It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.
But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.
“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”
McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.
I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.
The August 2023 newsletter was inspired by LinkedIn’s in-built newsletter function. It’s almost the bank holiday so I thought I would spend some time to try out the newsletter function in LinkedIn.
If you’re reading this, you’re a pioneer! If this goes well I will put one out each month. You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
LK99 & room temperature superconductors – why it was a big deal, what it would have meant if it were true and the damage likely to have been caused given it’s likely to be false.
Chip War by Chris Miller. You can read my full review here.
Things I have been inspired by.
How left wing politics inspired Prada’s clothing designs.
Encouraging empathy for people with dementia in Japan with the restaurant of mistaken orders (scoll to the end here to find out more).
Things I have watched.
Three Body Problem. Chinese adaption by Tencent Video and made available for FREE on their YouTube channel. Don’t worry it has English subtitles. This is based on the blockbuster novel The Three Body Problem by Chinese science fiction author du jour Cixin Liu. The three books in the series are all fantastic and there is soon to be a Netflix adaption as well.
The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video. An ambitious adaption of William Gibson’s novel of the same name. Amazon Studios recently cancelled the next season of this drama, which is a real shame as its one of the stand out series amongst the content on Prime Video.
Un Flic and Le Samourai – the magical formula of French new wave director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Alain Delon created some iconic crime films that inspired directors in Hollywood, Hong Kong and Japan.
The sales pitch.
Available for strategic engagements in the autumn. Contact me here.
The End.
Congratulations, you’re reached the end of the August 2023 newsletter. Until next month: be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.
Geico advertising – a primer
Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.
Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.
The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising
Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.
Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).
Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset
As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.
There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.
The reasons are cultural in nature:
Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere
Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.
Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.
By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).
The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.
This achieves a few things:
You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand
Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:
Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients
So why was Geico advertising spend cut?
This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.
There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:
There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities
There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.
Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.
Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.
‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories
Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.
My consumer internet usage goes back 25 years as a celebratory email reminded me in my Yahoo! account earlier this year.
25th Yahooversary
had started using the internet back in early 1994. I had access to email whilst working as a research technician for Corning in their optical fibre manufacturing business. The account was for solely for professional reasons (for the most part).
After Corning, I went to college and had access to the web for the first time. At that time, people in my year and the year above me mostly didn’t bother with the internet. I had found it useful for getting Mac software and researching material for college essays.
I set up an Excite.com webmail account before leaving college, but it wasn’t that reliable. In the immediate aftermath of leaving college I worked long hours for the first few months in the call centre at MBNA the credit card company. So a rare day off was spent catching up on sleep or catching a video from the local Blockbuster store.
Coffee, cake and email
Over time, I got a temporary role in their marketing department. I was writing sales scripts for payment protection insurance and keeping a tally on salesperson performance. This meant that I moved to a role that was more 9 to 5 and I could start looking for my first career role. I even got to go shopping for sports cars that we were given away to the top performing sales person.
(Aside: The Lotus Espirit Turbo and TVR Griffith were unpleasant driving experiences; the Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205 and fourth generation Toyota Supra were great cars to drive.)
What Yahoo! looked like in early 1998, about the time when I set up my email account.
So one wet Saturday morning in March I set up a Yahoo! account in a cyber cafe around the corner from James Street station in Liverpool. I had found the address for Café Internet on North John Street in the Yellow Pages directory – there were only a couple of cyber cafes at the time in the Merseyside area and this one was the easiest to get to. Of course that would all change a year later with the launch of the easy group’s easyInternetCafe chain.
(Aside: in the process of writing this article I found out that Café Internet was the first cybercafe in the North West of England, originally opened in 1995.)
The connection that I enjoyed at Cafe Internet was slow and expensive.
I had a weekly ritual of working during the week and then heading over to Liverpool on Saturday morning to do a bit of record shopping, check my email and apply to jobs with some of the best coffee and carrot cake available at the time. I used to bring my emails that I needed to send, pre-written up a floppy disk as plain text files, along with a copy of CV to send as an attachment for jobs.
Eventually, I got my friend Andy online with his first email account and showed him the basics of web browsing. I don’t drink and we got accustomed to doing a spot of web surfing with good coffee and carrot cake prior to going window shopping in Liverpool city centre while chatting about everything and nothing. While we were online this was 25 years ago, so there was no UK e-commerce beyond shareware software on Tucows, so going shopping was not ironic.
My front door to the web
Yahoo! and other web portals like Lycos and Excite borrowed design cues from a newspaper page with their multiple columns of news snippets, horoscopes and weather forecasts. But it lacked the salacious content and gaslighting of the modern web.
My job search weekly cycle
Week day evening: Monday looking at The Guardian for marketing jobs. At the time The Guardian was a good source of entry level agency roles. Thursday meant going through Campaign and PRWeek. By going through, I mean looking at their print copies.
The library had a network that allowed PCs to do printing to a laser printer. In addition there were terminals that the librarians used to arrange inter-library deliveries. This ran on a command line interface connecting to a common database shared by all Wirral libraries. So my job search was analogue.
Saturday morning: over to Liverpool to check for email responses and send new applications in.
Given that most people applying for the jobs would be sending applications through via post, using email even on a weekly provided me with an advantage as a job seeker.
The internet in print
Given that it was expensive to get online. I spent more time reading MacWorld, Byte magazine and Wired magazine talking about online life than I spent online at the time. I noted down websites to check out next time I visited the cyber cafe, after I had sent my emails.
My internet consumption mirrored a wider consumer patten 25 years ago, many people were excited by the idea of the internet before they had managed to get online. Getting online would follow a year or two later, partly due to the heavy direct mail campaign by early ISPs including AOL and CompuServe who sent CD-ROM discs to my parents every six weeks.
Even by pre-internet standards that was a direct mail campaign of unprecedented scale.
MLM or multi-level marketing is where people who need to make money buy product from a company like Avon, Amway, Herbalife, Nu-Skin or Tupperware. Usually the franchisee doesn’t buy directly but through a contact. They may be a long way down in a chain of sellers, which means you end up with a pyramid scheme. Some have described the onboarding and seller communications as a cult. (Disclosure, I did a bit of agency work on Nu-Skin when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to see products, but not how they were sold).
Financial freedom
The real product of MLM seems to be hope. Discussing the downside of MLM at this time is important. Financial freedom is going to sound particularly appealing to struggling middle class households wrestling with the cost of living crisis and rising mortgage interest rates.
These videos by Sean Munger give a really good insight into Amway.
Ponzinomics
Robert Fitzpatrick’s self-published Ponzinomics seems to be the most cited book talking about the underbelly of MLM. Here’s an interview with him.
Soviet space programme
Enough time has gone buy for us to know how innovative the Soviet space programme was. Some of the innovations were dictated to them by limitations in production campacity. I came across these films about it.
And how Russian closed cycle rocket engines surprised NASA after the cold war.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves period drama novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God were remade in 1976 as a 13 part TV series. (The first two episodes are called 1a and 1b, presumably to avoid an episode 13, given that theatre as a whole is superstitious). In 1965, the BBC had done a documentary about the unfinished 1937 film version and had found bringing their version to television difficult due to production rights still tied into the 1937 production.
I, Claudius was considered to be a high water mark from point of view of audience viewership of more high brow material and latterly critics consider it to be one of the best TV programmes ever on British TV.
Hello Hong Kong
I received post from friends in Hong Kong and the package had a large sticker highlighting the Hello Hong Kong campaign which the government has been using to paper over the cracks left by its authoritarian pivot.
Hello Hong Kong mandatory sticker.
One part of me thought that ambient media such as the sticker might be a good side hustle for mail services everywhere. As I dug into it, I found out that the staff ‘had to’ put these stickers on the packaging and at least some of them were doing so reluctantly. At least some customers were reluctant for their packages to be ‘propaganda banners’ for the Beijing backed regime. Meanwhile 7/21 alleged government backed triad actions are still fresh in the mind of locals.
YKK
You don’t think about how YKK clothes zips work effortlessly, but this Asianometry documentary gives you insight into the Japanese zip manufacturer.
Starbucks Rewards as massive bank
I used to use the Starbucks pre-payment system back when I could use it in both the UK and Hong Kong, but a rupture came in when Starbucks removed its rewards scheme from stored value cards to an app. So I found this video by ColdFusion reframing the Rewards scheme as a large bank like pool of money more akin to PayPal’s float than Avios loyalty points.
Apollo project astronauts off the record
On everything from the context of Project Apollo through to their views on climate change.
Restaurant of mistaken orders
A Japanese pop-up retail project with restaurant servers who are suffering from dementia. I was sent the link by a friend of mine from Japan – the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders really brings the impact home.
One of the biggest things that have impacted many British people has been overseas money that has resulted in soccer team acquisitions. There is a certain irony in someone like myself who isn’t that emotionally invested in sport writing about the impact of soccer team acquisions – but maybe my view from the outside in may get somewhere closer to the truth.
I worked on lacrosse brand Warrior’s foray into soccer and helped relaunch the New Balance offering in football. (It had previously made football boots in the 1980s and had English football team captain Bryan Robson as their spokesperson.)
I have visited major football stadiums in Ireland, the UK and Spain – but still don’t have an emotional connection to the game.
Changing landscape
Over my life I have seen football change as a pass time. Football was a decidedly working class sport with concrete floors on terraced stands with railings to lean on, clubs could pack in their fan base to watch a game standing up.
Roy of the Rovers
The sport was lionised in comics, notably football player Roy Race aka Roy of The Rovers, which ran from 1954 – 1993. It has been rebooted a couple of times, most recently by Rebellion, publisher of 2000AD and Judge Dredd.
https://flic.kr/p/2oHEYiX
Roy of the Rovers from 1977
It is no coincidence that most of the UK’s most prestigious clubs were in historic large working class population centres: Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds and Leicester.
John Moores to Delia Smith
For working class entrepreneurs, soccer team acquisitions and team ownership were a way of demonstrating their position at the acme of their community. John Moores – the scion of the Moores family who founded the Littlewoods empire based on the working class love of betting on football match outcomes. Moores then went on to set up a mail order retail company also called Littlewoods, which mixed a wide product range with payment by instalments.
From mail order Moores rolled out a network of value orientated department stores that catered to working class communities. To give you an idea of how ubiquitous Littlewoods was, everyone I knew at school had school shirts, trousers, jumpers and blazers from Littlewoods.
In 1960, Moores become a director and then sealed his place in Liverpool society by becoming chairman of Everton Football Club. From this achievement he became a freeman of the city of Liverpool in 1980 and received a knighthood ten years later.
via Wendy House
Delia Smith is as famous in the UK for her cookery as she is for her ownership of Norwich City Football Club. A school leaver without qualifications, Smith built up a reputation for cooking after the austerity of the post-war years when cooking had no longer been passed down from mother to daughter due to food rationing. This eventually garnered being published in newspapers and magazines, her own TV series, books, a sponsorship deal with Sainsbury’s and an online cooking portal.
Smith and her husband were not from Norwich, but had chosen to make their home there. They cemented their place in the community when Smith bought into the club in 1996, where she has a reputation as an impassioned owner.
“This is a message for possibly the best supporters in the world. We need a 12th man. Where are you? Where are you?”
Delia Smith broadcast on BBC Radio Norfolk during a match against Manchester City
Smith like Moores was never going to make a fortune from football.
Football is our religion
In their push for viewer subscriptions, British satellite pay TV provider Sky Sports ran an anthem advert that got to the core of the British relationships with their football team.
In the advert, actor Sean Bean reads a manifesto written by Leeds United fan, who also wrote, directed and produced the film.
Life
It can be difficult
You know that
We all need someone to rely on
Someone who’s going to be there
Someone who’s going to make you feel like you belong
Someone constant
It’s ectasy, anguish, joy and despair Part of our history Part of our country And it will be part of our future It’s theatre, art, war and love It should be predictable … but never is It’s a feeling that can’t be explained but we spend our lives explaining it It’s our religion We do not apologise for it We do not deny it They’re our team, our family and our life.
Barry Skolnick
If the football match is their service, then the football stadium is their church and their bible is the history of teams and and their gospel chapters individual player biographies. In Britain weddings, funerals and baptisms may happen in a church – but that’s about the limit of religious activities for many people.
Catalysts
Catalysts were in place for new types of soccer team acquisitions.
How to become a millionaire?
The perceived wisdom about owning a football team was encapsulated in a British joke:
How to become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and then buy yourself a football team
But that isn’t always the case. In America there was a class of investors who realised that owning sports teams with substantial media rights didn’t give regular dividends but did offer the opportunity of a big payout when exiting and selling the business on. People like the Glaser family and their experience with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers took their expertise to English Premier League football. Acquiring undervalued teams, maximising the value and selling them on. This hasn’t been without controversy with fans being openly hostile to the owners.
A new type of British entrepreneur tried the same thing, the exemplar being Mike Ashley at Newcastle United.
Hot media property
Remember when I said about owning substantial media rights? The media rights themselves were a catalyst to changing the business and driving soccer team acquisitions. 1991 was a seminal year in English football with the founding of the Premier League. It was a break top flight football needed. At the time stadiums were in need of refurbishment and fans facilities were in a poor state. There were security issues at matches due to organised crowd violence. The English were only recently allowed back into European inter-league competitions after bans due to hooliganism.
The Premier League allowed clubs to tap into funds to help rebuild stadiums and make nicer facilities. Knock on effects of this included a pivot towards middle class customers and corporate entertainment which affected the atmosphere in the stadiums, but made the matches more media friendly. This meant football clubs became more brand friendly and opened new commercial doors for sponsorships.
The world is watching
The rise of the Premier League also saw the rise of international media rights. Matches were broadcast around the world. Clubs suddenly found that they had a fan base half way around the world. English football tended to be more exciting to watch due to its playing style versus European clubs. It also attracted sports betting. One of the things that most surprised me travelling in Asia was running into fans not only of Liverpool or Manchester United but also lower profile clubs like Blackburn.
The renovation of stadiums meant that clubs were ready for tourism and their merchandise sold around the world. A Manchester United football shirt appeared in even more cities than an ‘Irish’ pub. The clubs became global brands, which attracted the interest of American investors who realised the opportunity that English soccer clubs offered.
Second wave buyers
Skilful investors in English clubs don’t make money in soccer team acquisitions and running the clubs, but in selling their team. The next tranche of investors to shake up English football were foreigners resident in the UK and looking to enmesh themselves in British society some of them like Alexander Lebedev managed to buy the Evening Standard newspaper, which instantly gave him influence. However there are more opportunities to own a top flight football team due to media consolidation, AND, you probably have more chance of making more money on exiting the investment.
Roman Abramovich
The exemplar for this second wave would be Russian business man Roman Abramovich who had made is money in the post-Soviet era from energy and aluminium processing. He went on to buy Chelsea Football Club, one of the most high profile soccer team acquisitions of the early 2000s, if not the past quarter century. Under his ownership the club went under the kind of development that American owners had looked to achieve, but on a world stage. His ability to spend also distorted the transfer market for football players.
By the end of the decade, a Europe wide set of regulations were brought into effect to try and reduce the distortion that second wave buyers and their soccer team acquisitions could bring to club competition called the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations.
Even as a high profile member of British society, Chelsea couldn’t provide the shield that Mr Abramovich needed to stave off suspension of his tier one visa allowing entry at will to the UK in 2018. It also didn’t stop the sanctions deployed against him, amongst other Kremlin-connected business people after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Third wave of soccer team acquisitions
The third wave of soccer team acquisitions are from Gulf Cooperation Council member states:
Bahrain – Bahrain is unlikely to be doing any large soccer team acquisitions, though it has bought into second tier side Paris FC. It is a regional tourist destination for people in the Middle East and has built up a finance services sector that has a regional footprint. However it has relied on financial help from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Kuwait
Oman
Qatar
Their motivations are multi-pronged in nature:
Diversification of national wealth out of extracting oil and gas into assets that will continue to deliver returns after the oil runs out. In this respect they are no different to the sovereign funds of countries like Norway or Singapore
Media ambitions, Qatar already hosts the main service provider showing life professional football across the Middle East. Soccer team acquisitions could be thought of as vertical integration. For other countries, it could be seen as hedging against Qatar’s sports media hegemony
Increasing their soft power to improve their security status. This is also why Qatar hosted FIFA World Cup in 2022
Societal influence. The House of Saud have been the guardians of some of Islam’s holiest sites for about a century. Now they are the guardians of St James’ Park through their majority ownership via the Saudi government Public Investment Fund. This may give them a contingent to draw upon during difficult times in their relationship with the UK, particularly as Saudi oil becomes less important as an energy source. (Saudi oil will still be important as a chemical feedstock for every aspect of modern life including Tesla batteries, but hydrogen and electric power via alternative energy sources will reduce the impact of an oil embargo considerably.)
The outlier
Ryan Reynolds purchase of Wrexham is an anomaly. Soccer team acquisitions to build a media juggernaut are hard to do and Reynolds has shown he is uniquely creative with Aviation Vodka and Mint Mobile. He has managed to create a media property out of a lower league football team and bring pride back to a small North Wales town that hasn’t had much going for it since I was a child.
The club was community owned and has had a modest 2 million pounds invested in it since 2011. But it made great reality television in a healthy way. How long the halo of Hollywood lasts is a bigger question, but any attention given to the former steel making and coal mining town has got to be welcome.
