It’s your job to make things easy
Tom Goodwin has once again applied a defibrillator to marketing brains across the land and re-set them into thinking like normal human beings. This time on making things easy:
“People aren't busy and yet almost every brief in Advertising is for someone that is busy [...] Social Media takes up 2-4 hours a day of people's time. Nobody is on social media because they're too busy. People are overwhelmed [...] We're overwhelmed by algorithmic media, by craziness, by personal finances, by emotions whipped up [...] As a marketer, it's not your job to INJECT yourself into people who are busy's lives. It's your job to try to make things easy [...] A better retailer is not one with 100,000 SKU's, it's one where you feel good about what you buy. A better TV isn't one with 4000 nits or Dolby Vision IQ, it's one you understand and has a nice feeling remote.”
Thinking fast, slow, and artificial
Good ol’ Uncle Dan and Uncle Amos gave us System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, logical) thinking. And now Shaw and Nave have added System 3 to the family (instant, artificial).
When humans can perform System 2 tasks at System 1 speed, what does that mean for the likes of customer journey, brand fame and brand ethics? Feast your ears on Messrs Ferrier and Plant on The WARC Podcast:
“They're [LLMs] looking for real organic conversations, and then they're looking for those conversations to be picked up by credible sources, journalists and so forth [...] Have a hardcore strategy around Reddit and around your review culture. So make sure you know what you're doing with the reviews and how peer-to-peer reviews are done [...] And make sure you know how to get everyone doing them and make them as positive as possible. And then understand Reddit and how it works and the tentacles around Reddit as well.”
You are the media you eat
Back at our London event a month ago (how long ago?!?!) Jodie Jackson told us that we have a mental nutrition crisis and many of us are on a diet of ultra-processed, algorithmically decided nonsense.
And it turns out DPG Media, Øutlier and In Orbit had a similar strait in mind. They ran a two-week experiment and prescribed people either exclusively social media platforms or exclusively Dutch journalistic media:
“The social media group experienced constant stimulation, fragmented attention, mental restlessness [and] a feeling of being less social. The local journalism group, by contrast, felt calmer, more focused [and] more mentally balanced.”
The article mentions Fari Yakob’s media pyramid, which shows what a balanced media diet should look like. Old, but the principles hold.
It was better before you arrived
Daniel Parris of Stat Significant previously found that our music taste takes shape in adolescence and largely stays the same after our twenties. But what about films?
“Data reveals a clear generational divide across several genres: younger audiences tend to favor horror, comedy, animation, and action, while older viewers gravitate toward dramas, war films, and romance [...] we can [also] compare movie ratings by the number of years between a film’s release and the reviewer’s birth. The results suggest that movies were best before you existed, declined around the time you arrived, and have been getting worse ever since—a sentiment consistent across generations.”
And finally…
Clicking around this 2008 iPod Nano took me right back. Best opened on your phone and with the volume up for the full nostalgia hit to the stomach. Rubber charity wristbands and Sims 2 sold separately.
Why are there so many Thai restaurants in the US? In short, and a good dollop of gastrodiplomacy from the Thai government.
7 workplace horror stories, told through the medium of Sparrowhawks. Sublime.
Bon weekend,
Fran