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April 2025 newsletter
April 2025 introduction – key to the door (21)

Welcome to my April 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 21st issue.

21 marks a transition to full adulthood in various countries, hence ‘keys to the door’ in bingo slang. In Chinese numbers, symbolism is often down to phrases that numbers sound like. 21 sounds like “easily definitely fine” – indicating an auspicious association with the number.

For some reason this month I have had Bill McClintock’s Motor City Woman on repeat. It’s a mash-up of The Spinners – I’ll be Around, Queensrÿche – Jet City Woman and Steely Dan – Do it Again. It’s a bit of an ear worm – you’re welcome.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- Cleaned up copy of an interview I did as a juror for the PHNX Awards. More here.
- From the challenges faced by Apple Intelligence to drone deliveries and designing in lightness.
- I thought about how computing tends towards efficiency along the story arc of its history and its likely impact on our use of AI models.
Books that I have read.
- The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok. The book is a complex thriller. The story is straight forward, but the books covers complex, fraught issues with aplomb from misogyny, the male gaze to the white saviour complex.
- The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot focused on the use of numbers in the media. But it’s also invaluable for strategists reading and interrogating pre-existing research. As a book is very easy-going and readable. I read it travelling back-and-forth to see the parents.
- A Spy Alone was written by former MI6 officer Charles Beaumont. I was reminded of the dreary early 1970s of George Smiley’s Britain in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the tone of the book. However A Spy Alone is alarmingly contemporary, with oblique references to UK infrastructure investments in the UK attached to a hostile foreign power, private sector intelligence, open source intelligence a la Bellingcat, nihilistic entrepreneurs and a thoroughly corrupted body politic. Beaumont’s story features a post cold-war spy ring in Oxford University echoing the cold war Cambridge spy ring. Beaumont touches on real contemporary issues through the classic thriller, in the same way that Mick Herron uses satire.
Things I have been inspired by.

Big brand advertising isn’t as digital as we think.

Trends in TV 2025 by Thinkbox threw up some interesting data points and hypotheses.
- Advertising is eating retail property. A good deal of search and social advertising gains is not from traditional advertising, but traditional retailing, in place of a real-world shop front. This is primarily carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises. I imagine a lot of this is Chinese direct-to-consumer businesses. 80% of Meta’s revenue is not from the six largest advertising holding companies.
- Viewership across video platforms both online and offline have stabilised in the UK. (Separately I heard that ITV were getting the same viewership per programme, but it’s been attenuated with the rise of time-shifted content via the online viewership.
World views

WARC highlighted research done by Craft Human Intelligence for Channel 4 where they outlined six world views for young adults. While it was couched in terms of ‘gen-z’, I would love to see an ongoing inter-cohort longitudinal study to see how these world views change over time in young people. This would also provide an understanding of it it reflects wider population world views. BBH Labs past work looking at Group Cohesion Score of gen-Z – implies that this is unlikely to be just a generational change but might have a more longitudinal effect across generations to varying extents.

Anyway back to he six world views outlined:
- ‘Girl power’ feminists. 99% identified as female. About 21% of their cohort. “While they’re overwhelmingly progressive, their focus tends to be on personal goals rather than macro-level politics. They underindex heavily on engagement with UK politics and society.”
- ‘Fight for your rights’. 12% of cohort, 60% female, educated and engaged with current affairs. “Although they consider themselves broadly happy, they believe the UK is deeply unfair – but believe that progress is both necessary and achievable.”
- ‘Dice are loaded’ are 15% of their cohort. 68% female. “Feeling left behind, they perceive themselves to lack control over their future, and are worried about finances, employment, housing, mental health, or physical appearance.”
- ‘Zero-sum’ thinkers comprise 18% of their cohort. Over-index at higher end of social-economic scale, gender balanced. “…they lean toward authoritarian and radical views on both sides of the political spectrum.”
- ‘Boys can’t be boys’ are 14% of the cohort and 82% male. Supporters of traditional masculinity.
- ‘Blank slates’. 20% of their cohort, all of them male. “They aren’t unintelligent or unambitious, but they pay little attention to matters beyond their own, immediate world. While some follow the news, their main focus is on just getting on with life”.
More here and here.

FMCG performance

At the beginning of March, Unilever abruptly replaced its CEO. Hein Schumacher was out, and in the space of a week CFO Fernando Fernandez became CEO. That showed a deep internal dissatisfaction with Unilever’s performance that surprised shareholders AND the business media. Over the past decade Unilever has leaned hard into premium products and influencer marketing.

“There are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernandez said. “That’s a significant change. It requires a machine of content creation, very different to the one we had in the past . . . ”

Fernandez wants to lean even harder into influencer marketing. But I thought that there was a delta on this approach given his goal to have higher margin premium brands that are highly desirable.

“Desirability at scale and marketing activity systems at scale will be the fundamental principles of our marketing strategy”

Meanwhile Michael Farmer’s newsletter had some datapoints that were very apropos to the Unilever situation.

“…for the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the combined FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate per year. The numbers associated with this long-term growth rate are staggering. P&G alone grew from about $1 billion (1960) to $79 billion in 2010. Throughout this period, P&G was the industry’s advocate for the power of advertising, becoming the largest advertiser in the US, with a focus on traditional advertising — digital / social advertising had hardly begun until 2010. Since 2010, with the advent of digital / social advertising, and massive increases in digital / social spend, P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive have grown, collectively, at less than 1% per year, about half the growth rate of the US economy (2.1% per year). They are not the only major advertisers who have grown below GDP rates. At least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2% per year for the past 15 years. Digital and social advertising, of course, have come to dominate the advertising scene since 2010, and it represents, today, about 2/3rds of all advertising spend.”

Mr Fernandez has quite the Gordian knot to try and solve, one-way or another.

Automated communications and AI influencers

Thanks to Stephen Waddington‘s newsletter highlighted a meta-analysis of research papers on the role of automation and generative AI in communications. What’s interesting is the amount of questions that the paper flags, which are key to consideration of these technologies in marketing and advertising. More here.

LinkedIn performance

Social Insider has pulled together some benchmarking data on LinkedIn content performance. It helps guide what good looks like and the content types to optimise for on LinkedIn. Register and download here.

Chart of the month.

The FT had some really interesting data points that hinted at a possible longitudinal crisis in various aspects of reasoning and problem solving. There has been few ongoing studies in this area, and it deserves more scrutiny.

In his article Have humans past peak brain power, FT data journalist John Burn-Murdoch makes the case about traits which would support intelligence and innovation from reading, to mathematical reasoning and problem solving have been on a downward trends. The timing of this decline seems to correlate with the rise of the social web.

If true, over time this may work its way into marketing effectiveness. My best guess would be that rational messages are likely to be less effective in comparison to simple emotional messages with a single-minded intent over time. This should show up in both short term and long term performance. A more cynical view might be that the opportunity for bundling and other pricing complexities could facilitate greater profit margins over time.

Things I have watched.

Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is a film that I can watch several times over despite the film being over 75 years old now. Detective Murakami’s trek through the neighbourhoods of occupation-era Tokyo and all the actors performances are stunning. The storytelling is amazing and there are set pieces in here that are high points in cinema history. I don’t want to say too much more and spoil it for you, if you haven’t already seen it.

Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – Solid State Society – this is a follow on to the original GiTS manga and anime films touches directly on the challenges faced looking after Japan’s aging society. Central to the story is the apparent kidnapping over time of 20,000 children who can’t remember who their parents are. The plot is up to the usual high standard with government intrigue, technical and societal challenges.

The Wire series one – I stopped and started watching The Wire. Films better suited my focus at the time. I finally started into series one this month. The ensemble cast are brilliant. The show is now 22 years old, yet it has aged surprisingly well. While technology works miracles, the slow methodical approach to building a case is always the same.

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster – is a fantastic documentary covering the career of architect Sir Norman Foster. I remember watching it at the ICA when it originally came out and enjoyed watching it again on DVD. Foster brings a similar approach to architecture that Colin Chapman brought to his Lotus cars. When we are now thinking about efficiency and sustainability, their viewpoints feel very forward-thinking in nature.

Useful tools.

Fixing the iOS Mail app

You know something is up when media outlets are writing to you with instructions on how they can remain visible in your inbox. The problem is due to Apple’s revamp of the iPhone’s Mail.app as part of its update to iOS 18.2.

So how do you do this?

Open Mail.app and you can see the categorised folders at the top of your screen, under the search bar.

Find each tab where an a given email has been put. Open the latest edition. Tap the upper right hand corner. Select ‘Categorise Sender’. Choose ‘Primary’ to make sure future emails from this sender are in your main inbox view.

That’s going to get old pretty soon. My alternative is to toggle between views as it makes sense. Apple’s inbox groupings are handy when you want to quickly find items you can delete quickly. Otherwise the single view makes sense.

Inspiration for strategists

Questions are probably the most important tool for strategists. 100 questions offers inspiration so you can focus on the right ones to ask for a given time.

The sales pitch.

I have been worked on the interrogation process and building responses to a couple of client new business briefs for friends (Red Robin Ventures and Craft Associates) and am now working a new brand and creative strategy engagement as part of an internal creative agency at Google.

If you’re thinking about strategy needs in Q4 (October onwards) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me on YunoJuno and LinkedIn; get my email from Spamty to drop me a line.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my April 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the May bank holidays.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
April 25, 2025
Presidential election beliefs
Why presidential election beliefs as a topic? The US presidential election happened and Democrats are looking at analysing the fallout.

While it is easy to blame the qualities of the candidates, I wanted to take a look at the presidential election beliefs that underpinned the campaign. The reason why I am publishing a while after the fact is that I wanted the clarity of slower thinking rather than being wrapped up in the maelstrom of analysis, this then naturally took me to analyse presidential election beliefs rather than other aspects of the campaign such as the qualities of the candidates.

NASA/Taylor Mickal

I think that their campaign was built on presidential election beliefs that would seem foolish in retrospect.
- Gen-Z would vote Democrat
- Substance matters
- Taking the moral high ground
- Trust in the mainstream media
- Vibes over policy
Gen-Z would vote Democrat

I won’t get into the debate over how representative and helpful generations are as a descriptor and assume on good faith that this is just short hand for young adults. Evidence would suggest that this belief was untrue in election performance and underlying research available prior to the election.

Group cohesion scores

BBH London looked at TGI’s Jan-Dec 2019 UK dataset, measuring the size of the average majority viewpoint across 419 lifestyle statements.

As an entire populace, the UK’s Group Cohesion Score is 48.7%. In other words, the average majority opinion is held by 48.7% of the population. …On average, the generations have a Group Cohesion Score of +1.3, making them only marginally more like-minded than the nation as a whole. For Gen Z, this score falls to +0.2. People born between 1997 and 2013 have no stronger connection to each other than to the rest of the country.

This viewpoint was supported by a piece of research conducted by Stanford University researchers back in 1998 and presented to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The researchers found that the beliefs attributed to young adults at the time in terms of cynicism, bleakness about the future and personal unhappiness were actually increasing across all ages – an empirical demonstration of group cohesion similar to the TGI data cited.

Criteria affecting progressive political themes

Oxford Analytica published a paper looking at the criteria affecting progressive political themes on a global basis, which had some lessons at a national level as well:
- Manipulation of religious divisions will prevent an improvement in religious tolerance.
- Wealthier economies correlate with better support for proactive measures to support women’s rights.
A commen t by Alexander Stubb at the Norwegian Business School struck me about this concept of wealthier economies. President Stubb was talking about struggling to understand Brexit, he recalled a politician commenting on how the UK benefited in terms of GDP, to be interrupted by and event attendee commented ‘Yeah mate, perhaps your GDP, but not mine’.

What a wealthier economy is, is as much contextual as nation level quantitative data.

This would probably explain why less well off women didn’t universally rally behind the Harris over Roe versus Wade when they may have been pre-occupied by the impact of inflation on their households.

It also may partly explain the progressive / conservative political split between the genders highlighted in the FT. A new global gender divide is emerging – documented the split.

Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men highlighted some of the factors driving it that affect the context of a wealthier economy by gender from the gender split in education attainment to better quality social support networks.

Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.

Substance matters

I was divided over whether I should include this in the next section as substance and taking the moral high ground seem to be closely paired. I think that this is based on a number of factors:
- In most careers there is a fallacy where we think others think our work matters more than it actually does in the minds of the general public, the same goes for policy wonks.
- From the Roman satirist Juvenal discussing ‘bread and circuses‘ to Orwell’s description of the ‘proles’ in 1984 it is obvious that their vision of a general public that want to be entertained rather than informed. The higher role for media exemplified by the likes of John Reith at the BBC is at odds with this reality. This goes hand-in-hand with the power that Elon Musk’s voter registration sweepstakes and Joe Rogan’s podcasts seemed to have; despite them being the antithesis of John Reith’s vision.
Taking the moral high ground

The Republican campaign threw out a number of ‘dead cat’ tactics that distracted media, outraged their political opponents and entertained their supporters:
- Donald Trump’s admiration for Arnold Palmer’s sizeable penis. Words I never thought I would be writing here.
- Unfounded accusations of Haitian immigrants eating pets.
- JD Vance’s childless cat lady comments.
- Donald Trump’s ‘millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums‘
The average member of the public probably doesn’t care about the high ground. We can see this in marketing history. Going back to Christmas 2016, Poundland’s social campaign around its ‘naughty’ elf on a shelf that outraged the ad industry and regulators at the ASA, received positive responses from the general public online. We see this mirrored in the interests and pleasures of the ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984. Elections aren’t a debate class, but entertainment.

Trust in the mainstream media

One of the great differences between the campaign run by the Democrats and their Republican counterparts was the role played by the mainstream media. The Harris campaign relied on institutions like Saturday Night Live and interviews with serious journalists.

By comparison, Donald Trump gave his interviews primarily with podcasters (though some of those podcasters were faces in the mainstream media before becoming podcasters like Sean Hannity) including:
- Sean Hannity
- Let’s Go! with Bill Belichick, Maxx Crosby, Peter King & Jim Gray
- Brian Kilmeade (Fox Radio podcast show)
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- Six Feet Under with Mark Calaway
- The Dan Bongino Show
- The Glenn Beck Program
- Bussin’ With The Boys
- Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh
- The Ben Shapiro Show
- The Ramsey Show also syndicated in their clips podcast The Ramsey Highlights
- The Howie Carr Radio Network
- Lex Fridman Podcast
- The Dr. Phil Podcast
- Shawn Ryan Show
- This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
- The Adam Carolla Show
- Impaulsive with Logan Paul
Altogether Trump appeared on 22 podcasts in 2024 alone. Many of them on multiple occasions. If you discount mainstream media programmes republished in a podcast format, Harris appeared less times in less podcasts than her rival. In terms of absolute reach the Joe Rogan Experience is bigger for US audiences than equivalent shows on Fox News. Progressive-leaning TV networks MSNBC and CNN combined are about only half of Rogan’s reach.

The problem is that trust in mainstream media has declined, at a faster rate than their newer online media rivals according to research conducted by IPSOS. So the Democrats spent time focusing on ineffective media interactions in comparison to their Republican rivals based on presidential election beliefs about the primacy of mainstream media publishers with regards to politics.
November 16, 2024
2024 iPad Pro
In my take on the 2024 iPad Pro I am going to look at things through three lenses and after the initial hot takes have cooled down. These three lenses are:
- Hardware
- Semiconductors
- Advertisement
Apple and Microsoft both push their most powerful tablets like the 2024 iPad Proas creator tools. However, at the time of writing I have been working alongside creative teams in a prominent ad agency and both the creative and strategic elements of the work we were doing were pulled together using different software, but the same hardware. Apple MacBook Pro computers and large secondary monitors. An illustrator attached a ‘graphics tablet‘ alongside their laptop to provide additional tactile control, just in the same way I am known to use an outboard Kensington trackball for additional fine control in creating presentation charts.

Where I have seen iPads used:
- Senior (older executives) replying to emails – I suspect its because the screen is bigger than a smartphone.
- As a media player device. The iPad is the travel and bedside equivalent of the book and the portable DVD player.
- As a presentation device. Friends that give a lot of public presentations at conferences and one who works as a university lecturer both use the iPad as device to present from in place of lugging around a laptop.
In all of these use cases, there isn’t that much to differentiate iPad models and the main limitations are user intent or software-related.

My parents use an iPad I’ve bought them to keep in touch with me. We started using an iPad as a Skype client over a decade ago. Then iMessage and FaceTime started to make more sense, particularly has they started getting Skype spam. It’s the computing equivalent of a kitchen appliance: largely intuitive and very little can go really wrong – that’s both the iPad’s strength and its weakness.

Secondly, there is the confusion of the Apple iPad product line-up, which is at odds with the way Apple got its second wind. In Walter Isaacson’s flawed autobiography of Steve Jobs, one of the standout things that the returning CEO did was ruthlessly prune the product line-up.

He made it into a 2 x 2 grid: professional and consumer, portable and desktop. For most of past number of years, the iPhone has gone down this ‘pro and consumer’ split.

The iPad line-up is less clear cut to the casual observer:
- iPad Mini
- iPad
- iPad Air
- iPad Pro
In addition, there are Apple pencils – a smarter version of the stylus that used to be used prior to capacitive touchscreens became commonplace. Some of these pencils work with some devices, but not others. It’s a similar case, with other Apple accessories like keyboards that double as device covers. All of which means that your hardware accessories need an upgrade too. This is more than just getting a new phone case. It’s more analogous to having to buy a new second monitor or mouse every time you change your computer.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get into hardware.

Hardware

The 2024 iPad Pro launched before the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, so we had no idea how the device will work together in conjunction with iPadOS 18. Addressing long term criticism of using the iPad is as much about software as it is about hardware.

The 2024 iPad Pro still doesn’t have a definitive user case, but Apple decided to focus on creativity in their marketing.

Presumably this is because the main thing to celebrate about the 2024 iPad Pro is increased computing power and creative apps are the most likely to make use of that power. For many ‘non-creative’ use cases, the previous generation of iPad Pro is very over-powered for what it does.

Some of the choices Apple made with the hardware are interesting. The existing iPad Pro is a thin, lightweight computing device. The 2024 iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest device ever. This thinness is a clever feat of engineering, but so would be an iPad of the same size, but with more battery capacity. Instead Apple made the device made things a bit thinner device with exactly the same battery life as previous models.

The iPad Pro uses two screens one behind the other to provide deeper and brighter colours at a resolution that’s extremely high. This provides additional benefits such as avoiding screen burn-in which OLED screens were considered to be vulnerable to.

The camera has moved from the side to the top of the 2024 iPad Pro in landscape mode. This has necessitated a new arrangement of magnets for attachments, which then drove the need for new accessories including the new Apple pencil pro.

Semiconductors

The M4 processor is Apple’s latest silicon design and represents a move on from the current processors in Apple’s Mac range.

It is made by TSMC on a leading edge 3 nanometre process. This is TSMC’s second-generation process. Having it as the processor in the 2024 iPad Pro, allows Apple and partners to slowly ramp up production and usage of the new processor to match gains in semiconductor chip yields. This will give them the time to iron out any production challenges and resolve any quality issues. Relatively low production volumes would be a good thing, prior to the processor being rolled out more widely.

Apple seems to be designing the M-series processors in parallel to the A-series processors used in iPhones and iPads in the past. They seem to have them in mind for a wider range of devices.

Advertisement

Apple previewed an advertisement to promote the 2024 iPad Pro.

Crush has been executed with a high degree of craft in the production. It had a lot of negative reactions from celebrities and current Apple customers who saw it in terms of:
- It being a wider metaphor of what technology was perceived to be doing to creativity. For instance, Hollywood actors and screen-writers are concerned about streaming and the effects of large language models.
- Destroying real-life artefacts that consumers have attached meaning to. For instance, I use digital music, but also have a physical music collection that not only reflects my taste, but much more. Real-world experiences now provide respite from the digital world.
With product launches like the iPhone 3, Apple created adverts which were less of a literal metaphor for everything that could be crammed into the device by using show-and-tell.

Reversing the Crush! ad makes a similar point, but in a less oppressive way.

And as with everything else in life, there is seldom a time when an idea is truly new. There was an ad done by BBH London which used a crush metaphor to demonstrate all the features in LG’s Renoir phone circa 2008. As this circulated around Apple was perceived as being a copycat.

Presentation

Given that Apple events are now largely virtual post-COVID we didn’t have a positive live audience reaction amongst those who ‘got it’ to guide public opinion. Instead it was left on social media ‘contextless’.

The Apple exhibition centre at the new ‘space ship’ campus, doesn’t seem to be used in the same way that Apple did live events prior to 2020. Apple held small event screenings for journalists in New York and London.

But was Crush! bad?

When I first saw it, I thought that it was good from a craft point of view. I was a bit surprised at how dark the lighting was, it felt a little off-key.

My personal opinion about the concept was that it felt a bit heavy-handed because it was so literal. The creative brief done by a strategist is usually the jumping off point, not the literal creative concept.

But that doesn’t make it bad advert, it just felt not particularly clever for someone who is probably more media-literate than the average person. I would go as far as to say, it would have been unlikely to win creative advertising awards.

But I was also aware that my opinion didn’t mean that the ad wouldn’t be effective. Given the 2024 iPad Pro’s role as M4 guinea pig, Apple probably weren’t hoping for barn-storming sales figures and in the grand scheme of things the advert just wasn’t extremely important.

I was probably as blindsided as Apple was by the depth of feeling expressed in the online reaction.

TL;DR I don’t know if Crush! really is ‘bad’. Let’s ask some specific questions about different aspects of the ad.

Am I, or the negative responders the target market?

Maybe, or maybe not. I don’t have a place in it in my current workflow. I still find that a Mac works as my primary creative technology device. What about if Apple were aiming at college kids and first jobbers? These people wouldn’t come to buying the 2024 iPad Pro with the same brand ‘baggage’ that me and many of the commentators have.

Working in marketing, the 1984 ad and the Think Different ads were campaigns were classics. Hell, I can remember being a bit of an oddball at college as a Mac user. I helped friends get their secondhand Mac purchases up and running.

Going to coffee shops or working in the library and seeing a see of laptop lids emblazoned with the Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and H-P logos. If people were a bit quirky they may have a Sony Vaio instead.

I remember the booes and the hisses in the audience at MacWorld Boston in 1997, when Apple announced its partnership with Microsoft.

Even when I worked at Yahoo! during the web 2.0 renaissance, Mac users were second-class citizens internally and externally in terms of our product offering.

In the eyes of young people today Apple was always there, front and centre. The early iPad or iPhone experience as pacifier. The iPhone has must-have teenage smartphone. The Mac at home and maybe an Apple TV box.

Finally many high performing adverts of the past aimed at young adults have left the mainstream media and tastemakers non-plussed.

How did the ad test?

According to anecdotal evidence I have heard from people at IPSOS; in a survey they found that about half the respondents surveyed said they would be interested in finding out more about the 2024 iPad Pro. The younger the respondent, the more likely they were to be interested in the device.

System 1, tested the ad and found that it performed 1.9 out of a possible maximum score of 5. In System 1 parlance this indicates somewhere between low and modest long term brand growth derived from the advertisement. The average score for US advertisements is 2.3. But over half of ads that were run in the Super Bowl this year scored between 1 and 2. Which would imply that the ad could be improved; but the devil might be in the details as implied by the IPSOS research.

Is Crush! just a copy cat?

You can have the best creative director in the world who has seen a lot of advertising, but they might not know all advertising. Secondly, the advertising industry is getting rid of long term professionals. According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising no one retired from the industry in 2023, as staff were ‘phased out‘ of the industry way before retirement age. All of which means that there isn’t the historical memory to know if a campaign is sailing close to plagiarism.

And it isn’t just advertising. Earlier in my career, I got to see former business journalist and newspaper editor Damian McCrystal speak at a breakfast event. One thing stayed with me about his presentation, in which he talked about the financial industry:

The reasons why we make the same mistakes over-and-over again is because ‘the city’ has a collective institutional memory of about eight years.
Damien McCrystal

So we had Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, despite the fact that pretty much every financier I have ever met had read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. This was based on his experiences as a banker navigating the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.

So no, despite the similarity of the LG Renoir advertisement, I don’t think that Crush! was an intentional copy.

More related content can be found here.

More information

Some thoughts about Apple’s new iPads | Ian Betteridge

The M4 iPad Pros | Daring Fireball

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Yesterday’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad Keynote | Daring Fireball

How Apple’s ‘tone deaf’ iPad ad signals a turning point | FT

Apple’s New iPad Ad Leaves Its Creative Audience Feeling … Flat – The New York Times

Apple’s new iPad ad has struck a nerve online. Here’s why | AP News

Commentary: Apple’s tone-deaf iPad ad triggers our darkest AI fears – CNA

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad’s over a decade old and we’re still not sure what it’s for • The Register

12 things I learned by switching from the 13-inch MacBook Pro to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro | Macworld
June 4, 2024
Coffee shop problem
One of my friends who I first met when we were working on global brands at Unilever, took a change in career running their own chocolatier and coffee shop at a lovely market town outside London.

Coffee shops for years have had a nice line in selling branded insulated cups. The rationale is that these cups can be re-used and act as branded marketing for the shop. In the past you have had a push on using these insulated cups in the name of going green. There was a mix of take-up, but adoption was increasing over time.

The barriers to using re-usable cups include:
- Having a cup big enough to take your drink. Coffee shop chains offer their branded cups. And if you don’t want to be a Café Nero billboard, you can buy cups from the likes of Stanley that will keep your drink warm for up to eight hours.
- Having your cup with you. For drivers having a cup and a cup holder in their vehicle is easy enough. the challenge is when they take it into the home or workplace to clean the cup. They need to remember to have it back in their car. Public transport users have a similar problem but need a bag to hold their cup and their work ritual paraphernalia. One of the benefits of a single-use cup is not having to remember.
- Having to wash the cups. Coffee shops have to wash cups used by people drinking in a coffee shop, but customers coming in with re-usable cups would need an immediate clean. I did notice in a Starbucks in a Hong Kong neighbourhood that customers left their cups overnight with the shop. However for most shops relying on customers to clean the cup themselves and a quick blast of steam from the coffee machine cappuccino function should be enough.
Customer habits

Pre-COVID the coffee shop problem looked as if it was being slowly but surely being addressed. This was because a significant minority of customers were going to their local coffee shop near work or home with a reusable cup. You are building a smaller habit with a bigger habit as a trigger: taking your reusable cup with you as you leave home prepared for work.

COVID-19 changed the whole coffee shop experience. Insurance companies had already been pushing store-owners towards cashless transactions. But now hygiene had its place as well. We were divided from baristas with a sea of perspex and reusable cups were not accepted.

Wider daily routines were broken with working from home, and the atomic habit of a daily caffeine fix was shattered. There were other aspects going on as well. Consumers got used to making coffee at home, or not going into their workplace at all. A regular coffee habit has been more difficult to reform due to hybrid working and the cost of living crisis probably hasn’t. helped the coffee shop problem either.

Back to my friend’s coffee shop

So back to the discussion that inspired this post:

We give a 30p discount for bringing your own takeaway cup, but out of the almost 400 takeaway drinks we’ve served in the last week only 11 times have we been able to give this discount. We’ve started talking about how we can help facilitate this behaviour change more as part of our sustainability drives. One idea being explored is to actually start charging for takeaway cups rather than discounting for bringing your own…

This equates to less than 2.75% redemption rate. My take on the coffee shop problem is outlined below:

Reduce friction and doubt: Tell people you will accept any takeaway cup that has room to hold the coffee (if its bigger thats fine).

Optimise any behaviour change activities that you are likely to implement: a Phil Graves research outlined in Consumerology supports the heuristic that positive reinforcement tends to be slightly better over time. But one thing to remember is that behavioural change is a war of inches. For instance reframe the above statement ‘In just one week we’ve already helped almost 3 percent of our customer base move to reusable cups’. This then becomes a social proof that encourages consumer reading the copy to be part of a growing movement.

A cup ‘fine’ might be like a sin tax – this paper on late pick up fines at an Israeli childcare centre is often quoted in behaviour change books. Here’s a synopsis of story laid out in the research paper. In day care centres in Israel, economists tried to help schools identify ways to reduce late pick-ups. Economists conducted a study by announcing that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay a $3 fine. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went up by 100%. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.

More posts similar to this can be found here.
May 15, 2024
April 2024 newsletter – no. 9
April 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my April 2024 newsletter which marks my 9th issue. We managed to make it through the winter and the clocks moved forward allowing for lighter evenings in the northern hemisphere.

The number nine is full of symbolism in a good way. In Chinese culture it sounds similar to long-lasting. It was strongly associated with the mystical and powerful nature of the Chinese dragon. From the number of dragon types and children to the number of scales on the dragon – which were multiples of 9. You have nine channels in traditional Chinese medicine. In Norse mythology there are nine worlds and Odin the all-father hangs on the tree of life for 9 days to gain knowledge of the runes.

Social media-related cognitive dissonance

A couple of conversations with people, spurred me to write this next piece.

I know it’s obvious and common sense, but it needs to be said occasionally. This time last year, I was on a Zurich work trip, providing support to a teammate running a workshop for a client who viewed the agency as the least worst option. We did good work and built temporary rapport, we got insight about the wider client-side politics at play. It was the classic example of the complexities involved in agency life and Lord knows we already have enough internal politics in our own shops to deal with.

The photo I shared on Instagram at the time gave no clue to what was happening, serving as a reminder to consider the curated nature of social feeds when scrolling through.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- Fads versus real trends
- A quick guide to jargon used in pharma marketing.
- What my answers to Campaign’s a-list questions would look like.
- Boutique e-tailers and why the multi-brand luxury retail sector has gone from boom to bust.
- Very Ralph and other things – Ralph Lauren’s world building abilities and how others from a cancer patient or overseas migrant workers have bent the world to their needs, or made a new one.
Books that I have read.
- There are a few books that I revisit and the March 1974 JWT London planning guide is one of them. In many respects it feels fresh and more articulate than more modern tomes.
- Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. But if like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit. It is important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines. Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter.
- Van Horne and Riley’s Left of Bang was recommended by a friend who recently left military service. It codified and gave me a lexicon for describing observations of focus group dynamics and observation-based shopper marketing. Probably of bigger value to people more interested in the analytical side of behavioural science is the bibliography – which is extensive.
Things I have been inspired by.

Sustaining a sustainable brand

Kantar do a good webinar series called On Brand with Kantar. I got to watch one of them: Why consumers ignore brands’ sustainability efforts. Consumers are reticent to trust in brand’s sustainable efforts. Kantar’s recommendation is to stay the course and continue to demonstrate real sustainability. Kantar’s work complemented System 1’s Greenprint US-orientated sustainable advertising report. There is a UK-specific version as well with half a dozen ideas for marketers published in partnership with ITV.

Media platform trends

GWI released their 2024 Global Media trends report. GWI takes a survey based approach to understand consumer media behaviour.
- Broadcast TV still commands the greatest share of total TV time, despite Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and a plethora of other streaming platforms from Criterion to Disney+.
- Survival/horror players are most excited about gaming luxury collabs, whether or not luxury brands are equally excited about survival or horror gamers is a bigger question.
- Games console ownership has halved in the past ten years. This surprised me given how many of my friends have a Switch or PlayStation 5. It probably explains why Microsoft is focusing on being a publisher rather than on platforms as well.
Japanese online media spend

Dentsu published a report looking into 2023 Advertising Expenditures in Japan. A couple of interesting outtakes.
- They focused exclusivity on internet advertising, which gives you a good idea on where they want the balance of media spend to go, rather than necessarily the right tool for the right job. Yes digital is very important, BUT, we live in a world were we are wrapped by and consume layers of digital and analogue media.
We can see from GWI data that this viewpoint is likely to be still excessively myopic in terms of media due to offline – online media linkages. This is likely to be even more so in Japan that still has a more robust traditional media industry.
- Internet advertising reached a new high, despite being a couple of years after the Olympic games were hosted in Tokyo. (Media spend when a country hosts the olympics tends to be skewed that year upwards).
One thing I would flag is that this report is based on surveying people across the Japanese advertising industry and built on their responses. So there maybe some biases built into that process. Overall it’s a fascinating read.

Social media engagement benchmarks

RivalIQ published their 2024 Social Media Industry Engagement bench report, download it to get the full details. Three things that struck me straight away:
- Macro-level decline across platforms on engagement rate, which matches the trends that Manson and Whatley outlined ten years ago in their Facebook Zero paper for Ogilvy Social.
- If brands didn’t need enough reason already to reduce exposure to Twitter, the falling engagement rates on the platform add additional reasons. Overall video seemed to underperform on engagement compared to photos.
- One thing leaped out to me in the industry verticals data, if you are looking to reach student age adults, why not consider collaborating with higher education institution social media accounts rather than influencers?
Shocking health outcomes

The Hidden Cost of Ageism | A Barrier to Innovation & Growth | Future Work – sparked a lot of discussion with its implications on workplace practices, particularly within the advertising sector. What was less discussed but more important was the implications of ageism related biases on healthcare treatment.

Under-treatment or Over-treatment: Older adults may receive less aggressive treatment options or are overtreated because of age-related biases, rather than based on individual health needs and preferences.

Dismissal of Concerns: Healthcare providers might dismiss older patients’ health issues as inevitable parts of ageing, potentially overlooking treatable conditions.

Age-Based Prioritisation: In some cases, age influences the allocation of healthcare resources, with younger individuals being prioritised over older ones, assuming they have more “life worth living.”
The Hidden Cost of Ageism | Future Work

MSNBC News in the US did a report on what it called a ‘Post-Roe underground’ echoing the underground railroads to free slaves in the Southern states and the Vietnam war era draft dodgers who escaped north to Canada. This time it is to help women access abortion pills or procedures in other states or Mexico.

MSNBC

My friend Parrus hosted a talk on World Health Day, more on that here, the key takeaway for me was not trying to replicate developed market solutions in developing markets. Instead think about how it could be reinvented. Thinking that could be extended beyond health care to consumer goods, telecoms and technology sectors as well.

Luxury market shake-up

Business of Fashion covered a US court case where two women brought a lawsuit against Hermès, alleging purchase of its sought-after Birkin bag is dependent on purchase of other products and is an “illegal tying arrangement” that violated US antitrust law.

Hermès is more vulnerable than other brands because it owns its retail stores. The case, if successful could have implications far beyond the luxury bag-maker. For instance, how Ford selected prospective owners for its GT-40 sports cars, or most Ferrari limited edition for that matter.

While we’re on the subject of luxury, LVMH are rerunning their INSIDE LVMH certificate which is invaluable for anyone who might work on a luxury brand now or in the future. More here.

Morizo

Toyota are on a tear at the moment. They correctly guessed that electric cars were too expensive at the moment and focused hybrids as a stepping stone to electric and hydrogen fuel cell production. They have also successfully use the passion for driving in their products and their marketing. The Toyota GR Yaris was a result of Chairman Akio Toyoda instructing engineers to make something sporty enough to win the World Rally Championship and affordable.

He also outed himself as a speed demon who went under the nom de plume of Morizo.

Quebec

For many English speakers one of the most dissonant experiences is being confronted by a language you can’t speak. It’s part of the reason why ireland managed to become the European base of companies like Alphabet and and Intel. So I was very impressed by this campaign by the Quebec government to attract visitors and inbound investment.

Things I have watched.

I watched Mr Inbetween series one in March and managed to work through series two and three this month. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough as a series. They just keep building on each other.

Over Easter, I revisited some old VHS tapes my parents still had and rediscovered the Christopher Walken science fiction horror film “Communion.” It epitomizes its era, with alien abduction narratives emerging during the Cold War and permeating popular culture from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files,” tapering off after 9/11. “Communion” demonstrates how effective editing and minimal special effects can heighten tension and emotion. Despite the film’s incredulous premise, Walken delivers a fantastic performance.

“Modesty Blaise” is from a time when comic book adaptations were uncommon in cinemas. This 1966 adaptation of the 1960s comic strip shares stylistic similarities with “Barbarella” and stars a young Terence Stamp. I received a tape copy from a friend who was attending art college at the time. The depiction of the computer as a character with emotional reactions in the film feels contemporary, echoing the rise of virtual assistants like Siri and ChatGPT, despite being portrayed as a mainframe. It is interesting to contrast it with Spike Jonze’s movie Her made 50 years later.

Useful tools.

A lot of the tools this month have been inspired by my trusty Mac slowly dying and needing to get my new machine up and running before my old machine gave out.

Time Machine

Apple’s native backup software, Time Machine, serves as a personal sysadmin for home users. Regular backups are essential. If a crucial document disappears while you’re working on it, Time Machine, coupled with a Time Machine-enabled hard drive, allows you to retrieve earlier versions of the document, potentially saving your sanity in critical moments.

Microsoft Office

I prefer the one-off payment model over Office 365 services. I use Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps instead of Outlook. While Office is available for just £100, which is reasonable considering its features, I still prefer Keynote over PowerPoint for creating presentations.

Superlist

Many of you may recall Wunderlist, which Microsoft acquired, but much of its original charm was lost in the transition to Microsoft To Do. Superlist is a reboot of Wunderlist by the original team, this time without Microsoft’s involvement. It’s available on iOS, macOS, and the web, catering to both individual and team task management needs.

https://youtu.be/2MzzbRhYlSA?si=04eBXH-MqKLpX2bN

ESET Home Security Essential

I used to rely on Kaspersky, and while I generally like their products, I have concerns about the potential influence of the Russian government. Therefore, I switched providers. ESET has a strong reputation and offers better Mac support than F-Secure. I can recommend their ESET HOME Security Essential package.

Amazon Basics laptop sleeve

I use a various bags depending on my destination and activities. Over the years, I’ve found that Amazon Basics brand laptop sleeves work well for my machines. They’re often among the cheapest options available and tend to outlast the computers they protect.

Laptop camera cover

The photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s laptop with tape covering the camera raised awareness about privacy. Webcam privacy covers, such as a sliver of plastic that slides across, are ideal as they allow your laptop to close fully. A pro tip is to use a red LED torch to clearly locate your camera when applying the stick-on cover.

Protective case and keyboard cover

I’m a big fan of clip-on polycarbonate shells to protect my laptop, as they provide a better surface for the stickers that personalize my machine over time. You don’t necessarily need a big-name case. The one I have came with a keyboard cover that works well. Anything that prevented Red Bull, coffee, or croissant flakes from getting under my keys is worth doing.

Screen protector film

The screen protector film provides great protection and is easy to apply and clean, even for beginners like me. I’ll update you if my opinion changes.

The sales pitch.

I have enjoyed working on projects for PRECISIONeffect and am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my April 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the bank holiday.

Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
April 25, 2024

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