The Lebanese armed forces were celebrating their 75th birthday and wanted to celebrate the contribution that they make to society. So they worked with a marketing agency to come up with PEACECAMO. PEACECAMO is based on photographs taken of different humanitarian incidents over the years that were then rendered into camouflage. These uniforms will be worn when concealment isn’t necessary. For instance parades or humanitarian work. Its a lovely idea, unfortunately this happened before the Beruit port explosion, which has fractured the government from the Lebanese people. More information here. More design related posts here.
https://youtu.be/m2IGeqRFj1Q
PEACECAMO video
Marketing Week columnist and academic Mark Ritson at the Amplify marketing festival. In this presentation Ritson talks about balancing short term and long term needs in marketing. If that sounds familiar, well that’s because Ritson was inspired by this article by Tom Roach here.
Larry Shiller’s car collection and garage is a site to behold in terms of its scale. Although I wouldn’t be choosing any of these cars for myself I like the way he collects based on a narrow time period of design. You can see the jet age aesthetic coming through in the fins and tail lights.
I like the way he is pretty much self-sufficient from a parts perspective. With enough time, he can handle most of the repairs himself. This wouldn’t be possible now with the rapid evolution in technology. It was simpler times; chip design and software are essential to most modern cars.
Photographer Trey Ratcliff has been putting out these videos that would be beloved of VJs playing a rave in the early 1990s. Pull out your old Goa trance CDs and watch with this playlist for full effect.
At the beginning of the month, Dettol launched a ‘back to work’ poster campaign appeared on the tube as part of McCann London’s Keep Protecting series of adverts for Reckitt Benckiser.
The ad campaign had been launched in July with out of home posters like this one celebrating a return to school and video spots.
McCann London for Reckitt Benckiser
Here’s what Ads of the World had as an explanation of the ad’s rationale:
Lockdown has taught us all to appreciate the little things in life we previously took for granted. As we move out of the lockdown phase, we are all at risk of forgetting the importance and impact of the other little things we have been doing to keep ourselves, our families and our community safe. To remind us of these, Dettol has launched a fully integrated behaviour change campaign ‘Keep Protecting,’ comprising TV, VOD, digital and OOH.
Online conversations featuring Dettol went up 2245%*. In terms of sentiment**:
22% of posts were assessed to be negative in nature
11% of posts were assessed to be positive in nature
67% of posts were assessed to be neutral in nature
Was the Dettol campaign successful?
Was the campaign successful? It depends. At the moment we don’t know how Reckitt Benckiser were assessing the campaign, or what they wanted to achieve.
Reasons for thinking that it was:
Dettol would have been top of mind with regards to hygiene thanks to the increased talkability
The posters achieved reach far beyond tube travellers; which meant that the ads could be considered to be good value for money. I would presume that they already bought the posters at a considerable discount due to the overall surplus of inventory available in out of home advertising and diminished footfall
Any negative impact is likely to be short lived. Discussion peaked on September 3rd, with 3,286 mentions, declined to 414 on September 4th and 96 the following day. Whilst PR experts claimed that Dettol would have a hard time cleaning up after this mess – the quantitative online data tends to suggest otherwise
The (small) association of the Dettol ad with the government back to work campaign has potentially alligned Dettol’s personal care and household products to align more closely with the more socially conservative majority outside the big cities. And yet doesn’t seem to have impacted the appeal of the brand abroad in markets like India and Thailand
Prior to the ‘back to work’ themed poster, the campaign didn’t seem to have spurred a significant increase in online social discussions at all. Despite the investment in out of home advertising and video. No increased discussion about product usage, or preparing for back to school. The Back To Work poster gave Dettol a brief burst of cultural relevance.
Data* from Meltwater Social.The mini-peak that occurred on August 24th is unrelated to Dettol marketing efforts ***
Reasons for thinking that it wasn’t:
Dettol is already a by-word in the UK when it comes to antiseptic and disinfecting. It is already ‘verbing’ (as Faris Yakob would say) in UK culture. So there would be marginal gains
As much as the posters drove talkability, they didn’t seem to drive content on Instagram. So for youth-obsessed brand marketers after millennial Mums and gen-y office workers, it was a bit of a wash out.
Awareness and recall probably took a bit of a knock when 203 posts commented about how they thought the Dettol ad (with its prominent logo placement) was part of the UK government’s (currently postponed) back to work ad campaign. This connection has driven some of the media coverage that followed
Dettol is likely to remain top of mind for only a short time. Discussion peaked on September 3rd, with 3,286 mentions, declined to 414 on September 4th and 96 the following day. TfL claim that the footfall at the tube is running at less than 30% of usual capacity at the moment
The advert spawned memes that were negative to the brand and arguably more culturally relevant
The media is likely to have a longer memory than the general public about the Dettol advert. It has placed the brand as a potential football in wider culture wars currently going on. Whilst the brand marketers and advertising agency won’t care, the communications team will likely to have clean up any mess coming to Reckitt Benckiser.
The relative furore around the brand, looks bad compared to the results Dettol brand marketing teams have achieved across Asia. For instance Dettol India’s #HandWashChallenge got an astonishing amount of visibility on TikTok. It has achieved over 125.1 billion views across Asia****. More on that campaign here. And the Asian campaigns didn’t cause discord.
Only 67 of the 3,870+ mentions associated the Dettol brand with hand sanitiser. Yet a key part of the ad artwork was a silhouette of their personal hand sanitiser bottle
Dettol ad in question at Camden Town tube station
The copy:
Hearing an alarm. Putting on a tie.
Carrying a handbag. Receptionists.
Caffeine-filled air. Taking a lift.
Seeing your second family. Watercooler
conversations. Proper bants. The boss’s
jokes. Plastic plants. Office gossip. Those
weird carpets. Face-to-face meetings.
Not having to make lunch. CCing.
BCCing. Accidentally replying-all.
Hearing buzzwords. Leaving early for
a cheeky afternoon in the sun.
Disinfect surfaces we use throughout the
day, so we can do it all again tomorrow.
The little things we do help protect the
little things we love. Keep Protecting.
McCann London for Rickett Benckiser
What about the craft?
My issues with the campaign are more craft-related. The call to action at the bottom made perfect sense when associated with the ‘back to school’ creative iteration of the poster. It makes less sense in the ‘back to work’ and ‘back to commute’ posters, where it has been used unchanged.
The language used in the ‘back to school’ poster would bring back emotive memories of school. The back to work poster evoked the ennui, awkwardness and embarrassing moments that Ricky Gervais skewered quite eloquently in the comedy TV show The Office.
There was also a clear comparison to Renton’s ‘Choose Life’ speech in Trainspotting 1 & 2
Original version from Trainspotting
Updated Trainspotting 2 version
This could have been done so much better. It would still have been controversial – instead much of the abuse has come at the expense of its mediocrity. I suspect that the ad was an unintentional troll.
I am confident that this wasn’t a Dominic Cummings-type of deliberate trolling. It wasn’t designed to stir up brand relevance amongst the general public at the expense of the work-from-home metropolitan elites.
What next for Dettol?
The account planning team and client service staff members at McCann London will be wrapping together much of the reasons and data I’ve suggested above into a positive narrative for the client. If they manage to pull that off; they may even try to use it for award entries next year.
Dettol is a well-loved brand in a relatively low-passion category. Everyone I know has a bottle in the cupboard under the kitchen sink with the cleaning supplies or in the first aid kit. It deserved so much more from the marketers at Reckitt Benckiser (UK) and copywriters at McCann London.
^ VOD means video on demand like Netflix, Hulu in the US, NowTV in Hong Kong or ITV Player in the UK. OOH means out of home. Poster adverts that could be on billboards, electronic Jumbotron type signage, trains, buses or taxis. They can be inside like the London underground (mass transit) posters or out on the street.
*All data quoted from Meltwater Social. I looked at data only in English from the UK. The sources for mentions that I selected were: Twitter, forums, blogs, comments, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube.
** Machine derived sentiment, so assume that it is only 65-85% accurate
*** The mini-peak on August 24th was Twitter users sharing a meme about childhood in 1970s Britain. It associated Dettol with a simpler, if more deprived Britain. The original tweet that got things going said:
I was moulded in the 70’s…when ya school jumper was knitted by an intoxicated grandma…when ya bath had Dettol not bubbles…ya phone was a pissy smelling red box..you was tucked in & couldn’t move….fish finger sandwiches & lard fried chips & I’d go back in a heartbeat ❤️
**** TikTok like other social platforms have issues with regards engagement metrics.
UPDATE: September 15, 2020 – YouGov surveyed the British public on each of the concepts in the copy and you can understand from the results why it went over so badly. TL;DR – People really don’t like their alarm, they don’t miss the smell of the office or even eating out for lunch and your work colleagues definitely aren’t your second family (PDF)
Wieden + Kennedy put together this impressive tribute to Kobe Bryant and riffs on their pivot to individual sports performance rather than elite performers.
The craft in the video is self-evident. There are bigger questions to be asked about addressing legacy and what we tolerate in greatness. The tribute to Kobe Bryant is a difficult one to reconcile with his legacy. On the one side, he was a great basketball player. On the other side the legacy of Kobe Bryant is also a messy sexual assault claim that he managed to pay his way out of.
Is a tribute to Kobe Bryant appropriate in a ‘me-too’ world? Is it the right message for Nike to send? Having worked both agency-side and in-house, I would have balked at it.
https://youtu.be/C9I-W1eTCbk
Silicon Valley icon Carver Mead talks about the history of semiconductors and the related science behind it. Mead has a unique perspective given the role that he played in the development of Silicon Valley. He did foundational science that contributed to semiconductor development and a lot of the conceptual work on VLSI (very large scale integration). VLSI is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining large numbers of transistors on a single chip. Over time this has gone from thousands, to millions and then billions of transistors. Mead co-wrote ‘the book’ Introduction to VLSI Systems. Although technology has moved past Meads work on VLSI; there couldn’t have been a smartphone without Mead.
The Oxford Union hosted a couple of interesting web chats on Hong Kong that shared the perspectives of some of the pro-democracy camp and a former US diplomat and American businessman.
Interviewees: Nathan Law: Hong Kong politician and activist. A student leader during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, he served on the Hong Kong Legislative Council until his disqualification in 2017. Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick: Social activist and politician. He founded the Land Justice League, a conservationist, pro-democracy group and was elected to the Legislative council of Hong Kong in 2016.
Both provide a bit more context. What is missing is the Chinese government perspective delivered in a calm logical way rather than a shrill dogmatic manner. More Hong Kong related content here.
Interviewee: Kurt Tong: American diplomat, serving as Consul General of the United States of America to Hong Kong and Macau between 2016 and 2019. He previously served as U.S. Ambassador for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
The Avalanches have produced a track with the International Space Orchestra. The International Space Orchestra are musicians who happen to work for NASA or SETI as engineers. The whole things was filmed in lock down which is obvious from the Zoom-like theme in the video.
The Avalanches – Wherever you go featuring the International Space Orchestra (live in Lockdown)
Mike Pompeo renews attack on HSBC as bank walks line between US and China | Financial Times – HSBC is about to get a lot of trouble coming its way. It has managed to make enemies of the Chinese government over Huawei, the US government over Hong Kong sanctions busting and the UK government over its support of the Hong Kong national security law. I don’t think that they will be able to wriggle out of the mess that they have got themselves into
Are creatives better at creativity? | Contagious – While we’re always interested in the nature of creativity, it’s important to put experiments like these into perspective – there’s a lot more to being an agency creative than what was tested here. After all, being good at keep-ups doesn’t mean you can play professional football.
Tech war chronicles: How a Silicon Valley chip pioneer landed in China – Reuters – really interesting. MIPS, SPARC and RISC-V are arguably better architectures than ARM’s Core series of processors. MIPS has been ubiquitous in high performance computing to embedded electronics. It is very well understood, in terms of both design and writing software for it
Eat Your Greens is a selection of articles curated by Wiemer Snijders on all things that come up for discussion amongst account planners. Branding, marketing, some home truths about innovation and the value of creative. Much of it recycles the stuff that account planners know from reading Sharp or Field and Binet. In addition there are a few that specifically address diversity, inclusion – but excludes ageism in terms of the ways it talks about these as an issue.
Where’s the value in Eat Your Greens? The answer to that question depends on where you are in your career. As someone who is established in my career, I found it valuable in a few different ways.
Some of the essays from the likes of Phil Graves, Mark Ritson and Ryan Wallman, Rose and Faris Yakob, Byron Sharp and Amy Wilson are strong enough to make Eat Your Greens worthwhile in its own right. For instance here’s some of what Ritson had to say:
“The modern marketer has created an entirely stupid dichotomy between ‘digital communications’ and ‘traditional communications’… There are just tactical tools, and they can only be valued and selected once a target and a position and a strategy are in place. What’s more, it’s clear that most successful campaigns combine multiple channels for optimum success. Most studies suggest that the more channels a campaign includes, the better the ultimate ROI.”
Mark Ritson in Eat Your Greens
Going through the essays allowed me to come up with recommendations of new reading materials referenced in the essays – I have been using it to bulk up my Amazon list.
Essays that I would particularly recommend:
What Ails Marketing by Mark Ritson
Post-Truth Telly by Tess Alps
To Target Or Not To Target, That’s Not The Question by Shann Biglione
Everybody Lies – The Importance of Psychological Validity In Consumer Insight by Phil Graves
The Devaluation of Creativity by Bob Hoffman
Biting The Hand That Feeds Us? Why Advertising’s Love Of Novelty Is Doing Brands A Disservice by Kate Waters
Why Innovation Isn’t As Sexy As Business Books Promise by Costas Papaikonomou
For busy marketers or junior planners, Eat Your Greens is a nice introductory point for a number of issues in marketing, such as the corrosive digitisation of marketing.
I think it fulfils an important role. Particularly for junior planners as many agencies now rely on an army of freelance talent. Eat Your Greens isn’t a substitute for having senior staff developing younger account planning minds on the job. But given the current state of agencies, its probably one of the best options that we have. More book reviews here and my slowly updated bookshelf here.
