Ged Carroll

Category: marketing | 營銷 | 마케팅 | マーケティング

According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including

  • Super Bowl advertising
  • Spanx
  • Content marketing
  • Fake product reviews on Amazon
  • Fear of finding out
  • Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
  • Guo chao – Chinese national pride
  • Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
  • Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
  • Japanese consumer insights
  • Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
  • Doughnutism
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
  • Influencer promotions
  • A media diary
  • Luxe streetwear
  • Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
  • Payola
  • Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
  • Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
  • The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
  • Cultural marketing with Stüssy
  • How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
  • Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
  • The role of salience in advertising
  • SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
  • Brand winter
  • Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
  • Lovemarks
  • How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
  • Korean TV shopping celebrity Choi Hyun woo
  • qCPM
  • Planning and communications
  • The Jeremy Renner store
  • Cashierless stores
  • BMW NEXTGen
  • Creativity in data event that I spoke at
  • Beauty marketing trends
  • Kraft Mothers Day marketing
  • RESIST – counter disinformation tool
  • Facebook pivots to WeChat’s business model
  • Smartphone launches

  • 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)

  • US bankruptcies + more things

    Pandemic triggers wave of billion-dollar US bankruptcies – really interesting data points and charts on large US bankruptcies in this FT article. The bigger question are these billion dollar US bankruptcies like ripping a band-aid off as their demise was inevitable, or are good businesses going to the wall in extreme times? (paywall)

    The Effects of Hong Kong’s National-Security Law Are Already Clear | 新聞 – Yahoo雅虎香港 – Just a few weeks after China’s imposition of a new “national-security law” on Hong Kong, we can already see the law’s effects: It has emboldened the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to suppress dissent, punish activism, and create fear within the city’s democracy movement. In 1997, the United Kingdom returned Hong Kong, which it had governed for 99 years under a lease extorted from the Qing Dynasty, back to the People’s Republic of China. At the time, the PRC promised to preserve the political autonomy and freedoms the city had enjoyed under the British until 2047. The national-security law and the crackdown it initiated marked the breaking of that promise.

    An Oral History of ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’ – The Ringer – the bit about motion capture purely for marketing, rather than improving game play was gold

    Gen Zer men think feminism has ‘gone too far’ | Canvas8 – ok dodgy headline. The interesting thing about this is that it questions the blanket progressiveness wrapped around gen-z. Which is also an indicator of how useless generations can be as shorthand. It would be interesting to see how they compared to previous cohorts of 18 – 29 year olds. Not terribly surprising though. More consumer behaviour related posts here.

    Here’s Why Jackie Chan Is Really Unpopular in Hong Kong | Vice – accurate, but neglects to mention a number of relevant points. That the fate of Chan’s son (arrested on drug use) rests with the Chinese government. So there was at least one point of leverage that the party has over Chan. Adding to the complex relation of Chan’s relationship to the Chinese Communist Party is is own family history. Chan’s father was a Koumintang intelligence officer hounded by the communists. After successive assassination attempts on his life; Chan’s father eventually ran away to Hong Kong and eventually Australia where he worked as a cook. Chan’s mother had smuggled opium in her past. Meanwhile his brothers who were left in China lived a life of hardship full of communist punishments because of who their father was.

    The Case of the Top Secret iPod – TidBITS – interesting article about an impressive device hack to repurpose it for other things

    DigiTimes: HiSilicon engineers abandon ship – Huawei is apparently looking to build a 45nm silicon chip fabrication plant without US tech, which DigiTimes claims is ‘mission impossible’. Kind of related form the FT: Huawei employees worry about lay-offs after tougher US sanctions. Not surprised that the global marketing team seems to be taking the cuts. It was often quoted to me that ‘the best advertising for Huawei was its employees’ and attributed to Mr Ren. This was when the company was reluctant to do co-marketing deals and advertising for handsets

  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders

    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.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Burger King King of Stream campaign conducted in conjunction with Ogilvy agency DAVID based in Madrid, Spain. The King of Stream makes sense when you look only at the data. Target young people who do gaming. Presumably there is some group cohesion data or insight that shows a propensity to eat fast food with gaming.

    However what would have been an interesting half-formed idea in a brainstorm seems to have had a negative impact in real life. Often what makes sense on Excel isn’t that smart when it meets the real world.

    It reminded me of the introduction to Robert X. Cringely’s insiders story of the PC industry, Accidental Empires written in the 1991:

    … PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.

    Robert X. Cringely – Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

    Spreadsheets and the data models inside them can be extremely powerful business tools and also weapons of mass destruction. And King of Stream seems to be the advertising equivalent.

    The use of bot powered donations to Twitch with the donation sizes related to Burger King special deals had an adverse effect on the gaming community on Twitch for a few reasons.

    • Burger King is a big brand, yet isn’t engaging with the community in a respectful way. It was culturally tone deaf.
    • This was the bit that surprised me the most given Ogilvy’s reputation around its use of behavioural economics or behavioural science in campaigns. The ‘donations’ are miserly. There is a lot of psychology around the value of donations or gifts. If it really want to engage with the gamers, why not sponsor them?
    • The execution was intrusive and felt like spam

    More on this can be found on the King of Stream by reading this thread here. More on other Burger King campaigns here.

    https://youtu.be/236KSswX7v4

    Celebrating Hong Kong style milk tea. According to the descriptor on this video is made by the Cui Brothers in Hong Kong; though I suspect it might be carefully edited from other films. It features classic Hong Kong dishes including French toast and pineapple bun with butter.

    Indigo Gaming have put together this guide to cyberpunk culture. It is called part one, was done months ago and there doesn’t seem to be a part two yet. Part one of this guide to cyberpunk culture is worthwhile watching on its own.

    The best of dance music over the past 30 years or so in a Soundcloud account – The Classic Mix CD Series | Free Listening on SoundCloud – mix CDs were time capsules of what was hot in different clubs at the time. They owe their origins to the mix (cassette) tape packs that club promoters used to sell of their nights. Mixmag took that concept and came up with the first properly licensed recordings.

    The original ones were done as one track per DJ mix. At the time CD players would in a space between each track recorded on a CD. Even early versions of iTunes used to do the same thing with both mix CDs and recordings ripped of mix CDs.

    At their height, they were an amazing money maker for record labels. They received steady royalty payments from licensing their tracks to appear on these mix CDs. For example Gat Decor, who had a break out single called Passion – appeared on 191 compilations and mix CDs.

  • Influencer endorsements + more stuff

    Influencer endorsements fail to influence purchase decisions | WARC – Influencer endorsements play only a small role in affecting the purchase decisions of their followers, according to research from influencer endorsements platform Influencer and GlobalWebIndex. In their survey of consumers in the UK and US who follow influencers on social media, just 15% said influencer endorsements motivates them to make a purchase – the tenth most common response. In comparison, more than half of consumers who follow influencers say free delivery (57%) and offers/promotions (52%) would motivate them to make a purchase. – Interesting in light of the high amount of spend put around influencer endorsements by the likes of Unilever personal care and beauty products. Is this a lack of ‘influence’ or being more budget conscious that is the driver? There might need to be a readjustment of charges for influencer endorsements. Also as WARC notes, a long term test is required.

    Jailed WeChat User Says Chinese Police Monitor Overseas Accounts Too – Jin Chun, a former big data engineer at Huawei’s Nanjing Research Institute, meanwhile recently told reporters that all Chinese communications companies and internet service providers companies are required to monitor users on behalf of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Faced with an official request for data, no company will resist, because they would cease to operate, he said. More on China here.

    Will Blaize Trailblaze Edge AI Market?   | EE Times – what people tend to miss about this is the pushback against the cloud, even with 5G connectivity

    Puncturing the paradox: group cohesion and the generational myth – BBH Labs – yet more evidence against generations

    Google giving far-right users’ data to law enforcement, documents reveal | Technology | The Guardian – Saira Hussein, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, said in a phone conversation that EFF was concerned about the “vast amounts of user data” Google appeared to be voluntarily passing on to law enforcement, but questioned Google’s goal in doing so. “Are they expecting law enforcement to do something, or is this just a way of covering themselves? Does Google see its responsibility as simply reporting this to law enforcement and moving on?”

    Automated assistants – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence – limited but coming

    China drought, heavy rains spark concern over grain supply as Xi Jinping launches campaign against food waste | South China Morning Post – interesting when one reflects on this in conjunction with the Chinese government ‘clean plate’ initiative in the news last week

    She Helped Wreck the News Business. Here’s Her Plan to Fix It | WIRED – TL;DR brand safety is destroying online advertising in news and current affairs

    New Cold War With China Demands Radical Industrial Rethink for United States – Since March alone, China has threatened to withhold medical equipment from the United States and Europe during the coronavirus pandemic; launched the biggest cyberattack against Australia in the country’s history; hacked U.S. firms to acquire secrets related to the coronavirus vaccine; and engaged in massive disinformation campaigns on a global scale. China even hacked the Vatican. These incidents reflect the power China wields through its control of supply chains and information hardware. They show the peril of ceding control of vast swaths of the world’s manufacturing to a regime that builds at home, and exports abroad, a model of governance that is fundamentally in conflict with American values and democracies everywhere. And they pale in comparison to what China will have the capacity to do as its confrontation with the United States sharpens

    Miss M: Guarding the City We Call Home | We Are HKers – Like many of our forefathers, Mainland Chinese flee to Hong Kong and even overseas for obvious reasons.Among the younger students in my school, 80% have Mainland Chinese backgrounds (they are either from China or they speak Mandarin at home). Many treat learning English with disdain and fantasise that China will rule the world in the near future and foreigners will have to learn Mandarin to please the Chinese. This is a tragedy. Their parents send them to Hong Kong to study despite all the hardship, but the kids fail to forego their conservative Chinese mindset. This happens not only in Hong Kong, but also in Canada. The CCP have already gotten their hands on Chinese language newspapers such as Mingpao and Sing Tao Daily. Lennon Walls in Canadian universities are destroyed within days by Mainland Chinese students and their physical attacks on Hong Kong students are common – the degree of population change is quite phenomenal

    Why marketers should embrace Share of Search as a metric | WARC – “The SoS calculation itself is simple. Calculate a rolling 12-month average of the various brands to be analysed, including your own. Total this. Divide each individual brand’s 12-month rolling average by the total and turn into a %. This is Share of Search, using Google Trends data.”