This Week in Strategy: I got kicked out of a flat earth Facebook group because I asked if the 6 foot social distancing had pushed anyone over the edge yet!

Hi Strat Pack,

We apologize for missing last week's publication date. The Strategy Editorial department was only recently notified that Friday occurs every week. We regret the pain and suffering this may have caused.

Speaking of pain and suffering, yesterday was the deadline to submit to Cannes Lions, and those entry forms are a beast. It's been keeping me up at night. And (yes I know it's a really shitty humlebrag and I'm really honestly super lucky to have worked on work good enough to submit) I'm just glad that I'm done with it.

Whatever the opposite of pain and suffering is, it's the trailer for Fast and Furious 9. Strat Pack, I've got to level with you, the last few seemed a bit more furious than fast. But holy shit this movie looks good. Love how they're bringing the old cast back, and let's be honest, I'm a sucker for John Cena. But even more insane than this trailer (are they really going to put a car in space?!) Justin Lin, the director of FF9, said that he could see a crossover with Jurassic World "Once you reach a certain pinnacle, there's nowhere to go but to cross brand and merge, it's what big corporations do with each other when they get too big, you know what I mean?" said Michelle Rodriguez. "You just have to brand and merge with each other." What a trip that would be.

So, these two creative directors recreated office scents for R/GA staff working at home. I think I love it but I'm not sure. What do you think? Scents range from the familiar and comforting “Warm 96-page deck left on the printer,” and “Afternoon rush at the coffee bar,” to the altogether less appealing “Room 12F.1 after a 6-hour workshop.” I do know the smell of that warm 96 page deck. I might even miss it. And I honestly don't know how that makes me feel.

Last thing - non spon con(tent) alert. Friend of the newsletter Libie recently started a sustainable insole company called Fulton that you should check out. They position themselves as "A better way to walk" and their brand purpose is "Fulton aims to create a sturdier foundation for a healthier future." Which I really like. Points for cleverness.

Beyond a pretty website (it is!) Fulton is not your parents' insoles. The goods are made out of carbon neutral materials, like cork, natural latex foam and vegan leather made from cactus. The truth is that shoes pretty much suck and they've more or less screwed up how we are supposed to distribute pressure on our feet. So we all need insoles and the reason we don't have them is because, honestly, just look at Dr. Scholl's advertising. Check out www.walkfulton.com it's good stuff. Tell them Jordan sent you.

I feel the need to say that this is not Libie's marketing copy, this is me bloviating on. Which is why I'm a strategist, not a copywriter.

Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out what my flavor of scented candle would be. Let's jump right in.

The one thing to read this week
1) Insights Library - Cheat Sheet [Julian Cole - Planning Dirty]

I've been talking a lot about insights recently. I once heard Mark Pollard say Crafting an insight is the most important part of strategic storytelling. It's how we grab the audience's attention. The role of strategy is: develop the revelation / confession. And the role of creative is to bring that to life in a way that’s never been done before.

Julian's document has a bunch of great resources, and I recommend reading all of them. I've read most of them and these are my favorites:

2) FCB Checklist for Evaluating Creative [Richard Shotton - LinkedIn]

From Alex Morris' brilliant Strat Scraps. But click through for the comments in the LinkedIn post. There's some good stuff in there

evaluating creativity.png

3) Attention in advertising: Karen Nelson-Field [ThinkTV]

Not all attention is equal. That seems intuitively correct, but it’s something Karen Nelson-Field was determined to quantify, and on Nov. 16th she shared the results of her latest research on video advertising effectiveness.

Attention is a critical, but often overlooked, advertising metric: Not only is attention directly correlated to an uplift in sales, but unsurprisingly, if no attention is paid, there is no chance that an ad will work.

Karen’s research – conducted in a number of countries including the US, Australia and Germany – found that in all markets, TV delivers more ‘active attention’ seconds, and subsequently more sales uplift, than any other platform.

Furthermore, TV ads have a longer impact on sales than any other platform.

ad impact.png

(BVOD is Broadcaster Video on Demand, which...ugh)

There's a pretty good video in there if you have an hour. And you can download a PDF of the deck for your next presentation.

4) Department of Great Work

  • Ryan Reynolds' Satan Returns in Hellishly Fun New Work for Mint Moble [B & T] After finding love in 2020, Satan returns and he’s turning his efforts to flogging you a low price mobile plan. The ad’s for Mint Mobile and sees Satan working for rival mobile firm (the fictitious) Big Wireless. Ryan Reynolds said of the work: “From Match to sneakers and now wireless… Satan is on fire! We like to break new ground at Maximum Effort so the idea of having Satan find professional success at Big Wireless right after finding love on Match was so appealing. I like to think of it as my own personal MCU – the Mephistopheles Commercial Universe.” Nice. Very good. From Maximum Effort

  • Heinz Ketchup turns burgers, fries, and hot dogs into its 'Keystone' logo [AdAge] The power if an iconic brand asset. Heniz' newest effort is a campaign spanning outdoor, print and digital ads in which foods that ketchup is commonly paired with are shaped like the brand's well-known "keystone" logo. Burgers, fries and hot dogs appear molded into the shape of the logo, together with the words: "It has to be." The word Heinz does not appear. The outdoor ads are currently running in Canada, but the campaign may also roll out to the U.S.and even globally at a later date. From Rethink Toronto

  • Running up a Pocari Sweat [Shots] This is definitely a pretty spot, but more than the creative itself is the making of. This was a single take, shot with 100% practical effects. The floors become wavy, the walls twist and turn, and papers fly out of empty classrooms. She bursts through a wisteria-strewn lane onto a stage where she and a fellow classmate lock eyes and hands, swinging above the ground. The production built an undulating set nearly 85 meters long. The hallway’s sides are strips of fabric, and even the trellis holding the flowers was made to move. All in all, the ad is an ode to film craft and technology, capturing a tumultuous, but happy, moment in a teenager’s life when things suddenly make sense and take a turn for the better. Watch the Making of - it's cool as hell. From Dentsu Tokyo

  • 'Back to the Office' Instagram Game Has You Avoiding Maskless Colleagues and Overcrowded Pantries [Little Black Book] With working from home no longer the default mode in Singapore from 5 April, advertising agency BBH Singapore has launched an Instagram game that trains corporate staffers to be workplace ready again. The interactive 8-bit game, named Back to the Office, is a tongue-in-cheek nod at workplace policies in a post Covid-19 world. Players take on the role of an employee at BBH Singapore, and they are tasked to avoid maskless colleagues, duck from client briefs for a post-Covid world, and escape an overcrowded pantry that breaches social-distancing guidelines. Click here to check it out.

5) Platform Updates

  • Twitter reportedly discussed buying social audio app Clubhouse for $4 billion [The Verge] Twitter’s already building a competitor to the hot social audio app Clubhouse, but apparently, it’s discussed outright acquiring the company, too. Bloomberg reports today that Twitter held discussions with Clubhouse about purchasing the app for around $4 billion. These conversations have reportedly stalled, and it’s unclear why.

  • Am I FLoCed? [Electronic Frontier Foundation] Third-party cookies are the technology that powers much of the surveillance-advertising business today. But cookies are on their way out, and Google is trying to design a way for advertisers to keep targeting users based on their web browsing once cookies are gone. It's come up with FLoC. FLoC runs in your browser. It uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other "similar" people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web. This makes it easier to identify you with browser fingerprinting, and it gives trackers a head start on profiling you. You can read EFF's analysis and criticisms of FLoC here. The Chrome origin trial for FLoC has been deployed to millions of random Chrome users without warning, much less consent. While FLoC is eventually intended to replace tracking cookies, during the trial, it will give trackers access to even more information about subjects.

  • Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods [New York Times] Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it is true. “We would choose the most dramatic moment — or fake it and make it look more dramatic,” Mr. Robertson, 25, said in a recent interview. “We realized that if we wanted a future on YouTube, it had to be driven by confrontation. Every time we did that kind of thing, it would explode well beyond anything else.”

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

Jordan Weil