Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Dettol – back to work

    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.

    Dettol keep practicing
    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.

    Ads of the World^
    McCann London for Reckitt Benckiser

    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.
    Dettol. Keep Protecting
    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 at Camden Town
    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.

    More FMCG-related content here.

    Notes and references.

    ^ 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 ❤️

    Mark Norris on Twitter

    **** 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)

  • Pro IRA memes + more things

    Why Are Teens Sharing Pro IRA Memes on TikTok? | Slate – pro IRA memes aren’t that they seem. The pro IRA memes aren’t literal support for the armed struggle. But are comments on the politics of the day. The helpless of COVID, BLM and access to healthcare. Provos have become meme fodder to discuss other issues. This give you an idea of how fast the Good Friday agreement has faded into history

    Taiwan unveils new-look passports to avoid ‘China confusion’ | South China Morning PostSouth China Morning Post – it is all because of the confusion and discrimination created when our people travel abroad only to be identified as nationals of China,” he said. Wu said that since the coronavirus pandemic began in January, many Taiwanese people had faced discrimination at immigration checkpoints because they had been mistaken for mainland Chinese nationals. More Taiwan related topics here.

    FBI investigates deaths of mining executives in UK corruption probe | Financial Times – this reads like the start of a good novel

    Who are the four in ten Britons who say “advertising helps me choose what to buy”? | YouGov – tend to be younger, female and more idealistic

    The Epic Battle for the Soul of Antitrust | Verfassungsblog – interesting read about US antitrust law

    Unilever plans to remove oil-based ingredients from all cleaning products | Business | The Guardian – this is interesting, how will they get the non-oil chemicals to scale, and how much energy needs to be put in to make it happen? Is it just shuffling the carbon footprint to other parts of the supply chain?

    Japan, pioneer of one-person economy | Apple Daily – Japan pioneered the singleton economy. Now China is catching up: Mainland singles break 200 million: a look into savoring singledom in Shanghai – their economic power explains how the Chinese government dialogue went from ‘leftover women’ to ‘little sisters’. Interesting analysis from Hong Kong’s Apple Daily

    Louis Vuitton
    Louis Vuitton shop display in Hong Kong

    LV knock-offs in China implanted with chip to pass off as branded bags: reports – inevitable and impressive. It reminds me of when I first visited Hong Kong and bought a couple of pirate CDs. These weren’t ripped on CD burning equipment like in a PC, but in a proper CD pressing plant. The packaging was far superior to the original items and even had holograms that marked them as being genuine pirate copies of a high quality. I think that Louis Vuitton not being able to trust their staff is more worrying: A Louis Vuitton Employee Allegedly Sold Unreleased Bags to Counterfeiters So They Could Make Better Fakes 

    Should Google’s Ad Market Be Regulated Like the Stock Market? | WIRED – author argues that it should as it runs the market and is the largest buyer and seller in the market

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    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)

  • Keyboard cover

    I have been using a keyboard cover on my Apple MacBook Pro. It’s easy to wipe clean and keeps oil, grease and debris from clogging the individual key mechanism. This is particularly important for Apple keyboards with their infamous butterfly key mechanism keyboards.

    I have been using keyboard covers by Mosiso. The first ones that I used were moulded silicone rubber. They fit like a glove and don’t affect your ‘feel’ as touch typer.

    Finite life of cover

    The big problem with the silicone cover is that it tends to change shape over time. It no longer neatly fits the keyboard and slides out of position. I have had two of them and they tend to last about five or six months.

    Here’s what a tired keyboard cover looks like. I seem to cause most of my keyboard cover wear on the lefthand side of the keyboard by the look of this picture.

    Worn Mosiso silicone rubber cover

    TPU

    Given that I seem to be wearing out my current covers at a rapid rate I chose to go with an alternative keyboard cover material this time. The current material I am using is TPU – thermoplastic polyurethane. Thermoplastics have the relative toughness of plastics, with rubber like qualities in terms of flexibility. So the keyboard cover is floppy rather than a rigid sheet.

    TPU has a wide range of uses from high performing films to tough plastics, for instance the ‘indestructible’ Nokia 3310 phones had TPU moulded cases that would pop off to absorb some of the kinetic energy of a fall.

    Nokia
    Nokia 3310 by Thomas Kohler

    The caster wheels on your office chair will be predominantly TPU.

    What I’ve ended up with is a cover this is more form fitted to my keyboard than the silicone version, thinner and more transparent. It has all the original benefit of being able to be wiped clean and keeping debris away from my keyboard.

    It remains to be seen how hard wearing the keyboard cover will be.

    More about the original Mosiso silicon cover that I’ve been using here, and the TPU version that I am now using here.

    More on the Apple MacBook Pro keyboard here.

  • Ageism + more things

    Ageism row: WPP CEO Mark Read apologises on Twitter | More About Advertising – interesting to see how this debate about ageism in marketing services has gathered steam. I was at Paul Armstrong’s conference TBD where it was talked about as an ‘unspoken issue’ and now Mark Read seems to have elevated it inadvertently. The concept of digital natives is becoming less tenable in general.

    Although it is unspoken in Read’s interview and apology I think this strikes down a number of fault lines that advertising is trying to address. Digital is an analogue for performance media marketing and television an analogue for brand building. I believe that the pendulum is swaying slightly more in favour of brand marketing than it had been in recent years. I also believe that digital advertising platforms haven’t done that good a job in setting out their case for roll in brand building activities; but have instead tried to put old ‘performance marketing’ wine in brand marketing bottles. I suspect that the evidence of ageism cited is as much about the relentless cost-cutting of marketing combines as anything else

    About — Yahoo Creative Dept. – interesting that they’re touting their wares to all comers, rather than being purely focused on inhouse work. And no exclamation mark on Yahoo! in the meta data either. Yahoo! is the company a Yahoo is someone who works (or has worked) for Yahoo! More Yahoo!-related content here.

    [outages] Level3 (globally?) impacted (IPv4 only) – fascinating to read, I wonder what caused it?

    ByteDance’s Global Chief Security Officer Says That The Chinese Government Cannot Get Hold Of TikTok Users Data Since its Servers Are Based In The United States / Digital Information World – interesting but not completely truthful. Even Huawei admitted that

    “Article 77 of the State Security Law sets out an obligation on organisations and individuals to provide assistance with work relating to State Security”.

    Sophie Batas, director for cybersecurity and data privacy at Huawei Europe

    And if you want an idea of what state security means, have a careful read of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as an example. It is vague, expansive and extra-territorial in nature.

    China Tightens Tech Export Rules Amid TikTok Talks – WSJ – interesting tech that China wants to keep at home….

    Saudi Arabia’s women gamers want to be taken seriously – Rest of World – a young, rapidly growing population – it makes sense that Saudi Arabia could become an e-sports powerhouse

    Google, Facebook Dump Hong Kong Cable After U.S. Security Alarm – Bloomberg – potentially huge given Hong Kong’s position in terms of international finance where high speed networks are key. Another thing to watch is the ratio is if the ratio of population to Cisco certified engineers starts to drop in Hong Kong which could be a real possibility with the departure of data centre occupants like Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Google etc… No cloud services again make international finance difficult.