategy: Why can't you use “beef stew” as a password? Because it’s not stroganoff!
Hi Strat Pack,
We now have a new high water mark for a jpeg - $69 million (nice). But what will the auction winner store the file on? I really really hope it's the world's most expensive USB drive, a Magic Mushroom with a top-of-the-line emerald coated case for a cool $36,900. Guys I'm sorry I can't get excited about NFT. I want to, I really do. I just can't. It just seems like a money laundering con to me. I hope that upstart artists can break out and make some money. But the fact that the latest NFT auction was at Christie's just tells me that NFT is becoming another money laundering financial instrument. A place to park your money and watch it appreciate. Not to meaningfully contribute to the art world.
This article is a really interesting read and I highly recommend taking 7 minutes to read it I Broke Amazon’s API to Make Alexa Start a Conversation You’d Never Want to Have. Alexa, Call Mom!, is an immersive storytelling installation using Amazon’s Alexa platform. It leads participants through an immersive séance experience. It is a parodic reimagining of the classic horror séance and an exploration of the tense relationships we share with conversational devices in our home. Amazon might be hiding how difficult it is to create conversations between people and artificial intelligence. The company sells us a dream of revolutionary voice interfaces that reality has not yet caught up to. Alexa is impressive at answering commands and giving one-line responses. In short, Alexa is optimized to serve and shop. As much as possible, its capabilities guide users toward shopping on the Amazon platform.
On a side note, President Biden said that all Americans will be eligible for the vaccine no later than May 1st. So I hope that means we're not far away from being able to spend money frivolously on drinks and concerts and I don't know, not sourdough starters.
Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my last day in the office and my last dinner in a restaurant. What were you doing a year ago? I think as things start to thaw out in the northern hemisphere, it's good to reflect. This past February was really tough for me. It was dark a lot. I was working like a dog. It was cold. Going outside during the week felt like a chore. In truth, it was very emotionally draining for me, and I know I'm not alone. But this week has been in the 60s in New York (that's 15-20 Celsius for you rest of the world people) and I'm hoping we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. If you can, try to spend some time on you today. The Times did a really nice photo series commemorating (if that's the right word) a year of Covid. It's worth checking out.
Last but not least. It's Pi Day this weekend (or not, depending on when you read this. Pi Day is 3/14)! In countries where they write the date dd/mm, do they celebrate Pi Day? I'm genuinely curious. Please let me know in the comments below! How are you going to celebrate. I plan on first watching the trailer to Darren Aronofsky's 1998 very weird and good movie Pi. I will briefly think about Archimedes, the first person to calculate π. I'll wonder if I could be as cool as Albert Einstein if I too were only born on Pi day. I will not eat any pie. I might have a slice of pizza. (Maybe I'll eat a whole......pie). Was that too much? I don't know. I was considering trying to shove in an "as American as apple π" but I decided against it. Oh well.
Alright stop messing around trying to figure out my favorite type of pie. It's no secret - strawberry rhubarb! Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Why planners are breaking free from agency chains [Campaign Live]
Over the past couple of years alone, there has been a wave of consultancies set up by former high-profile agency planners. These consultancies typically comprise small core teams of senior people with access to a wide network of freelancers. Many were born out of frustration at the existing agency model. What they offer the founders is the ability to free strategy from a predetermined creative execution, solve broader business problems and ensure strategy is better valued and rewarded by clients.
When Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO’s long-standing duo Craig Mawdsley and Bridget Angear (pictured) unveiled their strategy consultancy, Craig & Bridget, last month, they joined a growing band of planners who have gone their own way.
Over the past couple of years alone, there has been a wave of consultancies set up by former high-profile agency planners, including: The Barber Shop led by Dino Myers-Lamptey (ex-MullenLowe Mediahub), Bodacious run by Zoe Scaman (ex-Droga5), Saboteur Studio co-founded by Alex Clegg (ex-Brand Union), Deft founded by Ian Crocombe and Niran Vinod (ex-Facebook), and the WPP-backed Proto, set up by five people from R/GA’s consulting practice.
These consultancies typically comprise small core teams of senior people with access to a wide network of freelancers. Many were born out of frustration at the existing agency model. What they offer the founders is the ability to free strategy from a predetermined creative execution, solve broader business problems and ensure strategy is better valued and rewarded by clients.
Scaman speaks for many when she says she became disillusioned with agencies because strategy always had to lead to an ad: “We didn’t charge properly for strategy. Clients got the thinking ‘for free’ and the agency made their margins in the production cost.”
Increasingly, she was seeing clients with more complex business problems for which she believed the solution lay outside advertising – in product innovation, changing a pricing strategy or launching in a new market. But she says that such thinking “was actively discouraged because it wasn’t leading to the profit margin that the agency wanted. Clients begin to lose trust in your ability to navigate them in the right direction.”
Sally Weavers, co-founder of comms planning business Craft Media, had a similar experience. “Craft was set up in 2018 as a direct kick against what was happening in media agencies. Strategy was being very steadily downgraded,” she says. Clients were being pushed towards those channels where agencies earned the highest commission, she adds.
Ad agencies are structured around creative execution, so even when they have the aspiration to offer wider strategy, clients “were often reluctant to invite us into those conversations”, Mawdsley says. His and Angear’s business may be in its infancy, but he has already seen a shift in how clients treat them: “There are different expectations around what we’ll be able to do.”
If you think of strategy as your product, then it doesn’t matter what that looks like at the end, and that’s massively liberating,” Torode says.
“At agencies I had always been taught that clients don’t pay for strategy. But what clients don’t pay for is self-serving strategy; strategy that is just creative fluffing to retrofit the ad solution.”
Myers-Lamptey argues that planning has become “very unfulfilling” at big agencies because people attach themselves to “meaty” global accounts to justify their positions. But working on such accounts is not enjoyable because people “can’t necessarily see the impact of their work… that quickly”. This frustration, he says, is a key driver for the formation of this new breed of consultancies.
Indeed, the unbundling of services is a rising trend across many industries. In adland, as the tech, tools and people required to implement an idea are more accessible to marketers, they are now able to take a more pick and mix approach to services. Multidiscipline collectives, like Harbour, have also capitalised on this with a small, senior team, who assemble specialists according to client need.
The new businesses also offer greater access to senior talent, especially for smaller clients. “I’m part strategy sounding board and part therapist. Clients have thorny problems and they want to throw ideas around with someone experienced who they can trust. They are worried about throwing ideas around internally because it looks like they are less decisive,” Scaman says.
For the most part, the new strategy consultancies are not pitching themselves against the management consultants, they are focused on the application of creativity to a business problem. This skillset will become increasingly in demand, Myers-Lamptey says.
He argues: “In a world where companies have more information on what their competitors are doing, it is harder to find a competitive advantage through traditional business levers like headcount, supply chain or distribution. Instead, the real differentiator is marketing – how a company positions itself and what consumers understand about the brand.
“Businesses need people who can understand audiences and think with a creative hat on.”
2) Agencies: Business Partners or Ad Producers? [Alexa McGriff - LinkedIn]
Ad agencies are rarely, if ever, asked by their clients to help them evaluate whether a product, service, or overarching business proposition is right for consumers. Agencies are not asked if fill-in-the-blank service or offering answers a consumer need or solves a consumer problem. Our usual task from clients is to market the product, service, or overarching brand our client brings to us —no questions asked.
This is true for the majority of agencies* and there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach at its core. We get briefed on a product offering or a new business and asked to sell it. That makes sense — that is, after all, our area of expertise.
But sometimes it is not the marketing, and it's just a bad product. Advertising agencies can definitely help brands avoid failures like these. We bring a unique lens in that we are always thinking from a consumer perspective (or at the very least, we should be thinking from that perspective). We know how to do market research, how to pull information out of consumers that help inform the work. We can add so much business value.
So why wouldn't brands bring ad agencies in sooner to think through product and service offerings?
I am certain it's because of the years agencies spent hiding behind the veil of confusing billable hours, over-staffed meetings, and an obsession with industry awards that don't take into account business objectives.
Brands and clients simply don't trust agencies like they used to.
That's on us. We have to find a way to reverse course. If we are truly in the business of our clients' business (which we should be), we must show that we can bring value at every step of the way. We must do what it takes to help our clients succeed. It may be scary, but it will also be worth it if we can really, truly help our clients and their businesses succeed.
If we don't, the finger will be pointed at us when launches fail, even if it truly wasn’t the fault of poor marketing. Consultancies have caught onto this and are currently leveling up their marketing disciplines.
Furthermore, without big changes to the way we work, they'll change the way brands look to ad agencies, essentially reducing us to production houses with no strategic or creative leadership.
This doesn't have to be the direction in which our industry moves. We have time to redirect the path, to chart a new course. It's on us to build trust, to ask the right questions, to create relationships that result in getting pulled in sooner in the process. If we're transparent in our processes, inquisitive with no ulterior motives, and adding value where we can, our clients will pull us in sooner and engage with us in more meaningful ways. The ball is in our court. Let's go!
3) Roblox and the Dispersal of Creativity [Scott Galloway]
I love Scott Galloway. This has been an open tab in Chrome for, well, 3 months, but now that Roblox has IPO'd, I figured it was good timing.
There’s a group of platforms out there that don’t just disperse retail, but disperse creativity. Etsy — a pandemic winner whose prosperity is nothing short of inspiring — enables artisans to reach a global audience. YouTube made video stars out of millions, and now TikTok is leapfrogging YouTube in the mobile space. Substack, Patreon, and OnlyFans are likewise disarticulating creators from traditional gatekeepers. It appears algorithms have a better eye for great content than Meg Whitman.
Roblox is a global gaming platform that disperses game creation tools to millions. And in turn, it disperses the games to tens of millions more. It has 31 million active daily users, 7 million of whom have made at least one game of their own.
Roblox commands the attention of America’s kids to the tune of 2.6 hours per day. And it does so with games that largely avoid the violence and dystopia of those $100 million blockbusters. Some of the most popular games on the Roblox platform are about adopting digital pets, building virtual communities, and running a pizza restaurant. The audience skews younger than the traditional video game market as well: 54% of users are under 13.
Unlike Facebook, whose concern for the well-being of kids lies somewhere between Michael Jackson and the Catholic Church (can’t wait for the hate mail on that one), Roblox appears to be run by people who act as if they have children of their own. The word safety appears 121 times in the S1, which is 8x more than in Facebook’s. And the word parental appears six times in Roblox’s S1 and … zero times in Facebook’s. The company employs both filtering software and content moderators, who have reviewed over 68 million digital assets this year alone.
By dispersing tools to millions, Roblox has made money for independent developers and created a flywheel for its own future growth. Nearly 1 million creators earned Roblox’s in-game currency (“Robux”) with their creations, and over a thousand have made over 10,000 real dollars in the past 12 months. 250 of its creators made over $100,000.
While Roblox pays out about a third of its revenues to its creators, what it gets in return is a deep collection of content and a powerful marketing engine, as creators and users share their experiences organically. The company’s sales and marketing expenses are less than 10% of revenue. Facebook spends 14%, and Twitter 26%. Of Roblox’s 830 full-time employees, 79% of them are engineers — making it more of a purely technology company than Apple, Netflix, or Google.
Roblox could be to Facebook what Shopify is to Amazon, the non–social media social media firm. Just as hospitals, doctors offices, headquarters, shopping malls, and campuses are being bypassed and shifting hundreds of billions in stakeholder value, Roblox could disrupt the kid attention economy. Roblox is set to go public this month, and will create meaningful shareholder value. Prediction: stock trades up 70% or more on first trade. More important, Roblox could be the first social media firm whose shareholder value isn’t designed to extract value from the least powerful stakeholder, kids.
Facebook and Roblox. One firm is being broken up, the other going public. The world has endured a virus that has levied tremendous damage to the commonwealth. It has also endured Covid-19. Roblox will be a great stock and, more important, might pull off a jailbreak from the menace economy of big tech, which arbitrages depression, desperation and dissent. I’m playing Piggy and Hide & Seek Extreme. I hate both. However, my 10-year-old son seems to genuinely enjoy teaching me how to play, and that’s enough.
4) Department of things that happened this week
Burger King. Oh Burger King. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. "Women belong in the kitchen." Woof. Like the newspaper ad...fine. At least in print they have more than 140 (whatever, don't @ me) characters and can lay out the full proposition. But Twitter? Where the objective of people is to get offended? And where things like nuance and wit literally do not exist? Not a good idea. The medium sometimes really is the message. Or at least it can absolutely take it over. After 4+ years of Trump using Twitter like a bull in a china shop, you'd think that lesson would have been learned by now Nope.
To Mark International Women’s Day, ‘Fearless Girl’ on Wall Street Has Been Surrounded by Frightening Shards of Broken Glass [Artnet] Oh look what's back in the news. McCann's State Street's Fearless Girl. State Street is billing the new stunt as a celebration of the progress toward gender equity that has been made in the business world since the statue was first created. Artnet's take: Surrounded by a sea of glass, Fearless Girl looks trapped, unable to move forward lest she cut herself. Surely there is a better way to welcome women into leadership roles than by reminding them that the remnants of the barriers they’ve overcome still might hurt them if they don’t watch their step.
My Take: State Street had some really serious issues with gender equality when this came out in 2017. Now they're doing this shit. 100% of the jobs lost in December were by women. Women have lost 1mm more jobs in the US than than Men in 2020. But hey, let's do a stunt celebrating the end of the glass ceiling. This is one of those instances (Burger King is too) where actions speak louder than words. Don't tell me that the glass ceiling is broken. Do something to break it. As the expression goes, shit or get off the pot. Wonder if it was McCann again. Oh it was. This was an Editor's pick of the day on AdAge. Barf.Jonah Peretti Lays Off 47 HuffPost Staffers In Latest “Bloodbath” [Defector] 47 U.S. HuffPost staffers, including eight managers, would be losing their jobs in order to “drive longterm sustainability.” Thirty-three of those employees were members of HuffPost’s union. According to a recording of the all-hands call obtained by Defector, Peretti told staffers that if they “don’t receive an email” by 1:00 p.m. EDT then their jobs are safe. The HuffPost staff received an email at 10:00 a.m. EDT announcing the meeting. According to an attendee, the password to join the meeting was “spr!ngisH3r3.” Real classy, dude.
5) Department of Great Work
Work is light this week. Covid Fatigue is real.
Bob Ross Paints Mtn Dew Bottle in 'Lost' Episode of The Joy of Painting [Muse By Clio] Bob Ross was a formative part of my childhood. I would literally watch PBS for hours as he painted happy trees and serene mountains. When he would change colors and dry his brush by banging it on his easel, 4 year old me would lose my shit like a teen at a BTS show. On Saturday, following an earlier teaser, the PepsiCo soda posted a 42-minute "lost episode" of The Joy of Painting, the painter's show that aired on PBS from 1983 to 1994. It's vintage Bob, but with a major twist. After crafting a lovely winter scene, deepfake Bob spends the final third of the show plopping in a honking bottle of Mtn Dew, replete with "happy little droplets" of condensation.The painting will be auctioned off, with proceeds going to charity. Mtn Dew is also creating limited-edition Bob Ross Paint Kits that will be given away in social media via a TikTok influencer campaign. There's been blowback but fuck the blowback. The project was endorsed by the Bob Ross estate and is honestly a great homage to him. I love this. From TBWA\Chiat\Day NY
The Moon Falls to Earth in this Dreamy OnePlus Ad from Mother Shanghai [Little Black Book] Why does it seem like all the good work is coming out of Asia these days? The film takes a cinematic approach to tell the story of the moon playfully sweeping through a quiet cityscape, in a cheeky nod to Hasselblad’s history. A wise owl, a girl with a dog and its dog, a moment between two construction workers where sparks fly… all are made that much more beautiful as we land on one thought-provoking message: it all begins with a simple thought. The VO was kind of terrible, but overall it was a nice simple thought. And such a refreshing break from the kinetic bullshit (ex Apple) smartphone marketing that's been coming out recently. From Mother Shanghai
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