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Another Life is a new Netflix sci fi tv show offering, starring Katee Sackhoff and Selma Blair, about an alien artefact landing on Earth. Looking forward to watching it! Via the Verge:
The series follows Commander Niko Breckinridge (Sackhoff), who’s selected to lead a mission to a distant planet after an alien ship touches down on Earth. All the tropes of a “reluctant leader setting off on a dangerous mission”-type of show are present: there are promises to loved ones that she’ll be back, forlorn staring out into space, and members of the crew musing about their place in history. Meanwhile, her husband (played by Justin Chatwin) is tasked with figuring out where the artifact came from, and it looks as though there are bigger ramifications for the fate of humanity thrown in for good measure. Along the way, alien monsters, crew members apparently developing strange powers, and parties on the flight deck also factor into the story.
BETC Paris has created a new ad for Netflix which is full of Easter Eggs. The Stranger Things Easter Egg is easy to catch, but can you find the rest?
What we’re watching: Stranger Things Season 3. Though with maybe less enthusiasm than before. We loved Season 1, but the introduction of a romance plotline between tiny kids in Season 2 was probably unnecessary.
Perhaps confusingly, one of the biggest adland events of the year bears approximately the same abbreviated title as the biggest film event of the year. Maybe because it appeals to adland egos, maybe everyone just likes to party in Cannes, who knows. This year, there was a minor stir over Alfonso Cuarón, who was a key speaker. You may remember Cuarón from films such as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban. Haha, we kid. We mean (also) Children of Men and this year’s Oscar bait, the long, black and white, Netflix-funded masterpiece, Roma. Cuarón was at Cannes to pick up more shiny awards, and also to talk about social causes marketing in a talk called Defining Art+Activism. Via FastCompany:
Cuarón directed a PSA to help promote a Domestic Workers Rights bill in Mexico, which was passed into legislation, and now they’re working to promote a similar bill that will be introduced by Senator Kamala Harris in the U.S. later this year. Back in 2017, Participant and Cuarón also launched a campaign called “Mexico Rises” to help reconstruction in Mexico after the devastating Puebla earthquake.
As more brands look to make social impact a part of their marketing, Cuarón had some key advice for the gathered ad industry in how to go about it the right way. “To do this in a genuine way, all you do is put yourself at the service of the (social impact) organizations you’re working with,” he said. “Not trying to tell them what to do but actually for them to lead the message. You become a platform for that organization. It has to be a genuine commitment. People nowadays, they smell everything. They smell when something’s not genuine, and then it backfires. These relationships have to come from a standpoint of honesty. It’s clear we’re in difficult times, in which people are aware of the reality in which they live. And as much as they want luxury, they also want to do the right thing.” Good direction from one of the world’s best.
That’s exactly what I wish brands who piggyback on social movements for momentum would understand. If your commitment to whatever it is isn’t genuine, it’ll often backfire in your face.
Social Causes Marketing in the Wilds
Me @ companies during pride pic.twitter.com/Dv6uNwnYvx
— Bryan Russell Smith (@bryan_r_smith) May 31, 2019
For the most recent egregious examples of social causes marketing, check out what happens during Pride Month. Every year, a bunch of brands jump on the chance to put a rainbow in their logo without having to do the work of being an actual ally.
Good morning! Happy June to all brands launching a Pride campaign!! A reminder: you are about to capitalize on our identities/marginalization for corporate gain !!! It is therefore worth giving a second thought to your limited edition rainbow product !! Here, let me help!!! 💕 pic.twitter.com/uNCuGamiBQ
— Fran Tirado (@fransquishco) June 1, 2019
As Fran Tirado says in their thread, there are several vacuous ways that brands engage with the LGBTQA+ community. A t-shirt doesn’t cut it, nor does vanilla messaging about how “love is love”. If you plan on monetising Pride, make sure that you at the very least:
– Have a queer nonprofit partner
– Donate a portion of the profits that isn’t a pittance to your queer nonprofit partner
– Have a diverse campaign developed by queer/trans people, for which they are paid the market rate
In other words, if you want to jump onto a movement, do it for the right reasons — and you can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk.
Some Good Examples
Moving on from egregious examples to good ones, here are some ways that a brands have done the work.
One of the most well-known PSAs out there is Dumb Ways to Die, from our very own Metro Trains. The combination of a catchy song and hilarious graphics meant that the song went mega-viral, reminding everyone to be careful around trains. Train safety is of course close to the Metro’s heart, but the video’s a good example of how messaging and imagery doesn’t have to be explicitly branded in order to work for the brand:
Outdoor clothing brand Patagonia has stepped up its attempts to bring awareness and help to public lands during the current administration, including briefly blacking out its front page after Trump’s announcement that he would scale back two national monuments. The company also launched lawsuits on behalf of one of the monuments (Bear Ears) and works with conservation groups. With a nearly 30 year history of working to protect public lands, Patagonia also teamed up with Google to create a series of interactive videos:
Have a cause you want to support? Curious to learn more about how it might fit into your company strategy? Get in touch.
Feature image from Variety.
The trailer for the Mulan 2020 film is here… and to be honest, we’re rather underwhelmed compared to 2009. It looks very pretty though, but I don’t know if it compares to this:
The race to save endangered food, via Vox — we’ve been letting things that we’ve eaten for thousands of years disappear from our tables. Via the video blurb:
We’re letting foods we’ve eaten for thousands of years disappear from farmers’ fields, and from our plates. Saving them isn’t just a matter of cultural preservation. In the next 30 years, we’re going to need to learn how to feed more people on a hotter planet, and the more genetic varieties we lose, the harder it’ll be to adapt.
To learn more about the foods facing extinction in the US and around the world, check out the Ark of Taste, a project of Slow Food USA.
Journalist Mark Shapiro’s book, Seeds of Resistance, goes into much more detail about the risk that genetic homogeneity poses to our food supply. He also profiles some of the efforts, many led by indigenous communities, to preserve older seed varieties.
For more on seed relabeling, check out the Farmers Business Network’s 2018 Seed Relabeling Report.
The chart on declining global yields for corn, wheat, and rice comes from an article in the academic journal Disasters and Climate Change Economics from agricultural economists Mekbib G. Haile, Tesfamicheal Wossen, Kindie Tesfaye, and Joachim von Braun. Their prediction model takes into account both climate change and price volatility, which is why their estimates are higher than those of some other researchers.
Mount Pearl, a tiny Canadian town, made a viral rap video to extoll the benefits of living in/visiting Mount Pearl, along with a hashtag campaign. It’s kinda hilarious.
Nike has released a stirring ad to celebrate the US Womens team winning the 2019 Women’s World Cup, continuing their dominant run. Now hopefully Nike will offer them the same endorsement value as they do for star male football athletes, hm?
Star Wars: Galaxy of Adventures is a beautiful, kinetic, colourfully animated short film that runs through the Jedi vs Sith divide.
Omnichannel is one of the popular buzzwords flying around the industry, randomly smacking the uninitiated in the face. You’d be forgiven for thinking it has something to do with science fiction. The star of some new Transformers movie, maybe. Or the name for a new Pacific Rim Jaeger. Put simply, an “omnichannel” approach is a multi-channel, integrated approach to sales. But wait, you’d say. That’s just more marketing TEDtalky word salad. Listen to yourself and stop drinking the craft beer.
Okay. To put it even more simply, omnichannel approaches try to provide end-users (aka customers) with a seamless experience, whether they’re accessing whatever it is online, on their couch at home with a cat on their head, or in a brick and mortar store. It sounds like science fiction because it is science fiction. It’s Luke Skywalker using the Force to appear seamlessly on another planet, hopefully without being tempted towards the Dark Side. It’s Neo integrating into the Matrix, but with hopefully less Agent Anderson. See the common thread through our analogies? No, not the mega money-making profits from both SF franchises. While omnichannel can help integrate and improve the customer experience, the information you’d have to gather on a customer to make it possible is also vulnerable to abuse.
Hello from the Dark Side
Inside Retail declared in 2016 that omnichannel would soon meet its demise:
“The ability to have a continuous experience across brands, across formats and across devices that is completely bespoke – that is the promise of a new way of thinking and marketing that has been long unnoticed”.
The real reason omnichannel will die a slow and gruesome death is that the customers will reject it. Ironically the better omnichannel works, the more intense the rejection will be.
What is needed for omnichannel to work? Cloudtags explains:
- Seamless, open lines of communication across multiple channels (in-store, on the website, in customer service emails, on store associate calls, via tweets, etc).
- Data is used intelligently to inform decisions on the when, where, how, with whom of those communications.
- The customer sees a valuable return for their the collection of their data. Data gathering methods are transparent and always opt-in at the end.
The first two parts is on brands to develop. The last part requires delicacy and respect. Today, as customers grow more and more tech-savvy and conscious of their privacy online and offline, it can be harder to persuade customers to provide their data to you, a commercial entity. Privacy-preserving services like VPNs, script blockers, Tor, and ad-blockers are becoming more and more popular. And with data breaches growing commonplace and increasingly egregious, affecting large companies like Sony, Yahoo, and the latest, Facebook, customers are becoming more aware about who should have their data and why.
Take the Cambridge Analytica business with Facebook. Customer data on Facebook was gathered by Cambridge Analytica through this process:
In 2015, Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, created an app named “thisisyourdigitallife” that promised to predict aspects of users’ personalities. About 270,000 people downloaded it and logged in through Facebook, giving Kogan access to information about their city of residence, Facebook content they had liked, and information about their friends.
Kogan passed the data to SCL and a man named Christopher Wylie from a data harvesting firm known as Eunoia Technologies, in violation of Facebook rules that prevent app developers from giving away or selling users’ personal information. Facebook learned of the violation that year and removed his app from Facebook. It also asked Kogan and his associates to certify that they had destroyed the improperly collected data. Everyone said that they did.
Of course, they actually hadn’t. Cambridge Analytica continued to use the data to help Trump more effectively target voters on Facebook than his rival, Hillary Clinton, giving it an unfair advantage.
Similarly, surveys are a favourite way of gathering customer data by brands. Agencies like the Retail Partners Unit can provide a nuanced omnichannel strategy that respects customer data while providing them with an affirming, useful return for its supply. This data has to be analysed and used to inform a brand’s overall approach to creating offers for clients, marketing, and other forms of communication. If the data is to be shared with other channels, consent needs to be acquired from the customer. At all points when customer data is gathered, the customer must be given information on how the information would be used. A lack of transparency will breed distrust: just look at the backlash when people were randomly messaged by the “Yes” campaign during the marriage equality vote. While we’re suspicious of people who used that incident of SMS marketing to decide they were opposed to marriage equality (what??), we note that people can find omnichannel features like geolocation contact intrusive and offensive.
How to be More like Keanu Reeves
Our quick omnichannel rules:
- Let people know what they’re getting themselves into. Don’t be afraid to be honest.
- Provide an experience that feels naturally seamless, and isn’t just there for the sake of being cool. The integrated touchpoints of your retail offering have to be valuable and well thought out.
- The experience has to make the customer feel like they’re getting more out of the retail experience.
- Don’t use data without consent.
- Be transparent and mindful.
- Be respectful. Data is valuable. If a customer willingly provides it to you, value their data and their trust.
- Don’t overdo it: study when and how it would be appropriate to engage with customers, and, especially, when they might want you to engage with them. If you bury customers in messages, pings, newsletters, and more, chances are they’d unsubscribe, and worse: you might lose a customer if you piss them off.
- Be fully digitised: this will help you integrate multiple touchpoints more easily.
- Stay on top of retail trends. If your business is future-facing, customers will be more willing to engage with multiple touchpoints that might otherwise feel confronting and scary.
- Don’t use the data to help elect Donald Trump.
Need more help? Still don’t understand any of this? Drop us a line.
This post was last updated on 8 July 2019.