Blogbook
New Belgium Brewing has debuted the Hemperor, which they’ve called “the dankest ale in the world”, made with hemp and hops. Via Adweek:
Though it has no psychoactive properties (any resulting buzz may come instead from its 7 percent alcohol content), its recipe inspired its advertising, which deliberately borrows from stoner culture, Belongie says, “to capture the spirit of that world in a way that people will find fun.”
The animated ads, from agency Erich & Kallman, have a purposely DIY feel, with shades of Monty Python and Teletubbies (the sun comes to life!), “a quirky charm” and plenty of Easter eggs, Belongie said.
Viewers learn a few things about The Hemperor from the campaign: He definitely inhales, loves his wildlife, nurtures his creativity and carries a torch for his ex. (He’s still into you, Jennifer.)
The San Francisco-based agency, which recently hired an actual Belgian to shill for the brand’s Fat Tire Belgian White, created the character and his illustration, which in turn named the product that’s been two years in the making.
“We feel like we have a unique, one-of-a-kind beer on our hands that provides a full sensory experience,” he said, noting that the campaign aims to keep it from “getting lost in a sea of 10,000 India Pale Ales. Within a second or two, it needs to grab people and have them asking, ‘What is this? I need to find out more.’”
The duck curve is said to be solar energy’s greatest challenge. What exactly is it and how does it have an impact on energy prices? Via Vox:
It may seem counterintuitive, but the people who operate the power grid don’t really think of solar power as conventional supply. They can’t control or “dispatch” it on their own schedule. It comes and goes with the sun; they must accommodate it. So from the grid operator’s point of view, more solar (or wind) power looks like a reduction in demand for their dispatchable power.
Total load minus renewable energy is known as “net load.” That’s the target utilities have to hit with their dispatchable resources.
As more and more solar PV is integrated into the grid, it starts dramatically suppressing net load during midday, when the sun is out. The net load curve sags in the middle of the day (like a belly) and then swoops back up when the sun goes down (like a neck).
It’s just like that first load curve I showed you — a peak in the morning, a peak in the evening — only in between, there’s an enormous sag that gets bigger as more solar is added.
At the time, the California Independent Service Operator (CAISO, the operator of the California energy grid) was noticing the same thing. The realized that high levels of solar penetration start generating a net load curve that looks … well, like a duck. Thus, the “duck curve.”
It’s Monday afternoon. After lunch. There’s a discussion in the marketing half of the office, which ends with the youngest (millennial) member of Starship asking, “Who still watches TV anyway?” Making my afternoon cuppa tea in the kitchen, I thought back. When was the last time I watched TV? That’s right. Masterchef Australia’s 2017 finals, and I muted the ads.
Yes, I mute ads, especially during Masterchef season. I love Masterchef: at its best it’s feel-good TV where you can pick up some cooking tips. Masterchef was how I learned how to joint and quarter a chicken. I watch the whole season once they get to the top 24, but I can only handle seeing the same repeat involving Curtis Stone’s smarmy face for so long. Remember their shonky “Feed a family of 4 for $10” campaign? Urgh. I mute ads for all my online browsing as well, using three add-ons on my Chrome browser. I take public transport, which means the only billboard I see is the one at Richmond Station–if I’m even looking up from my phone at that point. The only ads I see are the occasional sponsored post on social media, which I usually scroll past without reading (Why does Twitter keep serving me South African ads?). I don’t subscribe to any print newspapers or magazines, nor do I know anyone my age who does. I don’t even remember the last time I even touched a print newspaper: I read my news online.
I’m in my 30s, which places me in the oldest “millennial” tier. Anyone younger might not be adblocking, though they probably are: nearly half of millennials use ad blockers on their desktops, a smaller percentage use it on their phones, and some use it for every device they have. They aren’t watching as much television, or listening to as much radio. 47% of millennials and GenXers don’t watch TV at all, and one in three don’t listen to traditional radio. With the rise of Netflix, Spotify, and other streaming services that are just growing more and more accessible, it’s possible that traditional media’s share of market attention will soon drop further. Hell, my senior citizen parents watch Netflix. They only watch traditional TV for soccer and golf.
Advertising often changes along with the changing media landscape. With every new generation it’s quite likely that the trend towards engaging with less and less traditional media will continue. What’s next?
Advertise Without Advertising
Oh btw I’m building a cyborg dragon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2018
In the modern cult of celebrity, some people can sell out flamethrowers with a tweet (true story) or get elected President and possibly declare nuclear war with a tweet. It’s a brave new world. Social media has been used by brands to varying effects, but it’s definitely best at engaging millennials–most of whom use social media in some form or other. The efforts of certain social media teams have been so on point that they have revived sales for flagging products:
Lol ok https://t.co/lobyuNOkee
— MoonPie (@MoonPie) August 21, 2017
This quick troll tweet by MoonPie was one of several in an impressive run, which raised demand for its chocolate cookie and marshmallow product so much that its Chattanooga Bakery factory ran out of supplies and had to stop churning them out. The social media strategy and personality was the brainchild of a Knoxville agency, The Tombras Group, which stated that demand for MoonPie rose 17% from social media alone.
It’s not all good news, of course: it’s easy for brands to misstep online, either by ignoring review sites or worse, responding badly to reviews. Tinder famously went on a social media rant after a Vanity Fair article claimed that Tinder was only for hookups, which they then had to apologise for.
Some key takeaways:
- Yes You Need A Strategy: In the modern media ‘verse, social media is an important face of your brand that needs thought and professional attention.
- Have an Outside Team If You Can: In-house teams can work, but they can also make mistakes by being too “close” to the brand.
- Be Genuine: Have an actual personality.
- Don’t be an ass: This sentiment is key to modern advertising and marketing.
People Will Watch Your Ads If they’re Good
Ads do get shared by people if they resonate with their audience: even if the audience in question might not watch TV and/or block ads. Even for that most-hated of formats, the pre-roll. The Geico pre-roll ad campaigns were hugely successful, effectively reinventing pre-roll advertising. They tied into a core truth in pre-roll ads: that people don’t really like seeing them. Pre-rolls mess with instant gratification. There’s something inherently annoying at clicking on a video of a cute kitten and having to spend 15, 20 seconds watching an ad about something unrelated.
As such, Geico tries to make their pre-roll ads highly entertaining. By acknowledging the truth of pre-roll ads, their ads try to provide compacted information while being funny enough to make watching them feel like you’re not wasting your time. Their “Unskippable” campaign gained a lot of attention, even getting featured in news media like USA Today. If it’s possible for pre-roll ads from an insurance company to get shared around, there’s hope for everyone, in our opinion. You just need to get to the right truth. And you have to respect the fact that the audience is giving you some of their time: especially if they have no choice about it.
Some key takeaways:
- Whose Time are You Wasting and Why: Know your audience and respect their time.
- Know What You Want To Get Out of It: Have a strategy.
- Set Out ROI and Targets: Know where you want to be.
Ad Bombing
In the first episode of the Netflix series Altered Carbon, the main character, Takeshi Kovacs, is briefly overwhelmed by an unfiltered ad bomb: tons of ads all at once, floating everywhere.
Anyone travelling through Melbourne in the last few weeks probably also realized that Masterchef’s latest season is on or coming up: the ads are everywhere in public spaces. This sort of full-court press approach to advertising can risk alienating your target audience if it gets too intrusive, but we’ve seen some ad installations work well, even within Melbourne itself, particularly when driven by social consciousness. During the leadup to the equal marriage plebisite, in Melbourne the “Yes” posters were everywhere, plastered across seemingly every friendly business and venue. Even the niche boardgames/Magic the Gathering venue where my group plays D&D had multicoloured buntings up. The mass visibility of the vote worked not only to show support for the issue but also to make everyone aware of the vote. Victoria ended up having the overall highest “Yes” vote in the country.
Ad bombing is, however, extremely costly, even if traditional advertising still provides a degree of credibility that modern forms of advertising might not. As such, we often suggest (where clients have the budget for it) an integrated strategy involving both traditional and newer touchpoints, tailored towards the audience in mind. You do in many ways get what you pay for, but we do work with clients to get the best ROI out of what they have available.
Brave New World
Recent forms of advertising are all tech-driven. Brands have had activations in VR and AR, with varying success. Google debuted its first VR-capable, 360º Google Doodle only a few weeks ago. Brands have also had success using immersive AR to tell the stories: Red Cross used a great AR game to highlight the experience of children in war. Brands have even dipped into blockchain and bitcoin tech: Burger King famously debuted a Burger King bitcoin. There are even industry awards now that celebrate the use of tech in advertising.
There’s even a word for the conglomeration of advertising and technology: ad tech. Designed to help agencies make better use of budgets, ad tech is the umbrella term for tech that allows agencies to better target and analyse their digital efforts. You can read more about it here and about some of its controversies here. There’s even marketing tech: a buzzphrase for advanced CRM and SEO technologies. Less about new platforms, these forms of technology are about targeting, a whole different can of fish.
So what’s next? Is the future the giant holograms of Bladerunner: 2049? The ad bombs in Altered Carbon? Advertising will probably never die. The touchpoints will evolve, but the core challenges will remain: creating ads that capture and retain audience interest in a meaningful way (without wasting their time), and converting that interest into a valuable return. For everything else, well, in the future of Altered Carbon, there’s always the ad blocker.
Described once as part NASCAR, part Science Fair, Battlebots is back. An American robotics competition, competitors design and operate remote-controlled attack bots. Via Gizmodo:
Robot bits are strewn across work benches, sparks are flying, and crews are furiously prepping for the next battle, replacing smashed parts with new ones and testing their weapons. In one corner, sits Chomp. Chomp looks like a regular BattleBot on the outside, but inside there’s a secret trick: Artificial intelligence.
Tucked under Chomp’s hood, there’s a LIDAR camera that maps the opponent’s location as the two bots try to wreck each other. There’s also a small computer inside of Chomp that can calculate when the right time to strike the most destructive blow might be.
This killer attack is called “Auto-Chomp” and blew audiences away back in 2016, Chomp’s debut season on BattleBots. The feature then represented an AI-powered BattleBot on a basic level, as the weapon was automated but didn’t necessarily think for itself. Now, Chomp is getting smarter, and BattleBots as we know it could be evolving in a fascinating way.
Just as in so many other areas of robotics, autonomy is the new name of the game in BattleBots. And Chomp is leading the way to the future.
“Autonomy is really hard so basically nothing is against the rules right now,” Chomp’s builder Zoe Stephenson told Gizmodo. “I think Battlebots would love to have more autonomous robots, and I would love for people who are interested in autonomy to come to BattleBots and help us build.
A Royal Wedding Corgi brand activation? Yes please. You might not care very much about the latest British royal shenanigans, but corgis are cute. A breed that’s famously the favourite of the Queen, this brand activation was in NYC, promoting the upcoming Harry x Megan film. Sadly, in April, the Queen lost her last corgi, prompting an internet outpouring of sadness. Via TIME:
Queen Elizabeth lost the last of her beloved corgi dogs this weekend.
Willow, who was nearly 15 years old, was put down after a lengthy struggle with cancer, according to reports in the U.K. press.
This marks the end of the monarch’s longstanding tradition – the first time Her Majesty hasn’t had a corgi in her household since World War II. The Queen, 91, is well known for her love of corgis and has bred them for nearly eight decades.
The Queen and her canine companions feature prominently Netflix’s buzzy show The Crown.
Monty Roberts, a former royal family advisor told Vanity Fair she didn’t want to have any more young dogs after 2012 because she didn’t want to “leave any behind.”
Before celebrity dogs of Instagram were earning more money than humans, Willow was world-famous. You may have spotted the dog alongside Holly, another one of the Queen’s corgis, in the opening sketch at the 2012 London Olympic Games with a slightly more famous Brit – James Bond.
Willow also was part of the Queen’s official 90th birthday portrait in 2016. The palace has not yet commented.
In Epoch, a short film by Rich Lee and Christopher Probst, a lone woman searches for survivors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Via Short of the Week:
Approached by Jarred Land, President at Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, to put their Monstro 8K camera through it’s paces, director of photography Christopher Probst decided to put it through some strenuous testing by using it in “several varied lighting conditions and harsh production environments”. The result is Epoch, a visually impressive science-fiction/horror short, Land made with long-term collaborator Rich Lee.
If you’re reading the log line for Epoch and thinking it sounds like something you’ve seen before, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Narratively, Lee’s 14-minute film isn’t the most original, although considering it started off as a project to test a camera, it’s got a lot more story than you might expect.
A little slow in starting, Epoch follows a lone survivor across a post-apocalyptic wasteland as she searches for supplies, though the short picks up pace and delivers a strong twist in its final third, you can’t help but feel like this is a journey you’ve experienced before.
Where Epoch excels though is in its aesthetic. Visually the film is outstanding and the sense of scale Lee, Land and their crew achieve with their world building is akin to what you might expect to find in a feature film.
Childish Gambino’s beautiful, disturbing “This is America” music video depicting gun violence and the African-American experience has gone hyperviral. Via the Guardian:
Try, if you can, to watch This Is America, the new music video from Childish Gambino, while keeping your eyes off the man in the camera’s gaze. It’s not easy. You may have to watch it twice, maybe three times, probably more. In the clip, Childish Gambino is a dancing, running, alternately homicidal and joyous streak of shirtless charisma. Your eyes want to follow him, soak him in. But if you do, you’ll miss the point he seems to be making in the video, an enigmatic and provocative effort that has accumulated over 74m YouTube views and hundreds of thinkpieces in the six days since its release.
[…]
While Childish Gambino is surely the star – playing the role some have suggested is America itself – viewed in context of the background action, the video is dizzying, hypnotic treatise on racism, gun violence, joy, spirituality, hip-hop and entertainment in the United States. Its symbolism has been linked to Jim Crow, Michael Jackson and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. YouTube videos investigating these Easter eggs have more views than many actual music videos.
Since debuting This Is America during last week’s episode of Saturday Night Live – for which he served as host and musical guest – Glover has refused to reveal the video’s message, telling TMZ “that’s not for me to say.” What’s certain is that This Is America is a brilliant, career-defining moment.
“This is one of the great performers in modern America,” says TV host Touré, whose books include 2012’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? “He’s showing a really interesting ability to do soul music, television, movies, comedy and drama and to make art that has political substance, but not so much that it becomes propagandist or preachy.”
This Is America has dared us to decide what to make of it. The video’s background action commences immediately after the video hits it pivot point: Childish Gambino pulling a gun from his pants and shooting a hooded man in the back of the head, execution style. This is when he declares the song’s guiding principle: “This is America.”
The fact that sports sound better in your living room is a testament to the ingenuity and efforts of audio mixers to create the soundscape you hear at home. Via Vox:
When you watch a baseball game, you’re also listening for the hum of the crowd and the crack of a baseball bat. People like Andrew Stoakley make that happen.
He mixes audio for teams like the Toronto Blue Jays, which means he combines a tangle of audio feeds to create the soundscape you hear when you watch the game at home. And he’s done it for a long time, too, with experience including hockey, NBA, lacrosse, and almost every other game that needs sound. Oh, and he’s very Canadian — in the winter months, he mixes curling.
He was nice enough to guide me through how he helps sports sound amazing, answering some questions I’d never thought to ask before: How do they keep the crowd from cursing into the microphones? What makes a baseball bat sound so good? And what’s it really like making all that noise into an incredible show?
Stoakley walked me through a typical Blue Jays game. He’s worked a lot of them this year, and as an “A1,” he leads their sound mixing.
When the TV truck arrives, he and his assistants get to work. They’ll show up at 1 for a 7 pm game, since they have a lot of work to do.
Stoakley runs audio lines from the TV truck to the “patch room,” which serves as a clearinghouse for connections to the stadium’s audio lines. As Stoakley patches in, his assistants are busy placing the TV station’s mics on the field, which will stay there during a home series.
You’re reading the newspaper. Maybe checking the stock market. You see yet another article talking about “blockchain”, “bitcoin”, or “cryptocurrency”. Depending on what you’re reading, the article’s either telling you how you can make ridiculous money through bitcoin, or predicting the bubble bursting. You probably know someone who knows someone who once bought bitcoin for cheap back when it was just for fun and is now a millionaire. Somehow none of this really surprises you. After all, currency is itself a bit of a social invention, and so much of it is digital nowadays anyway. Lots of people live cashless lives, paying for everything through cards. If a digital number rising and falling in a digital account can noticeably change–even save–a person’s life, maybe the development of a new form of purely digital currency isn’t so out there. Yet what exactly is blockchain, and is it really going to be the New Internet?
All the Jargon in the World
Invented by someone (or someones) going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain is a distributed database. A shared record book, if you will (via the afr), made up of thousands of copies stored in computers around the world. A decentralised system. Every time there’s a change made to the record, aka if someone sent someone money, it’s a new line (a “block”) that’s replicated across all the copies, an irreversible change that will exist as long as the Internet exists. The change is validated by known algorithms. As the record book is owned by anyone who has a copy, there is no middleman like a bank involved. Existing in a state of consensus, the blockchain checks itself every ten minutes, reconciling any transaction during that time.
As such, this system has the benefit of transparency–everyone has access to the copy of the record book–and virtual incorruptibility, since it would require a lot of computing power to override the blockchain. It also lacks centralised points of vulnerability that hackers can exploit. This decentralised system has been called Web 3.0, allowing users to create value and authenticate digital information safely and transparently. The system, if widely adopted, would have wide-ranging effects on how we currently use the Internet.
[I]n a world where anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, blockchain is the answer to a question we’ve been asking since the dawn of the internet age: How can we collectively trust what happens online? –PCMag
Blockchain Outside Bitcoin
To date, the value of bitcoin is estimated at several billion USD. And the blockchain system is beginning to be used for things other than cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Via PCMag:
[D]ozens of startups are using the technology for everything from global payments to music sharing, from tracking diamond sales to the legal marijuana industry. That’s why blockchain’s potential is so vast: When it comes to digital assets and transactions, you can put absolutely anything on a blockchain. A host of economic, legal, regulatory, and technological hurdles must be scaled before we see widespread adoption of blockchain technology, but first movers are making incredible strides. Within the next handful of years, large swathes of your digital life may begin to run atop a blockchain foundation—and you may not even realize it.
In Kenya, which has a problem with fraudsters and corrupt land officials changing records for “land grabs”, it’s hoped that blockchain will help build trust in and buffer a system otherwise rife with problems. From the BBC:
Caine Wanjau, the technology officer at Twiga Foods, a Kenya-based food distribution company, says: “In a relationship where two parties don’t trust each other, then blockchain makes sense.”
The company recently announced a partnership with IBM Research to create digital profiles of informal small-scale traders – to be stored in a blockchain – to help them access credit.
“Seventy percent of Kenyans work in the agriculture sector but only 2% get credit from banks. We want to create an immutable – trustworthy – database of the vendors and suppliers we deal with to help them, and banks to have access to information they can use to negotiate credit,” Mr Wanjau adds.
But I’m not in Kenya, you might say. And my business won’t touch cryptocurrency with a 100 foot pole. So what does blockchain have to do with me? It’s because, as Don Tapscott explained it in Blockchain Revolution and in his 2016 TED Talk:
Today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries; middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit companies, and so on to establish trust in our economy. These intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from identification and authentication of people through to clearing, settling, and record-keeping… they capture our data, which means we can’t monetize or use it to better manage our lives, and our privacy is being undermined…
[S]o what if there were not only an Internet of information, but an Internet of value. Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed, all without powerful intermediaries.”
Some brands have also seen immediate returns by engaging directly with the blockchain system. We’re not talking about weirdly jokey forays like Burger King creating its own cryptocurrency (Yes, this actually happened in Russia, the Whoppercoin). Via Adnews:
The blockchain boost continued when Kodak revealed this week it too was jumping into blockchain and launching its own cryptocurrency: the KodakCoin.
Shares of the struggling 130-year-old company rose as much as 90% Wednesday, giving it a valuation of US $565 million.
That represented a gain of roughly US $431 million or 321% since the company said it would use the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, blockchain, to help photographers manage their image rights.
Blockchain systems provide what people want out of modern brands: transparency and authenticity. By integrating blockchain, brands could provide proof that certain practices that their target audience wants are being put in place–for example, that sustainable, ethical practices are being used in goods. Transparency can also lead to other benefits like operational efficiency. Looking for more ways to improve transparency and operational practices? Get in touch.
Celine Dion’s new single, Ashes, is a Deadpool 2 tie in for the film, a hilarious video that is apparently part of the film’s plot. Watch until the end! Via the Verge:
We’re several weeks away from Deadpool 2, which means a massive marketing blitz and more magnificent Deadpool content to share. The latest drop is a music video for Céline Dion’s “Ashes,” which is featured on the film’s soundtrack. In the video, Deadpool does his best Flashdance impersonation, as Canadian national treasure Céline croons, “And when I pray to God all I ask is… can beauty come out of ashes?”
The video features some snippets from the upcoming movie, including Julian Dennison’s mutant character Russell and Deadpool with Vanessa. Deadpool also does some nice pirouettes and grand jetés in between — in stilettos, no less! — as Céline goes full Céline onstage. The performance concludes with a deadpan gag between the two, with Deadpool quipping, “[This is] too good. This is Deadpool 2, not Titanic. You’re an 11. We need to get you down to a five, five and a half tops. Just phone it in.”
As to the Deadpool dancing on stage in high heels, it’s not actually Ryan Reynolds, but Britain’s Got Talent finalist Yanis Marshall, as per Ryan Reynold’s instagram:
Deadpool 2 will be out in a couple of weeks.