Volume 17: Quarantined projects and socially distanced budgets.

1. What do you do when your projects are quarantined and budgets socially distanced?

Tl;dr: #FREE #OFFKILTER #BRANDADVICE #SCREAMINGWITHHASHTAGS

The Coronapocalpse comes at the perfect time for . . . nobody, including myself. So what to do when projects have been quarantined and budgets socially distanced? Well, as the old saying goes “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Now is probably as good a time as any to get ahead of things and lift the strategy hood. Or if you prefer medical analogies, pull up a webcam and tell me what’s keeping you awake at night.

Let’s talk about what comes next. Recession strategy? World-comes-back-to-normal-but-we’re-all-different strategy? What’s next for your business? What’s next for your clients? Positioning for the upturn? What stupid nonsense we need to avoid? Or maybe you’re just bored with working from home and need a laugh rather than screaming at your kids. I’m here for you.

Perhaps we’ll bond for life. Who knows? But it sure beats going it alone in an apartment for the next four months. So if you’d like to Zoom with me, please feel free to put time in my calendar here, or email me back if you’d prefer.

On a serious note, I know this is a bad time. I went through similar in 2008 and might be able to help.

2. BAT puts a bullet in brand purpose while Patagonia and iFixit self-repair.

Tl;dr: BAT brings the cynicism while Patagonia quietly goes about its business.

For anyone who hasn’t seen this ad that ran in the FT recently, BAT (British American Tobacco) apparently believes in #PURPOSE. Sorry, I’m throwing up in my mouth a little as I share this with you:

“We aim to reduce the health impact of our business by offering consumers greater choice in new product categories.”

What an absolute load of old tosh. Tobacco products kill 8 million people a year, so with 15% global market share, BAT’s $30bn in revenue is directly responsible for around 1.2 million deaths. The only part of their business which might even charitably be connected to this blandly stated purpose is vaping, which best as I can tell represents a single digit percentage of current revenues. I’m also guessing the average Lucky Strike customer isn’t reading the FT, so really this is a cynical effort to make investors feel better about themselves for the blood that’s on their hands. It’s a new low for the already low low of brand purpose. So, maybe next time someone starts wiffling their purpose-vertising nonsense you can whip this ad out like Zorro and stop the conversation in its tracks. You’re welcome.

Now, way beyond stupidly cynical ads, being a purposeful company is a very big deal. So it’s important to note that so very quietly you may not even have noticed, Patagonia inked a deal with iFixit to provide instructions on how to self-repair Patagonia garments. (Which might come in handy when we’re all stuck inside with nothing else to do). It’s a big statement made very quietly, because the right to repair is currently a huge legislative issue. Tech companies are fervently against it because it raises tricky issues around who actually owns the product (turns out that you technically don’t own most tech, you just have a license for its use, which really should be illegal) Apple are particularly cynical on the topic, deliberately making products difficult to repair and using this to encourage wholesale replacement rather than fixing what’s broken.

Anyway, I’ll leave you to make your own mind up on which matters most. Screaming about your BS purpose in an ad, or quietly and purposefully taking a pro-consumer stance relative to a major anti-consumer issue.

3. Slashing advertising might do some good. Like highlighting the true scale of digital ad-fraud.

Tl;dr: By 2025 digital ad-fraud predicted to be world’s 2nd largest illegal industry after drug trafficking.

I’ve been reading the really rather good “Advertising for Skeptics” by the incomparable Bob Hoffman. Unlike most business books, which can’t even get one of these right, it has the distinct quality of being funny, informative, straightforward and quick to read.

In it, he dedicates a chapter to the issue of ad-fraud. From it, here’s a quote from the ad-tech director at the Washington Post:

“The numbers are all f***ing fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshitters enforcing and profiting off the fake numbers.”

Estimates vary as to the scale of the problem. Advertising trade associations with an agenda suggest it is low and getting lower, while experts in the field such as Dr. Augustine Fou who I’ve quoted before, believe ad-fraud could be as high as 50% of every digital dollar spent.

Of the major scams to have been discovered, Fireball in 2017, infected 250 million computers worldwide and was capable of serving up 30 billion false ad-impressions every second. That’s a lot of fake ads.

The thing about fraud, though, is that fraudsters are experts at preying on the emotions of their mark. In this case, marketers who are being measured against an ever more tactical set of advertising metrics. And if those metrics are fake, many would rather be blissfully ignorant because the metrics are making them look good (and potentially keeping them in a job).

But when an exogenous shock like a viral pandemic comes along and forces you to turn off the taps, it’ll be interesting to see how much the metrics that really matter get impacted. And how many businesses realize this is because they’ve been throwing money away on fraud, rather than falsely thinking they’ve been throwing it away on advertising.

4. Please try to do your part and look after your local businesses.

Tl;dr: It’s up to us to look after local businesses that can’t lobby for a bailout.

I’ve been really impressed by the way some large businesses have responded to the coronapocalypse. LVMH, for example, re-tooling their cosmetics manufacturing plants to produce gel sanitizers, while broadband and cell-phone providers have been opening up bandwidth without cost to help people more effectively stay connected and work from home.

But we all know who the big losers are going to be and they won’t be the airlines that have spent the past 10 years price gouging their customers in return for an ever-declining experience. They’ll be bailed out just fine, which is a shame, because the world would be a decidedly better place if American Airlines wasn’t in it.

No, the biggest losers are going to be your local mom and pop shops, restaurants and bars. So please try and help them out as best you can. If you can’t order food from them, or go out to them, then please try and buy a gift-card from them and try to help them through. Unlike American Airlines, they won’t be rewarded with a government bailout after spending the last ten years sacrificing their resiliency by spending billions on stock buybacks.