Blogbook
IKEA Greece’s new ad involves the friendship between two dogs that were separated after only one dog was adopted out by a family. It’s a tearjerker of an ad, created by Ogilvy Greece. Speaking of IKEA, when is the pet LURVIG range ever going to come to Melbourne?
Isabel Castro’s Darlin is a NYTimes Op/Doc which premiered at Tribeca this year, following a Honduran family’s separation after the zero-tolerance policy.
In this fast-changing, crowded day and age, brand experimentation is essential. It’s not just about changing parts of a brand’s messaging, look & feel, or advertising — it’s also about trying out new or different platforms. The process can be a little hit and miss — I laughed when I saw that L’Oreal created Snapchat lenses — but having content spread out across unexpected touchpoints does pay off: L’Oreal has been repeatedly named the world’s most powerful cosmetic brand. In an interview with Google, L’Oreal mentioned:
Whether you’re a global company like L’Oréal or a smaller brand, testing new ideas or tools takes investment and resources. That’s why anything that we test has to be something that we think can really make a difference at scale. This isn’t about looking for shiny objects, this is about taking big bets on things that we think will really help achieve a wider business goal, then seeing whether or not we were right.
To make sure that we’re staying on track and getting the biggest bang for our buck, every test has to have what we call a “learning agenda”. That’s where we outline what questions we’re looking to answer, what new insights we’d like to uncover and the steps that we’ll take to get there.
To take a page out of L’Oreal, this means:
- Having an overarching goal for your marketing: whether it’s to get X number of quality leads a month or to get Y number more visits to your site. Having a definite set of Key Performance Indicators in mind will keep your strategy on track.
- Don’t be afraid to try new ideas or new tools, even if it takes an investment.
- Anything you test should be potentially able to help you reach your overarching goal.
- Have a set of ideas that you need confirmed or answered. Is X your best target audience for your product? Is it being sold in the right way, at the right place? Should you expand?
Brand Experimentation on Different Platforms
If you’re above a certain age, or not particularly into social media, you probably aren’t familiar with TikTok. It’s currently one of the most popular social media apps on the planet: in September 2018, it had more monthly installs on the App Store than Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, and was downloaded more than a billion times that year. Tiktok is, basically, a video-based social media platform for sharing and creating short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. You might have seen its influence in the rise of the biggest song right now on the charts: Lil Nas X’s smash country trap hit “Old Town Road”. Prior to gaining mainstream success, it built its popularity through memes on TikTok. This eventually led to the song rising through the Billboard Country charts, only to get struck off for not being “country” enough, igniting a furore about inclusiveness in country music (Lil Nas X is young, black, and queer). A remake that included Billy Ray Cyrus has been on a record-breaking run on the charts and is currently Billboard’s longest-running #1 song ever.
This success might not have happened without TikTok. The app is a second iteration of the now-defunct Musical.ly, which was a similar app launched in 2014 by Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. It was acquired by a Chinese tech company, Bytedance, and merged into TikTok (called Douyin in China). It’s now available in 150 countries, in 75 languages. While TikTok is still finding its legs as a commercial platform, the Director of US Marketing, Stefan Heinrich, was a popular figure at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Via FastCompany:
“Part of the reason TikTok has taken off is that things move in trends,” he says. “People have been in a perfect, manufactured world for a while, where they have to live up to expectations and ideals. Now it’s about real life. Real people. It’s getting a window into someone else’s life, with surprise and delight. And because it’s content-driven, not connection-driven, you see people you wouldn’t normally see, outside of your traditional circle.”
The app doesn’t currently have a broad paid advertising business, though brands and organizations—from Chipotle to the UN to the San Diego Zoo to the NBA—have signed up and are creating content, as individual users, not official advertisers. Given its revenue potential, that won’t last long. TikTok does have an ad-tools platform in beta being tested by a select number of agencies right now, but for the moment Henrich says they’re simply working to connect brands with their community of creators.
Brands should consider TikTok ads or TikTok influencers if they’re marketing to a young user base (16+), have social media and video content as a core part of their strategy, and are focused on entertainment, reach, and engagement. Relatively untapped platforms like TikTok would mean that your brand’s marketing would be more visible than usual, since you aren’t competing with as many brands for attention in that space. Just like L’Oreal, brands should try new platforms (if it fits their aims and target audience).
That aside, there’s much that brands can learn from TikTok itself. The concept behind it isn’t new–it’s pretty much Vine 2.0 as a social app–but the way it’s taken off in such a massive way indicates that often, the ticket to success is equal parts luck, identifying an unfulfilled niche, and having a brand that strongly appeals to a large section of the market. There’s nothing marketing can really do about the first bit other than try to help it along, but experimentation can definitely help you find your niche and perfect market.
Messing with your Messaging
Messaging isn’t just the copy that goes with your brand–it includes how your brand portrays and conducts itself over varying touchpoints. This could include packaging, imagery, even the tone of customer service. Does it fit your brand guidelines? (Dare we ask: do you even have brand guidelines?)
Experimentation can also include testing the messaging in focus groups before the campaign is released to the public at large. This is the safest way to have a good indication of how a campaign will be received, but it’s not a set-in-stone indication. We usually recommend it to customers who can afford the budget for testing.
According to comScore, about 54% of digital messaging goes unseen by consumers. To get heard nowadays among all the noise, you need a strong message and strong content that’s relevant and accessible to your target audience. Are there alt tags? Subtitles? Does your video work with the sound off? Is your message memorable, and isn’t unnecessarily detailed or convoluted? Experimentation will help you determine whether your message is working, or help you find and tweak it until it does. You can do that by carefully testing different offerings over a period of time, and doing monthly audits to check which gave you the most value in terms of engagement or leads.
Need more help? Curious to know more? Get in touch.
Ahsoka: A Star Wars Story is a beautifully made fan-edited trailer about one of the most influential figures in Star Wars.
It’s Tuesday afternoon in the office. There’s a disbelieving exclamation from the creative department: “Jeremy Renner had an app?”
Yes. Jeremy Renner had an app. He’s the actor best known for the archer guy in the Avengers, whose main purpose appears to be mysteriously surviving one apocalypse after another despite just being a vanilla human, while inexplicably being the best archer in the world even though he’s clearly unable to use a bow right. Renner developed an app that has since been described as Instagram but for Jeremy Renner fans (Rennites? Renneristas? RenHive?) called Jeremy Renner Official. It’s every bit as bizarre to me to imagine as it is to write this for you. In any case, Jeremy Renner Official trucked around quietly for years and was made by EscapeX, a startup company that makes self-contained apps for stars. These apps were naturally going to be filled by superfans of said stars. Via Wired, which interviewed EscapeX after the incident:
The 500 celebrities—in many cases, an admittedly generous description—who have launched apps through EscapeX have no suppressive algorithms to fear, and options aplenty to monetize. The Renner app, for instance, gave fans the option to purchase “stars,” which vaulted users to the top of some sort of leaderboard of Rennheads. (In his statement announcing the shuttering of his app, Renner declared a refund for anyone who had purchased a star in the last 90 days.) Other celebrity apps deploy a subscription model, or charge extra to unlock bonus features.
The idea is also to give the semifamous a safe space of self-selecting super-stans. Instagram has well over a billion monthly active users; some of them are bound to say mean things. On your EscapeX oasis, though, you can bask in, and profit from, unfettered adoration, even in your lowest moments.
Do people actually need an entire app to prop up their egos? If there’s a demand for it, why not? Besides, it’s hardly going to be the most weird thing that a celebrity has done. By all accounts, the app was pretty lively, with its own community drama, even before the Incident that got Renner to shut it down: for some reason, EscapeX had neglected to make it hard for people to impersonate Renner in the community. You can imagine what sort of trash fire this created, what with people starting to post ‘as’ Renner and talking about porno, among other things. This is why nothing good survives for long on the internet. Soon, the app was no longer a fun space where Renner’s superfans could wait to be told Happy Rennsday on Wednesdays (this was also in fact an actual thing) and it had to go.
That being said, the whole Jeremy Renner Official saga has a few teachable lessons for brands:
- Trolls will get to anything: In this day and age, it’s probably better not to put anything participatory out online unless it’s carefully moderated. Or it will go very wrong. Fast.
- There’s an app for that: An app could conceivably be made for any brand out there. If there’s the money for it. Whether it serves an ROI, however, is another thing altogether.
- The app has to be carefully designed. Assume that the worst could happen, and stand by to fix it if it does.
- People will still download apps that are relevant to their interests.
Some Good APPles
There have been cases where brand apps have gone viral. Here are some of the ways:
Offer Free Stuff
When I was in design school, one branded app spread like wildfire. It was Clemenger BBDO’s Hungry Jacks app. After launch, it hit over 265,000 downloads, was in the top spot for apps for days, and in the top five apps for a month. Those are huge results for a branded (read: not social media or a game) app.
For those non-Aussies who are wondering Burger King in Australia, which was renamed to Hungry Jacks due to corporate shenanigans that are too long to detail in a single blog post. You can read about it here though if you’re really curious. The Hungry Jacks app urged people to “Shake & Win”. All punters had to do was take themselves to a Hungry Jacks store, open the app, and shake their phone. The app also included things like nutritional information and calculators and such, but face it, the reason why it was downloaded so much was because of the promise of free stuff. In particular, free chips. You can look at all the social analysis from pundits about how the app gave people a constant reminder of Hungry Jacks and pushed them to go to a store and so on, but let’s get real. If free chips weren’t in the equation, we’re not sure that people would’ve downloaded the damn thing, which had an interface of brushed steel surfaces and red plastic textures.
Make It An Annoying Necessity
Free wifi in Changi Airport is only available if you find and acquire a coupon from one of their goddamned kiosks, request for an access code through SMS (a data-gathering trap that hardly ever rewards you with said code in time for you to leave the efficient airport) or download the app. This requires a lot of preplanning, given many visitors might not be aware of / visit Changi enough to pre-download this app. Similarly, SingTel’s HiApp is pretty much the least annoying way you can top up HiCards, the popular SIM cards sold to visitors. Forcing people to download your goddamned app in order to access a service that could be easily rigged up to a proper website is not the best way to go, in our opinion, but it’s one way to go about it. After all, it’s not as though there’s a feasible alternative to Changi airport in Singapore.
Make it Actually Useful To Your Audience
In July 2017, the guitar brand Fender released the Fender Play app to critical praise. Via Guitarworld:
Developed over several years with considerable assistance from music educators as well as the developers of successful education apps for other endeavors, Fender Play allows users to choose their own path, including the songs, genres and instruments they want to play, learn at their own pace and track their progress. Bite-sized video lessons enable users to comprehend and master skills very quickly, and most users are able to play their first riffs within the first 30 minutes.
“With Fender Play anyone can pick up a guitar and start learning,” says Fender Digital General Manager Ethan Kaplan. “You don’t have to drive somewhere to take a lesson or have someone come to your home, which is very convenient, but it’s also a good supplement to lessons. Most people view lessons as a chore, but with Fender Play we’re promoting playing guitar as a fun lifestyle, which makes it a lot easier to keep people interested in playing.”
The effort that went into Fender Play was extensive. Mary Keenan, previously with Leapfrog and boasting an extensive background in online and digital education, assembled a diverse group of counsellors from the USC School of Music, UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, Musicians Institute, the Berklee School of Music and more to help develop the app’s curriculum.
“We also took a close look at trends in online learning as well as educational strategies,” says Kaplan, “like achievement-based learning and micro-based lessons, which are small lessons that are much more effective than longer lessons. We also got input from instructors that we hired to provide the on-camera content.”
It also provided access to an online community of Fender fans, access to instructors, and to Fender staff. As of the time of this article, the Fender app is on the favourite picks for the App store, and has been called the most comprehensive online guitar tuition course available. At $10USD per month, the app provides Fender with a continuous revenue stream, with 60,000 users as of 2018 with projected growth to 100,000 by 2019 with an aggressive marketing push.
Make it Fun
IKEA Push is IKEA’s fun augmented reality app:
This app allowed people to “virtually place true-to-scale 3D models” in your home, using your phone or iPad. Operating pretty much as a really high-tech IKEA catalogue, the app is beautiful, fun to use, and is sure to trigger an IKEA visit in its users’ near-future. It was an evolution of the company’s previous attempt at an app. Via Wired:
For Charny-Brunet, it was absolutely critical that the Place app didn’t just give a vague idea of what a piece of furniture would look like in a room, but came as close as possible to the real thing. “It’s about reducing the risk that’s inherent with any home improvement you make,” he says. Through a combination of room scanning and 3D modelling, each piece of furniture in Place is almost perfectly in proportion with the real world.
It wasn’t just the look of the furniture that had to be right, but the sound. When a piece of furniture lands on the floor in Place, it lands with a little thud and a touch of haptic feedback. Those thuds were designed by the Swedish sound studio Plan8, who recorded the sound of a foley artist hitting a wooden board and then edited them so they fit the size and weight of the piece of furniture being dropped in the app.
Making use of IKEA’s vast in-house stock of 3D models, the app was a critical success. It was the second most popular ARKit app in 2018 – an achievement, given that most ARKit apps are games. While IKEA Place is no longer the only AR app of its type out there, the app ties in to its core business in a fun and accessible way.
In Summary
Looking to create an app for your business? Keep in mind:
- Do you really need one? Apps are expensive things to create, and getting people to download a brand app can be difficult.
- Do you have a “hook” or incentive for people to download your app?
- Do you have the budget to push it into the world with some targeted marketing?
- Do you have a specific need in your business that the app will address, vs a well-designed website?
All these should be preliminary considerations for you before you get into the app business. Still interested? We can help you out. Get in touch.
Via National Geographic: From Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to “The Jetsons’” Rosie the robot, these sci-fi creations have inspired real-world inventions. More than inventions, sci-fi has often imagined the future: including what the world itself would look like, and how it might return to “normal”. Via Wired:
In recent months the science fiction world has grown increasingly political, with dozens of writers contributing stories to anthologies such as Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against and If This Goes On. Another prominent example is A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.
“I wanted to use my position as an editor to try to help magnify the voices of the people that we invited to participate in this anthology,” Adams says in Episode 354 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “To sort of shout back at the Trump administration, and also to try to imagine some new futures that might help us figure out how to get back to normal from here.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0rnPu-pjUo
UberEats’ latest tv spot by Anomaly’s Los Angeles team reinvents Guy Fieri for the Uber-owned food delivery gig service, focused on drivers.
A horse expert reviews horse movies on Vulture, including much-loved films like Black Beauty, Secretariat, Spirit, and others. Via the Vulture:
Horse movies are a lot like dog movies: They usually make you cry, and sometimes they get animal facts wrong. We can’t help with the first part, but we can ask horse expert and stable owner Scott Tarter to watch and review some equine entertainment. Content warning: We definitely show the scene from The Neverending Story where Artax gets stuck in the Swamp of Sadness.
Kudos to TBWA/Paris and Mathieu Braccini for making this seriously hypnotic, beautiful, 3D animated Egg McMuffin ad for McDonalds.
When I first played Kingdom Hearts, I was still in uni. I wasn’t expecting much. It’s a game where you play a kid with huge shoes, big spiky hair, and unrealistic clothing called Sora. Sora wields a “keyblade”, and goes on adventures with Donald Duck and Goofy through different “Disney/Square Enix worlds” such as the world of Hercules etc. Which you fly to on a gummi ship. I know — it sounds ridiculous to me even as I’m typing it. Despite all odds, though, Kingdom Hearts turned out to be an unexpectedly entertaining game. The combat system was fluid and challenging without being annoyingly difficult, the storyline was extremely earnest (read: for kids) but coherent enough to tie the weird storyline together, and most of all — I kid you not — the gummi ship system was incredibly fun. The ship you build is fully customisable, and gummi ship space was fun to navigate.
That was in 2002.
As the game got bigger and more complex, Disney began to add in more and more of the franchises it owned.
In this year’s game, there was Toy Story and Monster’s Inc, on top of the wildly popular franchises of Frozen and Pirates of the Caribbean. I’m surprised they didn’t add worlds like Coco, Finding Nemo, and Moana. Or Star Wars, or Marvel. Playing through Toy Story beside Woody was a strange feeling, in between “I still can’t believe they own Toy Story” to “Why Toy Story 1 and not some newer Pixar property?” By far the biggest Disney flex in popular media so far, however, is probably that one scene in the second Wreck-it Ralph:
This was meant to be a funny/triumphant moment in the film, but I mostly just found it scary. How much popular culture does Disney now own? What would this mean for entertainment in general in the future? Needless to say, this wariness isn’t exactly a popularly held opinion. When Disney finally ate 20th Century Fox for $71.3 billion, the news was greeted with joy from fans — despite the mass job losses that ensued and the inherent problems in creating a monopoly this big. X-men was now part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Magneto could meet Captain America! Nevermind the implications of Disney now owning the lion (king)’s share of pop culture. Star Wars, Pixar, X-Men, MCU, hell, even the Simpsons. The Mouse just needs to buy DCEU and Harry Potter to consolidate its dominance.
And it will. Maybe someday it will.
I Will Show You The World
This year, the Lion King’s live-action remake became the highest-grossing animation of all time, along with being the ninth highest-grossing film of all time. It was pretty much the same as the original, except with Beyoncé and some slight changes to the cast. Despite the uncanny valley part at the beginning, I actually rather enjoyed it. Just like how I enjoyed the mediocre Avengers: Endgame film, or the very average Aladdin live-action, or the kinda eh Spiderman: Far from Home. That’s the thing about empire. Sooner or later you get used to it. Isn’t it better to have some content than no content?
The problem is in the type of content that gets produced, now that Disney is the Master of the Universe. Via the Guardian:
It’s an almost cartoon-like demonstration of alpha-capitalism: diversity and differentness mushed together into a great big monopolistic blob. With each acquisition, the stakes get higher, as do the profit-opportunities – and, I predict, the numbers of ass-covering executives who will feel less and less inclined to take risky chances on new and different types of film from new and different types of film-maker.
It also has an impact in the way films are now experienced. Via the Atlantic:
The merger essentially confirms that a new age of entertainment has dawned in Hollywood, one where simply releasing blockbusters in theaters isn’t enough to give a company a healthy profit margin. As my colleague Derek Thompson wrote in 2017, Disney’s acquisition of Fox is its first shot in the ongoing streaming wars—a sign that the company is building an arsenal to take on Netflix and any other tech giant that’s muscling into the entertainment business. Disney is getting ready to launch its own subscription streaming service, Disney+, and the Fox assets will pad out that library nicely.
[…]
Disney and Netflix offer the two clearest visions of Hollywood’s future. The former is a media company that’s as old-fashioned as they come, trying to make movies that will pull audiences en masse to the theater. The latter is a tech company that’s largely uninterested in the theater business but has won subscriber loyalty by offering a wealth of viewing options. As the cinema business continues to evolve, perhaps only the biggest films will survive as in-theater experiences, with streaming becoming an equally profitable venue. By adding Fox, Disney has gained ground in that second sphere, but other studios could get left behind in the race.
It’s not so bad yet. At MIFF this year there was a host of diverse, interesting, small-budget films that were screened to mostly booked/packed film theatres. Festivals like Cannes and Tribeca still celebrate creative filmmaking. But it’s often hard for people to see small films unless they’ve caught them at a festival. Not even the number of hipster cinemas in Melbourne screen everything, only the most acclaimed indie films. Films that won the Palme d’Or and such still do get screened at mainstream cinemas, but for everything else, you can either catch the film at MIFF or wait for it to come out on Netflix.
It’s only going to get worse. R-rated films, for example, don’t fit into the Disney brand. And it’s already having trouble spacing out its content, as now it’s just competing with itself:
Disney is already having trouble spacing out their plethora of films and franchises across the calendar in a manner that will give each of them a fair shot at financial success; Dumbo will release in late March despite being completed in time for a late 2018 spot – it was only pushed back to avoid clashing with Nutcracker & The Four Realms and Mary Poppins Returns. And, generally speaking, Disney doesn’t release all that many movies. In 2019, they’ll only have around nine titles in theaters with major releases (not including Fox properties soon to fall under their umbrella). Compare that to Universal Pictures, who will have 15 titles come out this year, while 20th Century Fox has 13 titles scheduled for release in 2019, including the repeatedly-delayed X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants. With that studio about to be consumed by Disney, the release schedule as we know it will be completely revamped. And that probably won’t be a good thing.
[…]
If Disney only has to compete with themselves for box office supremacy, then they have far less incentive to produce more or varied content. The Disney model of content is already one with surprising limitations. After all, this is the studio that has built a decades-long sustainable brand without releasing R-rated movies. These historically came under a different studio name like Touchstone, and so it’s unlikely they will entirely kill such Fox films post-merger, but they perhaps won’t be a priority, particularly if they’re bigger budget efforts such as the Alien movies. James Mangold, director of Logan, was one of many to express concern that the merger would limit such storytelling opportunities since they don’t fit with Disney’s brand.
With a huge share of the market, Disney can now enforce its already unprecedented demands on cinemas:
One way the schedule will be completely changed is in how it will affect movie theaters. Unlike most studios, Disney demands a far larger cut of ticket sales for their films and are also the strictest in terms of the conditions they impose on theaters, both independent and multiplex. For example, Disney demanded a massive 65% cut of domestic ticket sales from Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Typically, studios ask for between 50 – 60%.
Other than new films, Disney has also started block Fox’s backlog of films from second run theatres:
Not a surprise, but Disney's blocking of Fox's backlog of films from second-run/indie theatrical showings has begun. No more Aliens, Die Hard, Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy, Big Trouble in Little China, etc. at your local revival house. https://t.co/dt2RQr8i8x
— Bill Mudron (@mudron) August 27, 2019
Looks like the future’s in streaming, a handful of indies, or blockbuster fare — watched in huge cinema chains. Fun.
The Empire Strikes Back
When the Copyright Act was enacted in the USA in 1790, copyright duration was only 14 years, renewable for another term of 14 years if the author was still alive at the end of the first term. The law changed gradually over time, allowing for longer and longer terms, but it was only when copyright on the Mickey Mouse character was set to expire in 1984 that Disney started seriously lobbying in the 70s to have the Copyright Act changed. As such, when I was studying copyright law, we used to not-so-jokingly call it the Mickey Mouse Law — because it worked. According to the Art Law Journal:
In 1976, Congress authorized a major overhaul of the copyright system assuring Disney extended protection. Instead of the maximum of 56 years with extensions, individual authors were granted protection for their life plus an additional 50 years, (which was the norm in Europe). For works authored by corporations, the 1976 legislation also granted a retroactive extension for works published before the new system took effect. The maximum term for already-published works was lengthened from 56 years to 75 years pushing Mickey protection out to 2003. Anything published in 1922 or before was in the public domain. Anything after that may still be under copyright.
With only 5 years left on Mickey Mouse’s copyright term, Congress again changed the duration with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This legislation lengthens copyrights for works created on or after January 1, 1978, to “life of the author plus 70 years,” and extends copyrights for corporate works to 95 years from the year of first publication, or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first. That pushed Mickey’s copyright protection out to 2023.
[…]
Not everybody has been happy about these changes due to our inability to use old work to create new artistic works. One author noted that we are “the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves” since “no work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon.”
The Empire has until 2023 to figure out how to change the law again — but even if it doesn’t, the copyright that expires is on the original black and white, gloveless iteration of Mickey Mouse as seen in Steamboat Willie. The modern version with the gloves and the red pants expires in 2025 — and Disney will probably still contest the matter with litigation. Disney’s aggressive use of litigation to protect its copyright and its repeated tendency to change American copyright law to suit its own purposes has a damning effect on popular culture and creativity. As the biggest juggernaut remaining in entertainment, its clout has only gotten bigger.
I still look forward to Disney/Pixar/LucasArts/MCU films. I watch many of them on premiere days. I buy the merch, play the games. Yet the more ascendant the company gets, the more depressing the outlook for film and popular culture in general. Massive monopolies like this will only get bigger, more hungry, play safer: we can only hope that something will change. All hail the Mouse.