TEN DIGITAL TRENDS FOR 2020

STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU 4 BY MALLORIE RODAK

SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION 12 BY PATRICK O’NEILL AND KYLE DAVIS

THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM 18 BY SARAH WALKER-HALL AND KELLY PILAND

TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE 22 BY LUKE DAMOMMIO

COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT 31 BY TREY GREEN AND HELINA SEYOUM

BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE 36 BY LAKEN FACCIO

A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 42 BY AUBRI ELLIOTT

DEEPFAKES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURKY 46 BY JAYR SOTELO

UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S 49 MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION BY CONOR MACDOWELL AND ANN PETER

THE ANTI-AESTHETIC 54 BY LAUREN KAINDL BY BENNIE REED, COREY AUSTIN, AND CORY O’BRIEN TEN DIGITAL TRENDS 2020

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” – The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

As you read our Ten Digital Trends for 2020, pay attention to the language. You will undoubtedly notice words like culture, responsibility, authenticity, sincerity, and influence splashed throughout these pages. This may be jarring if you are familiar with our nine previous annual projections. You would likely have expected to be inundated with figures about adoption, growth, social, mobile, or any number of breakthroughs in new technology, platforms, or user behavior.

It is no accident that the most influential factors in digital for 2020 are as much about cultural reaction as technological advancements. As digital has become more pervasive and intrinsically influential in American life, it has rightly been scrutinized to a greater extent than ever before. The debate about digital has shifted from the realm of “what is possible?” toward “what is right?” Technological breakthroughs are still just as common, but they are shifting from novelty to reality – change happens slowly, then all at once.

The expansion of machine learning into ever more significant functions will continue, along with questions about bias and shifting patterns of work as artificial intelligence and machine learning augment job roles. Privacy, accountability, and responsibility will continue to dominate conversation in governments and boardrooms alike. Consumer control and expectations for products, services, and platforms will continue to rise, and experimentation at the edge of these experiences will continue to accelerate.

Apart from the inevitable disruption that this ongoing shift will bring to the core of their businesses, brands need to have a clear understanding of how these themes will influence opportunities across all touchpoints and audiences to appropriately plan their digital investments.

One factor will have the most immediate impact on brands’ prospects for taking advantage of digital in 2020: attention. From the collapse of the attention economy making it far more difficult to captivate audiences at scale to paying deep enough attention to the shifts major

2 communications platforms are making behind the scenes, attention will define the brand landscape in 2020. 1 To stay ahead, dive into analysis of how to engineer attention amid an overwhelmed and distracted population, find new audiences by experimenting within the second podcast boom, build strong and differentiated brand narratives with a shelf-out e-commerce strategy, or discover how brands can safely navigate the fraught waters of the 2020 election cycle. While planning investments for 2020, pay attention to the underlying platform strategies from the duopoly as they shift to less transparent campaign tools, attempt to satisfy greater scrutiny by building a more nuanced one-to-one-focused social ecosystem, and rise to the enormous challenge posed by deepfakes.

As always, the thinking in this year’s report is fueled by a wide range of digital experts – digital strategists, brand planners, media planners, creatives, and brand managers.

“We hope these trends will be insightful and instructive as you plan your brand-building strategies for 2020 and beyond. Let’s go have fun.” – Stan Richards, Brand Creative Leader

3 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU 1

Tsundoku (Japanese: ) is a Japanese slang term that originated in the Meiji era (1868-1912). It’s the idea of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The piling of unread books.

MALLORIE RODAK Brand Planning Director

Source: thedailystar.net

These days, your pile of unread books may be only a couple of titles deep. But turn your attention from your bookshelf to your laptop, phone, or TV. Consider your unread emails, bookmarked articles, social media notifications, podcast queue, Steam library, Hulu watchlist, Spotify playlists, and, if you’re over 40, your DVR. The tsundoku of today isn’t made up of paper and ink but bytes and code.

When memes joke about the stress of your never-ending Netflix queue, your overwhelming amount of notifications, or your RAM-defying number of unread Chrome tabs, it’s easy to see that we are living in the age of multimedia tsundoku.

4 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

STANDING OUT AMONG THE ZETTABYTES

When you consider that 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, the staggering reality of our modern-day multimedia tsundoku begins to set in.

The number of books published worldwide has sextupled in the past 30 years, with more than three million new titles annually. The number of original scripted TV shows and movies has gone up by a factor of six since the 1980s in the U.S. alone. Half a billion photos are posted each day on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. One million hours of video are uploaded daily to YouTube. Tens of millions of songs are available to stream, along with hundreds of thousands of podcasts and video games.

How have we responded to this exponential growth of content? On one hand, it’s our natural tendency to try and meet the demand, which is why our time spent on the Internet has grown globally to more than six and half hours a day on average, or more than 100 days of online time a year. To extend that average across all 4.4 billion Internet users, humanity will spend a collective total of more than 1.2 billion years online in 2019.

Source: hubspot.com

During those six and a half hours each day, we try and maximize our time engaging with content. Skim reading is the new normal. Podcasting is becoming podfasting (listening to podcasts at an accelerated speed), and podfasting has become the “gateway drug” to all types of sped-up media consumption.

Podfasting, or whatever fasting, gives me an opportunity to…set my anxieties aside and indulge in my wildest fantasy: to manipulate time, indefinitely, whenever the temptation strikes. So that I can read more books, watch more movies, blow through more TV shows, and listen to more podcasts – while still having time to hit the gym, hang out with friends, get enough sleep, and, you know, show up for my job every day. – Lindsey Lanquist

But on the other hand, in a content-rich, time-poor age, we are overwhelmed by the rate of consumption relative to the time we have available. The concept of timeboxing, or assigning scheduled time to a certain task, has leapt from the handbooks of Agile planning to self-help articles on time management. Some people are timeboxing the amount of their day that they consume content to limit their exposure. Brands are even timeboxing content by providing estimates of how long it will take to read their story or watch their video.

5 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

It’s no surprise that in 2020, the sum of human attention is simply not sufficient to consume the content that’s being created. Mark Shaefer coined this epoch content shock, where “exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect with our limited human capacity to consume it.”

As an advertiser, it all sounds fairly depressing. The battle for attention continues to grow harder with more content, more channels of exposure, more publishers, and shorter attention spans. Content creators are “the speed daters of storytelling,” continually challenged to break through with “snackable content” in shorter amounts of time.

When short becomes not short enough, and content becomes too much to take it all in, how can brands stand out in 2020? In this age of multimedia tsundoku, how can we avoid gathering dust on the proverbial bookshelf of the Internet?

“ARCHITECTS OF FAMILIAR SURPRISES”

Unfortunately, there is no formula for success for breaking out on the Internet. But according to Derek Thompson, author of Hit Makers, there are some fundamental elements involved in making a hit. It starts with a central thesis: We, as consumers, are simultaneously neophobic (dislike anything too unfamiliar) and neophilic (love trying new things).

Throughout time, we’ve been programmed to fear the unfamiliar as an evolutionary response to stay alive. In all organisms, exposure to a novel stimulus initially elicits fear and avoidance. The more that we’re exposed to a novel stimulus, the less we fear and avoid it. This is known as the mere exposure effect.

Does the mere exposure effect mean the answer is spending more money on more advertising to expose more people to our message more often? That’s not a sustainable solution, and in some studies, higher levels of exposure have proven damaging to company reputation. It means we, as consumers, like the familiar because it’s easier and faster to process.

Have you ever heard someone say “this is hurting my brain?” There’s a psychological principle behind that feeling called perceptual fluency, or the ease with which a stimulus can be processed. We love the feeling of quick and easy thinking, content that we can instantly understand. And there’s even a name for that moment when the unfamiliar becomes familiar, when everything clicks in our heads: the aesthetic aha. But the pleasure of the thought doesn’t always equal the quality of an idea. Thompson argues that this familiar idea should also be advanced in nature, meaning it pushes the boundaries of what we find acceptable or “normal.”

It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

Being familiar isn’t enough to stand out on the Internet. But neither is being brand-new. In today’s culture of worshipping the new, we might think that to stand out on the Internet, we have to be totally unique or post something that’s completely different than what others have posted before us.

But, in fact, the real power comes from “well-disguised familiarity.” The new ideas that inevitably remind us of old ideas. We, as advertisers, have to be “architects of familiar surprises.”

6 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

THE INTERNET’S ULTIMATE “FAMILIAR SURPRISE”

There’s no more prolific example of a familiar surprise on the Internet than memes: remixes, parodies, mashups, variants, and/or imitations in popular culture. Today, memes are more popular on the Internet than Jesus in terms of Google searches. Memes are the cultural language of our generation, a “system of shorthand” for expressing broadly familiar yet incredibly specific scenarios.

The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, and it comes from the Greek “mimema,” meaning “imitated.” Dawkins shortened this to rhyme with “gene” because he felt that ideas in popular culture reproduced in a process analogous to the way genes spread. Today’s Internet meme researchers echo Dawkin’s premise. In an analysis of over 100 million Internet memes, researchers described the “offspring” of a meme. Just as genes pass on a playbook of traits to their offspring, memes pass on elements of familiarity to their variants.

Indeed, a meme is the Internet’s architecture of a familiar surprise. The format, the visuals, the scenario feel recognizable or relatable, and the combination of elements comes together in a surprising and often humorous way.

The most popular memes that are shared most often are the ones that employ Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle of being the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. The funniest yet most relatable. Memes that push the boundary of the zone of normalcy at the edge of experimentation.

7 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

THE MAYA PRINCIPLE

Long ago, before the Internet and proliferation of content, there was an industrial designer named Raymond Loewy who understood the importance of a familiar surprise. It was this knowledge that propelled him to create some of the most iconic designs: the classic Coca-Cola bottle, the Shell Oil logo, and the Greyhound logo.

Loewy (1893-1986) was a designer famous for pushing the boundaries of expectation. His designs all followed one simple rule that he called the “MAYA” principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. It meant that Loewy gave users the most advanced possible design but not beyond what they were able to accept and embrace. Source: interaction-design.org Modern theorists agree that edgy aesthetics have value on the Internet. Somewhere between the zone of normalcy and the zone of experimentation there’s a sweet spot: what’s Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Source: subpixel.space

“When Weiden Kennedy says they want to capture “lightning in a bottle” this is what they mean: to take something just outside of mainstream culture, aestheticize it, and turn it into marketing for a consumer product.” – Toby Shorin

THE MAYA PRINCIPLE TO HELP STAND OUT IN TODAY’S MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

Are memes the future of digital advertising in 2020? Not quite, but MAYA ideas are. In 2020, more brands will realize that it’s a losing game to try and stand out on the Internet by constantly trying to be new or novel. Just as we think of what’s unique about our creative ideas, we also need to evaluate what’s familiar about them, because it’s these bold yet instantly comprehensible ideas that are the ones that stand out on the Internet.

Lately, some standout branded ideas have broken through the multimedia tsundoku. Whether MAYA is a fundamental characteristic of the brand or a strategy employed on a campaign level, these brands won the Internet with surprising takes on the familiar.

It’s a Tide Ad Tide’s Super Bowl ads took the familiarity of notable moments from commercials and the surprising revelation that the ad was for Tide. #TideAd became the second biggest trending topic on social media behind #SuperBowl, with #TideAd used over 45,000 times. The campaign’s creators acknowledge the importance of the familiar nature of the spots, and the surprising twist at the end.

It plays a little bit with your mind, in a good way. You are watching, and you think, “Oh, I know this ad,” and these ads were really big. Mr. Clean was huge last year. Old Spice was huge years ago. So you connect with that immediately and maybe feel the emotions connected to those ads. And then you have the reveal that, no, you’re actually in a Tide ad. – Javier Campopiano, chief creative officer of Saatchi & Saatchi New York

8 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

Purple Mattress

Purple Mattress has consistently disrupted the familiar through a strategy that’s been hailed as “differentiated” and “breakout.” All of their videos (over 736 million video views) capitalize on familiar narratives, themes, constructs, and characters like Goldilocks, superheroes, Sasquatch, Star Wars, and mummies. The videos play into the types of content that users might expect to get on YouTube or the Internet, with a quirky Purple twist.

Cards Against Humanity Prongles

One day, a familiar-sounding brand appeared on the toy aisle of Target: Prongles, with the tagline “once you pop…that’s great.” The chips instantly sold out, but the media was baffled about where this product came from. Turns out, it was a Black Friday campaign for the card game Cards Against Humanity, who used a familiar product in a totally surprising way.

9 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

Burger King Whopper Detour

Burger King took a familiar habit – stopping by McDonald’s, the world’s second-largest restaurant chain – and turned it into something incredibly surprising (and rewarding).

Geico

Geico is a classic example of a brand that’s employed familiar surprises in their advertising for over 25 years. Their MAYA strategy? “Be funny but not too funny.” Geico walks the line at the edge of experimentation with their parody ads that feature recognizable characters and scenarios. Here’s one of their most recent ads that exemplifies their approach.

ALIGNING ON YOUR MAYA STRATEGY IN 2020

In 2020, brands are finally realizing they can break out of the multimedia tsundoku by capitalizing on familiar surprises. They’ll take recognizable constructs, themes, characters, and ideas, and make them their own. They’ll push the boundaries of what’s acceptable to their target audience to help stand out on the Internet.

How can you create a strategy for standing out in 2020? By better understanding what’s familiar or surprising to your audience.

Phase One: Familiarity Exploration

To get people to pay attention, we have to pay attention to them first. In this phase, use research tools to better understand what’s familiar to your target audience. Databases like Google Audience Explorer, MRI/Simmons, and/or consumer data lakes allow for advertisers to get a broad swath of media, behaviors, brands, and attitudes about their target audience. Narrow down these data points to ones that are adjacent to the consumer decision journey or most relevant to your product/service. Share this “day in the life” of your target audience with your creative teams to help them better understand what’s truly familiar to their audience, so they can prepare to disrupt the familiar.

10 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU

Phase Two: Idea Development

Now that we’ve identified the familiar, how do we create a surprise? In this phase, consider creative brainstorm formats that shake up traditional thinking, like starbursting, where a familiar idea is presented and questions are generated iteratively off of this familiar idea, or mind-mapping, where associations are created from an original idea. Brainstorm contradictory concepts to the familiar ones you explored in Phase One. Challenge the assumptions of each familiar idea. Assign creative teams two random familiar ideas and force a connection between the ideas to see if you can create the unexpected through the familiar.

Phase Three: MAYA Testing

During the creative process, talk about the furthest you could push an idea before it became unacceptable to your target audience. Consider research that helps you understand where the point of diminishing appeal might be for a design or message, or how familiar, surprising, and perceptually fluent your ideas are through the lens of your target audience. Neuroscientists at the University of Southern California have developed a formal Bayesian definition of surprise measuring the posterior and prior beliefs of observers that could be used as a method to better understand how familiar and/or surprising your ideas may be to your audience.

The future of hits on the Internet will be democratic chaos, with millions competing for attention. Even with massive budgets, brands can still fade into the background, like a forgotten book on the Internet’s collective bookshelf. What do brands need to consider to stand out in 2020? What’s Most Advanced Yet Acceptable about your brand’s messages.

Are familiar surprises the ultimate key to breakthrough content in 2020? It’s a variable but certainly not the answer. Much also depends on emotional resonance, relevance, distribution, and marketing. But as brands think about crafting breakthrough products and messages in 2020, it’s important to remember: It’s not just about standing out among the multimedia tsundoku, it’s also about fitting in, surprisingly.

Author’s Note: Special thanks to Derek Thompson, as this article relies heavily on his book, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.

Mallorie Rodak

You’ve heard of those folks around the office who wear lots of different hats? In Mallorie’s case, those hats have included media buying, mobile marketing strategy, digital strategy, account management–and, these days, pairing sociology with business savvy to find strategic insights as a senior brand planner.

That’s a lot of hats. But there are more: Mallorie’s also worn the “Published Author” hat for her contributions

to the book Shaping International Public Opinion, the “Highly Regarded Ad Pro” hat for being named one MALLORIE RODAK of AAF Dallas’s 32 Under 32, and even the “Galactic Secret Agent” and “Battle Nun” hats for her voiceover Brand Planning Director work in anime and video games.

Not done yet. Mallorie also has the “Magna Cum Laude” hat (Drury University); the “Master’s Degree in Advertising” hat (Southern Methodist University); and the “Current Planning Director” hat for brands like Firehouse Subs, Keurig Dr Pepper, and On The Border.

We so want to find her a hat client.

11 SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION 1

In the first episode of podcast tour de force Serial, journalist and public radio personality Sarah Koenig describes the homicide case that would be resurrected as the topic of her weekly show and would soon live on in watercooler- and cocktail-talk infamy as one of the most intriguing podcasts ever to have been produced. In Serial’s first episode, Koenig recalls reviewing the homicide case for the first time, describing it as “a Shakespearean mashup: young lovers from different worlds thwarting their families, secret assignations, jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched…” Just the kind of elaborate drama that’s captivated human interest

for centuries and had previously been reserved for the small and silver screens. But the astronomic success of PATRICK O’NEILL: Serial was unignorable, and it became one of the first instances of Hollywood taking a legitimate interest in Digital Strategy the emerging storytelling clout of the podcasting medium.

Since then, podcasts have become an increasingly viable breeding ground for not only new motion picture franchises, but new storytelling opportunities, new content possibilities, and new ways for brands to inject some authenticity into how they connect with audiences. They’re low-risk, low-cost, and ripe for testing new ideas – they’re also seeing more adoption than ever before.

KYLE DAVIS: THE SECOND PODCAST BOOM Digital Strategy

Podcasting isn’t really a very new phenomenon at all, but because of its simple production model and sprawling appeal, the number of podcasts has grown exponentially, with some sources reporting a mind-boggling 1.5 million unique podcasts currently available for listening. Consider if each of those shows released a half-hour episode every week for a year: That would be 39 million hours or just over 4,450 years of content. The format is experiencing a massive renaissance, to the point where 2018 saw the first instance of Google queries related to “best podcasts” exceed those related to “best TV shows.” The sheer variety of podcasts is attracting listeners who may not have considered the medium just a few years ago.

Google Trends: Search queries containing “best podcasts” or “best TV shows” since September 2014

12 SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION

WHAT’S CAUSING THIS SECOND BOOM?

With 1.5 million shows to choose from, any new listeners have an unbelievably vast pool of content to explore: Podcasts about cereal to an in-depth Star Wars analysis where every episode scrutinizes a single minute of each film in the franchise. Both of these are completely real. For any micro-niche or interest you could think of, there’s probably a podcast about it, or at least an episode. The uniqueness of many of these podcasts is turning casual listeners into devoted fans, with many podcasts/hosts becoming iconic cultural phenomena in their own right.

To that end, TV has already staked a claim to podcasts like Homecoming (Amazon), 2 Dope Queens (HBO), Welcome to Night Vale (FX), Lore (Amazon), and Dirty John (Bravo). And, of course, there’s Maron (IFC), which, while it may not be a true direct podcast-to-TV transition, still owes a lot of its success to the titular comedian’s massively popular podcast, WTF With Marc Maron (the guy interviewed Obama, for crying out loud). Adaptations like these are turning podcasts into something that looks like an incubator rather than just digital radio.

Google Trends: Search queries related to “podcast,” “NBC,” and “NPR” in the past 12 months

THINK OF IT AS A LAB, NOT A CHANNEL

The beauty of podcasting comes from a blend of intimacy with the listener and permission to talk about subjects that would be outright taboos for traditional advertising.

For a medium that’s ostensibly so one-dimensional, podcasting offers a huge diversity of ways for brands to create, advertise, or test based on their own internal objectives. On one hand, they can become flagship brand assets that create a space for users to engage with topics they’re interested in. On the other hand, they can be a way to test ideas or leverage affiliations with niche creators to discover new audience insights and potential ways to connect with an audience on a deeper, more authentic level.

AFFINITY-BASED ADVERTISING

The podcast space has morphed into something that caters to almost every niche interest and unique identity imaginable. Of course, “niche” sort of implies a smaller audience, but what many of these audiences lack in size they make up for in dedication and authenticity. To that end, brands might not reach the widest audience when partnering with a podcast, but it’s fantastic for connecting with individual listeners in a way that’s unique, relevant, and contextual.

Just looking at sheer demographics, a partnership like BMW sponsoring The Daily (The New York Times’ daily briefing by journalist Michael Barbaro) is a total match: Household income for the average owner of a new BMW is just over $124,000; household income for the average New York Times reader is about $118,000. Still, there’s a deeper implied alignment with the time-deprived well-informed and some on-the-go, sports-car-driving professional who doesn’t have time for long-winded conversations or lazy mornings over coffee and a newspaper. Their life moves fast, and so should their news.

13 SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION

Beyond demographics, brand/podcast partnerships can become a lot more nuanced and even in some instances hilariously playful. My Favorite Murder is an immensely successful (currently #8 on iTunes) podcast that scrutinizes the lore and madness behind some of the most and least well-known serial killers in history. It also features some of the most interesting (and completely appropriate) brand partnerships we’ve seen among any shows in the space: surf-and-turf delivery company ButcherBox, cruelty-free hair care company Living Proof, and modern jewelry designer Machete, just to name a few of the show’s most fitting advertisers based on its morbid subject matter. It proves that something as simple as a podcast host reading an ad can punch quite a bit harder when paired with relevant content. On the other hand, shows like The Weekly Planet are finding ingenious methods for integrating branded content into their programming, like turning ad reads into opportunities for comedic improvisation.

For closed captioning, visit YouTube.

THE PODCAST PROMOTIONAL TROJAN HORSE

An ad read from a podcaster’s perspective functions as an invitation from a brand to the host saying, “Here are all the bullet points of what to hit on; structure it to your show.” Oftentimes it works because of a clear brand-show connection between the service offered and the content provided. However, like most brand integrations, the host reading an ad can be naturally abrasive to the ad-sensitive listener. So how can you lean into the medium in a way that takes advantage of one of its most prominent tools?

If Guy Raz (TED Radio Hour), Malcolm Gladwell (Revisionist History), and Sarah Koenig (Serial) were all given the same open-ended ad copy to read for, say, the Casper Mattress, would they all sound the same?

Not a new thought but necessary background: Podcast hosts have what marketers want, a captive audience that is there for every word. Which lends itself well to advertising.

Sixty percent of listeners in an Adobe Analytics survey stated that they look up products or services they hear about through a podcast ad. Why is that? It is within the very nature of podcasts, and it’s what makes them so special. A deep dive into a niche subject matter that is delivered with humble authority disarms the listener and makes them more keen on trusting their recommendations. And it’s not just a host’s charisma that sustains a listenership; in many cases, listeners are drawn to a host/brand’s subject matter expertise.

Take AT&T and Revisionist History, for example. In the latter half of the most recent season, Mo Katibeh, Chief Marketing Officer of AT&T, and Malcolm Gladwell, the host, engaged in a conversation in lieu of a typical ad read. The conversation spans multiple episodes and features the two exploring the capabilities of a 5G network from a business perspective as well as the technology’s ramifications for the future. The beauty of this format is twofold: Firstly, humanizing and simplifying unfamiliar, complex topics is just the thing Gladwell’s brand of journalism was built on; secondly, it blends into the format of the podcast, removing the abrasiveness of a typical spot that’s been jammed into a show. In the end, AT&T spreads awareness and builds brand expertise by cloaking its ads in Gladwell’s characteristic storytelling format. And it’s not just branded content in two- to three-minute increments: Brands with the most intense fanbases are grasping user attention for hours.

14 SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION

Visit site to review transcript.

WIELD AUTHORITY FOR MORE INTRIGUING CONTENT

The smartest brands are finding ways to parlay their innate industry expertise into fascinating looks into interesting worlds. 23andMe is a longtime podcast devotee in many ways – they find ingenious partnerships with true-crime shows or even exceedingly strange shows like The Last Podcast on the Left’s weird look into the history of eugenics. As of 2018, 23andMe began using the medium as a way to reinforce their subject matter expertise through the original podcast Spit. The podcast features celebrity conversations on the topic of DNA through the lenses of ethnicity, culture, and family.

For closed captioning, visit YouTube.

In a similar vein, brands can use the medium to explore a wide variety of tangential topics that they might still have authority to discuss. The weirdly popular Inside Trader Joe’s podcast touches on everything from produce, to sustainability, to package design, to just why the heck everyone there is so nice.

The beauty of podcasting comes from a blend of intimacy with the listener and permission to talk about subjects that would be outright taboo for traditional advertising. Aside from the podcast obsession with serial killers and true crime (we don’t even have to source it; you know it’s true), some brands have taken some equally astonishing risks in the content they’ve chosen to surface through podcasts. One of the most shocking-yet-genuine examples just might come from John Deere in its podcast series titled Out of the Darkness, a special feature from the brand’s long-running publication, The Furrow, which is a sort of story-centered trade publication aimed at the agricultural industry. Out of the Darkness homed in on the topic of rural depression, specifically how it has led to disproportionately high suicide rates among farmers. While the topic is more grim than what most brands would tolerate, John Deere leaned on its unique subject matter expertise and deep audience commitment to justify such a harrowing investigation into a legitimate industry epidemic. At the same time, it used existing content as a launchpad for an idea that could be reborn in an audio format.

15 SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION

LONG-FORM STORYTELLING FOR PASSIONATE AUDIENCES

In an effort to turn passionate fandom into even more quality time-spent-with-brand, Wizards of the Coast (proprietor of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and purveyor of many things nerdy) is launching its new campaign module with an original podcast arc. The module, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, will be played over the course of seven episodes as Podcast into Avernus to tease gameplay and let users delight in other players’ enjoyment of a new campaign.

This is the type of long-form, intensely niche branded storytelling that thrives in podcast form. The convenience of an audio format allows listeners to engage as passively or actively as they’d like over the course of the three-hour campaign. With such a flexible medium, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more brands with equally passionate fans experimenting with extremely long-form content. Illustration: Chris Rallis/Wizards of the Coast

RADIOLAB HAD IT RIGHT…

…definitely as far as the name’s concerned: Podcasts offer an insanely broad range of activation possibilities, but with each one advertisers should always keep in mind that they’re intruding on a very intimate media experience between the listener and the programming. To best integrate with audiences or programming, remember:

Affinity The strength of podcasts comes from their specificity and resonance within a niche audience. Develop a complete understanding of what types of content and culture your target surrounds themselves with, and devise ways that you can work your way into their podcasting routine through popular shows within an interest. Consider My Favorite Murder’s killer partnerships with fitting advertisers like ButcherBox and Living Proof.

Authenticity Listeners constantly praise the intimacy fostered by podcasts, and brands should not treat that expectation lightly. Know that your message will be an intrusion on a user’s connection with a podcast, and use that knowledge to explore ways to integrate your messaging more naturally into the content. Malcolm Gladwell is a master of this on Revisionist History.

Adaptation Think of how you can either repurpose or enhance existing content through podcasting. HBO does an amazing job of creating podcasts for TV fandom to overflow into (e.g., Game of Thrones and Chernobyl). John Deere even goes so far as adapting stories from its print publication for podcast episodes.

Authority Focus on brand strengths when considering topics that the brand can justifiably remark on through podcasting. Once that’s been decided, branch out to related topics to give your podcast longevity. Look at how 23andMe’s Spit teases topics like ethnicity, culture, and family out of the subject of DNA; Inside Trader Joe’s talks about everything from package design to botany.

Anticipation Think of ways you can service an existing content need in your audience or how you can set up a future possibility for podcasting. Wizards of the Coast senses opportunity in the playtest podcasting format with its new Dungeons and Dragons module. Not to mention, it’s a great chance for brands to come in and align with a hosting talent who might be one of podcasting’s next major influencers.

16 SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION

Patrick O’Neill

A compulsive builder and permanently curious, Patrick is absolutely determined to figure out how things work.

Not long after he graduated from the University of North Texas, digital killed Patrick’s writing career–for the better, of course.

Patrick earned his digital stripes in the fast-paced, super-cramped world of small agencies, where hours PATRICK O’NEILL: are many and multiple hats are a requirement. His preliminary work in search engine optimization led to a Digital Strategy fascination with web design, which led to a knowledge of CRM integrations, which led to an understanding of integrated campaigns–if it’s digital, Patrick is going to learn how the pieces work.

At The Richards Group, he applies the same hands-on philosophy to guide brands like the Mohawk Industries, Scottish Rite for Children, Charles Schwab, and The Salvation Army.

Kyle Davis

Kyle likes variety. A lot of variety. He bakes, he hikes, he listens to hundreds of hours of podcasts a month. Hundreds. In fact, it’s the podcasts that drew Kyle into the world of digital strategy. Originally a brand planner, he saw how quickly stories could spread online – and thus embraced the power of sharing culture through digital means.

Kyle’s wandering curiosity made him the perfect digital strategist, because he knows firsthand how trends KYLE DAVIS: and rabbit holes define the online world. Digital Strategy

In keeping with his love of variety, Kyle works on as many brands as possible at The Richards Group. His clients include The Home Depot, 7UP, Circle K, Nature Nate’s, Cache Creek Casino Resort, and a smattering of new business efforts.

17 THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM 1

The Ethical Leadership of America: An examination of why corporations assumed the responsibility of acting as the country’s moral compass.

Remember when brands didn’t take stands? When their open-armed “purpose” seemed to be to appeal to as many people as possible while alienating as few as possible? Over the past decade, our industry has witnessed a dramatic uptick in a different kind of purpose: purpose-driven advertising, or the act of companies advertising their beliefs on social issues. Every day, we all come to work with an aim to help our brands follow culture as closely, as tightly, as seamlessly as possible – but should we instead collectively SARAH WALKER-HALL: Brand Planning Director acknowledge that today our brands have the opportunity not to follow but to lead culture? After all, “Femvertising,” or advertising that promotes female empowerment, preceded its cultural twin, #MeToo, by three and a half years. Today, the brands we steward have the power to move not just products but people.

With great power, however, comes great responsibility – and, in this case, a concomitant and widespread skepticism about the motives of brands taking a newfound stand. “Pink washing” (breast cancer) begat “rainbow washing” (gay pride) and overall “woke washing,” which points a collective finger at advertisers for (over) using issues for commercial gain. Whether the advertising itself is successful – does purpose-driven advertising lead to more substantial revenue gains than product-driven advertising? – is not the topic we’ll KELLY PILAND: Brand Planning Director discuss here; that must be answered ad hoc on a case-by-case basis. Instead, the question of interest to us is: “How did we get here?” How did we go from watching ads about new product formulations and extra absorption to the rejection of toxic masculinity and the value of a girl’s education?

Why have so many corporations gone all-in on social issues, causes, and that squishiest of words: purpose? We believe it has to do with who holds the responsibility of moral leadership. Historically in America this responsibility has rested squarely and safely on the broad shoulders of three culturally expansive institutions – our government, the church, and academia. But today, trust in our president, our preachers, and our professors is lower than it’s ever been. And while this fall from grace might be something that’s occurred incrementally and that we now know intuitively, the data is staggering.

For example, Pew Research Center has asked the same question of consumers over the past 61 years and finds that “only 17 percent of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (3 percent) or ‘most of the time’ (14 percent).” Our belief that our government will do the right thing is historically low. In fact, with the exception of moments of national crisis – such as the tragedy of 9/11 – trust in government has trended steadily downward since the 1960s.

Source: people-press.org

18 THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM

Another institution that has historically acted as a moral compass for those living in America is the church. Recognizing that we now live in a culture where it is more socially acceptable to do so, the percentage of people who claim no religion has risen consistently for nearly three decades, and for the first time in history there are as many people in the United States who claim no religion (23 percent) as those who claim to be Catholic (23 percent) or Evangelical (23 percent). From our viewpoint, what is most intriguing is that people are not rejecting the spiritual component of faith – they are rejecting the cultural institution of religion. In 2017, 27 percent of Americans identified as “spiritual but not religious,” a 42 percent increase from 2012.

Source: cnn.com

Academia is the third institution that has historically provided ethical and thought leadership. In 2018, for the first time the number of Americans with a four-year degree topped 30 percent; it is inarguable that higher education is more need-to-have than ever before. Ironically, the ubiquity that drives expectation might also be driving resentment. As with government, the percentage of Americans who think our higher education system is headed in the right direction is the lowest it’s ever been. Much has been made of the partisan divide on perceptions of academia – with those on the right of the ideological spectrum, ironically, most convinced of academia’s wrongs – but there is bipartisan conviction that the system is troubled. More than half of both Republicans and Democrats agree that higher education doesn’t provide students the skills they need to succeed. Pair that perception with sharp increases in tuition, and the result is that a wide swath of the American public no longer trusts academia’s once-unassailable leadership position.

Source: pewsocialtrends.org 19 THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM

Many people cite widely publicized scandals – with the Catholic Church, this summer’s widely mocked “Aunt Becky” higher education fracas, and that pesky presidential impeachment inquiry, among countless others – as the causation for this cross-institutional trust erosion. We would posit, however, that the well-lit publicity of these scandals is actually a result of confirmation bias; trust has been slipping for decades, and these scandals confirmed and validated this newfound lack of respect. The widespread furor around these scandals weren’t leading indicators – they were lagging indicators. Indicative, not causal, of a cultural lack of trust in these institutions.

So: If not on the shoulders of these three institutional giants, where then does the responsibility for modeling the moral compass of America lie?

As physics tells us, “Nature abhors a vacuum” – and evidently so does both culture and the marketplace itself. In the absence of leadership, companies have stepped in to fill the void. The annual Business Roundtable with 200 CEOs of some of the country’s largest, most staid corporations (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, GM, Boeing) took place during the writing of this piece. In a proudly capitalist country, the emergent headline was shocking. In pursuit of “redefining the purpose” – there’s that word again – of an organization, the Roundtable declared that shareholder value is no longer the main objective. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said, “fundamental economic changes and the failure of the U.S. government to provide lasting solutions has forced society to look to companies for guidance on social and economic issues, such as environmental safety and gender and racial equality.”

In 2015, Salesforce was among the most vocal companies protesting a proposed Indiana law that would permit discrimination against gay people; their threat to halt corporate expansion in the state actually led to the softening of the 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was an epochal moment, and since then many brands have stepped in – and up. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, puts it simply: “We’re in a world where we need leaders to improve the state of the world, not just the state of the bottom line.”

From shareholder primacy to stakeholder advocacy? This potential shift is much more than semantic: It’s seismic.

As you might expect in a market economy, this evolution comes at the behest of consumers: According to the 2018 Cone/Porter Novelli Purpose Study, “More than three-quarters (78 percent) of Americans today believe it is no longer acceptable for companies to just make money, they expect companies to positively impact society as well.” Interestingly, this expectation of brands is borne of a belief in the power of brands as cultural agents of change. Edelman’s Brand Trust Study found that more than half (53 percent) of consumers believe brands can do more to solve social problems than governments, which leads us to conclude that there is an interconnected, perhaps symbiotic, dynamic at play: The less I trust the government and other cultural institutions to provide leadership, the more I, out of necessity, turn to other mechanisms to fill that gap. Brands, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

In a day and age when culture is more painfully cracked and riven than ever before – when trust in the traditional monoliths and pillars of society is plumbing all-time depths – we still possess an innately human need for leadership. Where will it come from today? Who could – and, more importantly perhaps, should – fill the vacuum nature so vehemently abhors?

So what happens now? Can we predict how successful (or unsuccessful) brands will be at filling this void over the next few years? How will consumers respond? Will they be satisfied with companies filling this void in moral leadership? Will other moral leaders emerge? We can certainly try.

Conservatively speaking, it’s likely that this leaning in of corporate America will continue. Consumers will come to expect – and reward – vocal stances of moral leadership; those who abstain may be met with the worst fate consumers can disinterestedly lash upon brands: irrelevance. These expectations and rewards – both a carrot and a stick – will encourage more brands to take part in the ethical dialogue.

Just as Femvertising presaged #MeToo, it’s possible that this increased moral awareness will lead to more actual engagement and actual activism on the part of consumers, contributing to higher voter turnouts among younger groups who have typically eschewed it, as well as an uptick in political candidates from the private sector. Howard Schultz, for example, told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley in January 2019, “I am seriously thinking of running for president. I will run as a centrist independent, outside of the two-party system. We’re living at a most- fragile time: Not only the fact that this president is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics.” Underscoring the idea that our government is failing and corporate America feels the need to step in. Schultz has since made clear that he will not make a run for the 2020 presidency.

Probabilistically, there will be a scandal or two that will force a cultural reckoning of the march toward brand-led ethics; can commercial interests altruistically lead morality, or is that cultural double-helix fundamentally flawed? Consumers have already begun sleuthing, in search of companies that don’t walk their ethical talk. Today, companies that have jumped on the gay pride bandwagon are regularly vetted to inspect whether their political donations match their rainbow-washed packaging. Consumers will become more skeptical of

20 THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM

the motives underpinning stances and will grow more adept at unearthing inconsistencies. When these are aired, consumer trust in the motivations behind ethical leadership will be challenged.

Catastrophically, the ideological canyons that zag left to right throughout the country may prove too deep and too wide for brands to bridge. Advocacy of one position will engender stiff-armed, clenched-fist resistance from the other side; “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” might prove bigger than physics, and brands could get caught in the cultural whipsaw. We already see evidence that support of certain divisive issues can lead to right-left bifurcation within a category; whether you wear Nike or Under Armour, eat at Chick-fil-A or Starbucks, or shop at Target or Walmart could be more a statement of values than your aesthetics or sandwich preference. In this scenario, good intentions on the part of brands – Stand up! Speak truth to power! – could exacerbate the divisions that are, by many counts, worse than they’ve ever been.

Regardless of how it plays out, we are grateful for the risks America’s corporate leadership is willing to take for the good of society and for the responsibility of moral leadership they’ve assumed.

Sarah Walker-Hall

Norwegian language instructor. Geographic wanderer. Bassist in an all-girl punk band, baseball umpire, bartender. If curiosity is a brand planner’s greatest asset, Sarah was born for this job.

Sarah’s career began with a stint at TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles on the famous “Yo quiero Taco Bell” campaign. There, she fell in love with the intricacies of advertising, consumer insights, and messaging

strategy. She returned home to Dallas in 2003 and joined The Richards Group, heading up planning efforts SARAH WALKER-HALL: for Amstel Light, Kiwi shoe polish, Thomasville, and Atlantis. A stint as strategic planning director at Brand Planning Director TBWA\Chiat\Day San Francisco saw Sarah oversee planning efforts for Jeep, Levi’s, and NVIDIA; then came Publicis West and work on T-Mobile and Aflac. Sarah returned to The Richards Group in 2018 and continues to push boundaries–and grow business–as a senior strategic leader.

A Dartmouth College honors grad in history with a concentration in women’s studies, Sarah has served as an adjunct professor at both Southern Methodist University and Miami Ad School in San Francisco. She is a two-time winner of the 4A’s Jay Chiat Award for Excellence in Planning.

Kelly Piland

On the surface, she sounds like she could be the heroine of a 1940s movie that we’d call Kelly Piland, All-American. Youngest of three girls in a happy suburban family. Captain of the cheerleading squad at ivy-walled Southern Methodist University (putting on a brave face and, in a comedic turn, cheering for the worst football team in the land).

Married to her high-school sweetheart and mom to two girls. Considers her parents to be her best friends. KELLY PILAND: Brand Planning Director Nice.

Look a little deeper, though, and you find that Kelly, though still unswervingly nice, has definite 21st-century facets to her story. After earning her advertising degree in the creative track at SMU, she followed her interest in the advertising business not into a copywriting or art direction career but into a study of human nature and consumer behavior, earning her master’s in account planning and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Since becoming a Grouper in 2007, the Plano, Texas, native has delved into the psyche of the marketplace and crafted strategies for clients that include AAA, AMC’s Mad Men, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, CitySquare Dallas, Famous Footwear, H-E-B, The Home Depot, MetroPCS, Tastykake, Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, and Wonder bread.

As her client list suggests, she’s passionate about nonprofit causes and (making her an ideal member of the Home Depot team) about home design and remodeling. She finds particular fascination in learning the history of old homes–the kind of homes, in fact, that might make a good setting for a movie called Kelly Piland, All-American. 21 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE 1

Practical guidance for brands navigating the inescapable political context of the 2020 media landscape.

It’s been almost four years since the 2016 election, and we are gearing up for another 365 days of polls, pundits, and politics. We are all going to witness one of the most polarizing elections in recent memory – and the big question for brands looms – should we get involved? Or maybe a better question – what do we do if we get pulled into getting involved?

LUKE DAMOMMIO: PART I: WHY BOTHER? Brand Management

Contextual Targeting: Targeting content that deals with specific topics, as determined by a contextual scanning technology.

Whether or not a brand wants to get involved, their advertising will very likely be adjacent to or a simple click away from a political ad or commentary. To put a few numbers to the immense social media conversation that currently is happening and will only grow louder as we near the 2020 election, I like to look at the Axios-NewsWhip 2020 attention tracker.

At the time I am writing this – 14 months prior to the 2020 election – last week alone, candidates still seeking their party’s nomination excluding the President generated more than 15 million social engagements (likes, comments, shares, retweets), in what was from a political news perspective just an average week. Assuming a conservative 3 percent social engagement rate, it would have required just over 500 million social impressions to generate this quantity of social reaction in just one week. Political conversation, reaction, and coverage are as inescapable online as they are offline.

So inescapable, in fact, that Twitter is actually banning all political advertising starting in November 2019 – the opposite stance that Facebook has landed on in recent weeks. These changes to Twitter policy will also impact “issue ads.” In what seems to be an impossible goal to police the validity of political advertising, which Facebook seems to believe is not their problem, Twitter is removing themselves from any contention.

If you combine projected political ad spending ($10 billion for 2020, roughly equivalent to the measured media spend of the 11 highest- spending brands combined) and the aforementioned social conversation, it’s easy to see that our screens are already being inundated with political conversation, with no signs of slowing. So, to say that Americans’ screens are going to be flooded with this commentary in 2020 is likely an understatement.

But why does that matter for advertisers?

It matters because being contextually relevant with content online is important (rightfully so) to brands.

Which targeting strategy is “best” can be debated for different brands and their objectives – but with advancements and restrictions in how data can be used to target consumers, contextual targeting offers a way for brands to operate within privacy-friendly practices and to reach consumers at a time and place when they will be more receptive to the message. Brands still very much care about reaching their audience, but the days of blindly following your audience around the Internet wherever they go are coming to an end (if they haven’t already), as the sensitivity around the use of consumer data and the desire to only have ads placed on sites that will not be harmful to your brand are on the rise.

And in 2020, we already know what a massive amount of the context will be centered around, so creating content that is contextually relevant can be predicted, and brands can prepare to actually insert themselves into the conversation in a very natural way if done properly. Not to mention, consumers want brands to take a stand.

Consumers Want Brands to Participate

Not only do brands have the ability to predict contextually relevant content, but consumers want you to create this kind of contextually relevant content.

22 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

According to the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand report, what in 2017 was “The Rise of the Belief-Driven Buyer” in 2018 turned into the “Now Belief-Driven Buyers” with a 13 percent increase year over year in people choosing to switch, avoid, or boycott a brand based on its stance on societal issues.

Source: medium.com

The study also shows 67 percent of consumers buying a brand for the first time because of a stance on a controversial issue, and 65 percent of consumers not buying a brand because it stayed silent on an issue it had an obligation to address (remember, silence is an answer).

And an Accenture Strategy study further supports this notion, showing that 53 percent of consumers are buying goods and services from companies that reflect their personal values and beliefs, with 62 percent of consumers wanting companies to take a stand on social, cultural, environmental, and political issues close to their hearts.

But here’s the rub. Yes, consumers want to support brands who choose and/or switch to brands who align with their beliefs. But the reality is, when choosing between a consumer boycotting (stopping buying or using products or services because of a political action or stance) vs. buycotting (spending money to support a company because of a political stance), consumers are nearly twice as likely to perform the former.

Source: morningconsult.com

Very simply, this means that consumers are increasingly less likely to switch or choose to support a brand than they are likely to avoid or boycott a brand, making the decision increasingly risky.

So if a brand decides that this calculated risk is worth it, how do you best set yourself up to become the buycott and not the boycott?

23 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

PART II: HOW DO YOU DO IT?

As one would imagine, there is absolutely a right way and a wrong way to get political. And despite the overuse of this buzzword, authenticity matters. The same Accenture Strategy report put a few data points to this.

Source: brandchannel.com

Consumers may want brands to take a stand but not any stand. And with the 21st century ability to fact-check, brands will find themselves in hot water very quickly if the stance taken is not authentic. Let’s look at how that can manifest in the real world.

Stephen Ross, Owner of Equinox and SoulCycle and His Support of Donald Trump When it was discovered that he would be hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump, social media rang with calls for boycotts from celebrities and customers of the popular workout companies. Supporting an administration that is viewed as anti-LGBTQ now calls Equinox’s LGBTQAlphabet spot and SoulCycle’s pride fashion collection into serious question. Not to mention that we very well might see the business take a hit when it comes time to renew gym memberships at the beginning of the next year.

Popular comedian (with 2.2 million Twitter followers) Billy Eichner tweeted:

Just contacted @Equinox to cancel my membership after many years. Money talks, especially with these monsters. If it’s too inconvenient for u to trade one LUXURY GYM for another, then you should be ashamed. (No disrespect to the many wonderful employees at my local Equinox). Bye!

There are a handful of billionaires who own everything, and many support Trump. Practically speaking, it’s probably impossible to completely avoid them. But considering @Equinox’s clientele and how they’ve pandered to us, this one feels particularly hypocritical and shameful.

The bolded part of that statement from Eichner rings loud. Equinox and SoulCycle are now being viewed as inauthentic – they said they cared about those communities, but the actions of their leadership are what people are remembering.

In response, Harvey Spevak, executive chairman of Equinox, attempted to distance the companies from Stephen Ross, noting:

As is consistent with our policies, no company profits are used to fund politicians. We are committed to all our members and the communities we live in. We believe in tolerance and equality, and will always stay true to those values.

The NBA and Their Lack of Support for Daryl Morey (and His Support for the Hong Kong Protests) To quickly set this up, in 2002 the Houston Rockets drafted Yao Ming (from China) as the No. 1 overall draft pick. He was the first-ever foreign-born player to be drafted first overall who did not play in the NCAA. This was a big deal. Fast forward to 2006, and the best- selling basketball jersey in all of China was Tracy McGrady – star player for the Houston Rockets. Fast forward to 2019, and the Rockets are still the second most popular team in China. The people of China love the Houston Rockets.

So Morey’s somewhat seemingly innocuous support of Hong Kong via a tweet that has since been deleted (it said, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.”) is more than just “any NBA team GM” saying those things. It’s the GM of the Houston Rockets saying them.

The NBA put out a message calling Morey’s tweet “regrettable” and saying his support “does not represent the Rockets or the NBA.”

24 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

Morey followed the apology tour with one of his own, stating:

I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rocket[’s] fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives. I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided, and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention. My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA.

This one gets really interesting when you factor in that the NBA somehow got Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke to agree on something.

25 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

Both politicians (and many Americans) have shown support for Morey and are viewing the NBA’s response as prioritizing money over human rights. The NBA, being the organization that has been most outspoken of all the major American sports leagues when it comes to social justice issues, now is coming off as inauthentic, only showing support for social justice issues when it pleases them or when it is not going to have the monetary risk that supporting the democracy of Hong Kong will.

These are just two of many examples of prominent leaders in a company taking a stance in their personal life that unintentionally impacts the entire brand. The common theme? Inauthenticity. The same filter goes for when brands make a calculated decision to play in the space. Some have definitely missed the authenticity bar, like Pepsi and Kendall Jenner attempting to cure racism by handing a riot cop a can of soda, but let’s take a look at how a couple of brands have actually been very successful at this.

NIKE – Colin Kaepernick “Dream Crazy” Nike’s “Dream Crazy” campaign was released during the beginning of the 2018 NFL season (hello, contextual relevancy) starring ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who had been under scrutiny for his decision in 2016 to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality. His decision created a massive divide in the NFL fanbase, as many players followed suit by kneeling during the national anthem, much to the dismay of many NFL owners and viewers and much to the respect of many others.

26 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

The campaign objective was summarized ahead of the 2018 Cannes Lions competition:

The idea was to harness the original sense of rebellious self-belief behind “Just Do It” and show how athletes today were using that spirit to move sport forward, and the world with it. And no one seemed to personify that idea better than Colin Kaepernick, who had used his platform to stand up for his beliefs and paid for it with his career.

The campaign began with a simple tweet from Kaepernick, followed by a two-minute film during the opening of the NFL season.

27 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

For closed captioning, visit YouTube.

The result saw Nike suffer a 3.16 percent drop in stock price in the short term following this advertising. It created a divide within their customer base, as evidenced by virtually any social media platform in the weeks following the advertising. But the end result saw stock prices rise to an all-time high and created $6 billion in brand value, making it the most successful campaign in the brand’s long history.

For Nike, this…

Turned into this…

28 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

Despite not being a perfect company by any stretch of the imagination, Nike has stood for social justice issues in their advertising for much of their history. And Nike even kept Colin Kaepernick on when he was not on the football field in 2017 and 2018, making this stance no doubt authentic.

Last year, when Morning Consult asked Americans to think of an ethical company and name the first one that came to mind, Nike was the 26th most frequently mentioned brand. When they asked again this year, after the “Dream Crazy” campaign they were the fourth most mentioned.

And if there is worry about taking a stance on a specific political issue, regardless of authenticity, there might even be another option. Here at The Richards Group, one of our clients did something interesting leading up to the 2018 Super Bowl.

Jeep – More Than Words

Jeep created an ad that was relevant and authentic but did not make any significant amount of people angry (beyond maybe the far right and far left).

Jeep is rooted in an American heritage that they strongly believe in. How did they intersect what was going on in the NFL (à la Colin Kaepernick) authentically with the heritage of their brand? They created a visual way to see the national anthem that highlighted people of all different backgrounds, genders, and cultures.

Take a look:

For closed captioning, visit YouTube.

One might say the ad leans to the right side of the aisle, but the reality is, it did not take a stance. It did not say you should not kneel during the national anthem; it did not say you should kneel during the national anthem; it said, however, that we are all in this together.

29 TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE

The statistics back up the success of this piece of creative:

The spot had more views (106 million) on YouTube/Facebook than any other during the 2018 Super Bowl.

Sentiment was nearly unanimously positive on YouTube (99 percent).

Traffic to the Jeep website increased 30 percent.

From January 30 to February 6, there were 123,059 mentions of Jeep on social media, with about 17 percent of this conversation directly tied to the commercial.

PART III: LET’S WRAP IT UP

Deciding if a brand should get involved in the political arena in 2020 is not an easy decision. But thinking through these questions can help brands get to the most educated decision possible. Some of these were discussed in this trend and some of them we did not get to, but they are great starting points:

Is the stance you are taking authentic? It seems obvious, but it really is the first step in deciding if there is an issue that a brand has ground to stand on. If your brand has historically donated to or supported anti-LGBTQ agendas – maybe don’t change your logo for Pride Month.

Can you be contextually relevant? The odds are very high in 2020. And if a political issue arises that supremely interconnects with your brand (e.g., Colin Kaepernick and Nike) – even better.

Do an analysis of the company leadership to ensure that personal leanings of public-facing, important members of the company will not jeopardize the stance.

Does your industry lean toward participating in this space, making entry a bit less daunting? We have seen the personal care industry discuss somewhat political and social topics for quite some time, with Dove clearly being a shining example. And this is just one man’s opinion, but Harry’s did a lot better job of this than Gillette in the past couple of years. I suppose YouTube sentiment would back this up, as Harry’s received 94 percent positive remarks while Gillette only has 35 percent.

It would be simply untrue to say that every brand should get political in 2020, but if you can check the boxes, it might just be worth the risk.

Luke DaMommio

Luke is all about content. Not just online, but in life. Before joining The Richards Group, Luke made movies– writing, shooting, and editing award-winning short films in Dallas, Houston, and New York. Luke also made money–as a result of his forays into film, he launched and ran his own successful production company with his best friend when he was 18 years old. Not done yet, as Luke also makes music–a self-taught musician, he plays regular shows around town. Finally, Luke makes meals–as a proud second-generation Italian, most LUKE DAMOMMIO: nights you’ll find him in the kitchen not cooking with store-brand red sauce. Brand Management

See? Content.

It seems only natural that all these passions led Luke to advertising. A renaissance man of the digital age, Luke was a natural fit for clients who sought to tell richer, more engaging stories. Luke’s comfort with both the creative and the business side of his work helps him to inform all aspects of storytelling for blue-chip brands like Schwab Advisor Services, Schwab Retirement Plan Services, Schwab Charitable Foundation, and more.

30 COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT 1

FIRST THINGS FIRST – WHAT IS A COLLAB?

Collaborations, for many brands, are an opportunity to make noise; it’s to drive conversation, garner relevance, or at the very least look pretty cool. By definition, it’s the action of two groups coming together to create something. In the past few years, collaborations have managed to flood every industry imaginable – anyone from fast food chains to electronic companies to auto manufacturers are hoping to strike gold with some form of social or cultural relevance. As we’re seeing collaborations become one of the quintessential ways to cash in on a growing fad, it’s likely that we’ll see an influx of these collaborations in 2020. So much so that we’re TREY GREEN: Digital Strategy entering what looks to be a massive oversaturation of the collaboration space that will only grow larger (and more pointless) in 2020. And like all things done without moderation – we’re going to get sick. People are going to grow increasingly tired of seeing collabs that exist just for the sake of existing. This will inevitably lead to what we deem to be the true trend for 2020 – collab fatigue.

With partnerships like KFC and Human Made’s Colonel Sanders-inspired merchandise line or AriZona Tea and Adidas’ sneaker take on the 99¢ floral can, there have been countless partnerships (rightfully) met with rolling eyes and less-than-impressed scoffs. It seems as though the original authenticity of collaborations has been exploited by brands looking to revive their stale social and cultural presence or pander to subcultures HELINA SEYOUM: that are getting more attention in the mainstream (i.e., streetwear) and ride the coattails of those waves. Digital Strategy

Source: hypebeast.com

The good news is that the overwhelming presence of collaborations doesn’t necessarily mean their overall death. There can still be a way to foster sincere, organic collaborations in 2020 – especially when we consider how long other industries have been able to do so effectively.

31 COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

WHO’S DOING IT RIGHT?

Music in particular has been an industry able to master the art of collaborations for decades and arguably has established the modern blueprint for how brands can model their collaborations today. When we think about music and collabs, the most obvious manifestation of this exists in the form of your classic artist duet. By definition, a duet is a musical composition for two performers in which the performers have equal importance to the piece. It’s symbiotic, and it’s meaningful. Like duets, there’s a lot of beauty in brands working hand in hand with another brand or creative partner (e.g., musician, designer, etc.) who can view one another in a light that both parties never knew existed. The magic of a collab – when done right – is creating something new and exciting but maintaining the intact integrity of each individual entity and hoping your audience sees the vision.

In music, many collaborations started safe, in that they existed between artists with quite a bit of overlap. For example, in 1966 Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recorded one of the most iconic duets in music history with their song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” In this case, the two artists who existed in similar genres came together to create a project that was in sync with their audience, their brands, and their talents. In the brand world, we’ve seen this manifested with partnerships such as Taco Bell and Doritos® for their fan favorite, Locos Tacos. Both brands service a somewhat similar audience, and they created something that existed in the perfect intersection of the two.

CO-CREATION IS KING

While this alone surpasses what some of these recent collaborations have been able to accomplish, what will really determine your brand collaboration’s success in the new year is co-creation. While on the surface it seems synonymous with collaboration, co-creation goes beyond collabs in that it is the action of two or more entities working jointly to create something that reflects both parties’ shared ideas and/or goals. It specifically requires each party involved to be fully invested and lend a piece of itself to be a part of the project. As a brand, you are entering co-creation when you are willing (even welcoming) to relinquish part of your brand to be a true participant.

Not all collaborations have to exist in the same overlap for them to be impactful and fall under co-creation. In 1986, hip-hop legends-in- the-making Run-D.M.C. partnered with the ever-prolific Aerosmith for a new take on the band’s famous song “Walk This Way” to merge two very different but complementary genres together – rock and hip-hop. With this, the goal was twofold: Foster genuine co-creation while also marrying two very different brands with different audiences to reach a new, larger audience base and ultimately push the status quo. Brands have been able to leverage this form of collaboration as well, such as with Halo Top ice cream and ColourPop Cosmetics and IKEA and Virgil Abloh.

However, growing social awareness and the ability for audiences to easily spot inauthenticity and disingenuous marketing are quickening the public’s exhaustion with collaborations. For example, we can all name one song that features two artists who, upon first listen, make it clear they have no business appearing on the same track together – other than for the sole purpose of charting and/or building hype. For example, the frequently used, often pointless, and highly unnecessary rap verse on pop songs of the last half-decade. Since hip-hop and R&B now account for the majority (25.1 percent) of total music consumption in the U.S. (compared to 23 percent for rock), hip-hop breaks and features are being sprinkled into pop tracks for quick success and relevancy. Camila Cabello’s “Havana” ft. Young Thug, Katy Perry’s “Bon Appetit” ft. Migos, or Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” ft. Kendrick Lamar all exhibit this sort of strategy. While these songs may see commercial success – much like many of these brand collaborations – their relevance is fleeting, and they hold no longevity for the artist’s or brand’s image, awareness, and overall impact. These are not and will never be classics. And neither will your brand collaboration if it follows this strategy.

It’s quite obvious when a brand follows this path to collaboration as they’re usually not culturally aware in their method to pick whom they collaborate with and how they plan to execute the partnership. This is where cultural documenters such as Complex, Hypebeast, and The Fader fall into the picture. Brands are starting to identify that partnering with these media companies will get them an instant stamp of approval, and in some cases, that might work. However, brands should be using them as partners in helping to amplify their collaboration instead of asking them to serve up a suggested tastemaker to collaborate with and be on their way. If our clients/brands are committed to the strategy of collaborating, then they must seek out partners in sincere, earnest ways. Don’t be hesitant to allow the collab process to be mixed and mastered by others. Oftentimes, the more open and collaborative a project, the better the outcome.

We’ve done a lot of talking about the rules of successful collaborations and how to foster genuine co-creation, but beyond the preaching, we’ve fortunately been able to actualize this as well.

32 COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Music credit: larrenwong – Voiceover transcript for video

HERE’S HOW WE DID IT

Just this summer, Snapple took the leap to try a new form of collaboration. The ask was to make Snapple relevant to a new audience. While this ask alone could have gone in any direction, the team saw there was an untapped opportunity that, if done correctly, could bring entirely new light to the brand. This is where the idea to partner with an up-and-coming Chicago-based streetwear designer, Joe Freshgoods, came to mind. While streetwear collaborations are in no way new, it was the way in which the collaboration was approached by both parties, from inception to execution, that made it meaningful and impactful.

For Snapple, it was the first opportunity in a while where the brand would be able to gain a sort of social currency with a new audience in an authentic way. The collaborative effort was put forward by both Snapple and the Joe Freshgoods team, and from the beginning, it was about being sincere to the audience but also getting the most out of the first iteration of the collaboration. To Joe’s credit, working with him never felt like a corporate tug-of-war between two brands, but more like a series of discussions at a family cookout on how we can bring Snapple back to its glory days and how the name Joe Freshgoods can begin to enter the homes of a new audience. In a way, Joe was Run-D.M.C. and we were Aerosmith. In the end, the team was able to produce exciting merchandise pieces, but the most valuable part of the partnership was our willingness to share the iconic Snapple bottle, including the brand logo, as a blank canvas for Joe to have creative freedom. Since the intention from the beginning was to enter the collaboration sincerely, Snapple lending the most notable piece of its brand to Joe was the largest differentiator between us and other potential collaborators, and ultimately the piece of the partnership that solidified his willingness to work with us. And that’s the beauty of doing a collaboration the right way – it’s symbiotic, it’s meaningful, and it exists in true co-creation.

The success of the collab was measured by how those invested in the culture responded to it and their sentiments on the collaboration as a whole. Understanding how the audience shows love (or doesn’t) was a key part of assessing whether the collaboration was received the way it was intended to be. Snapple and Joe Freshgoods were able to make brand history and orchestrate one of their best collaborations of the year because of their sincere and open approach, ultimately allowing Snapple, Joe, and the agency to reach new heights and set the bar a bit higher than where we started. 33 COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

WHAT DID WE LEARN?

If you’ve made it this far (or just skipped to the end for a quick recap), what we’re really wanting to drive home is:

The ultimate goal of a collaboration is to reach the highest form of co-creation. It’s possible to be true to your brand while still allowing yourself to truly lean in. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable and pull back the curtain (those who beat collaboration fatigue are also those who give more insight into the story of how the collab came together).

Turn to other industries for inspiration. We talked a lot about music’s blueprint for advertising, so it would be beneficial to study album rollouts or artist release strategies for insight on how we should help propel our brands.

Look for the influencer’s influencer. Subcultures like fashion and hip-hop have an abundance of up-and-coming artists that are pushing the envelope creatively. Many of the influencers you might have in mind are likely looking to these other figures for inspiration – you should too.

Trey Green

To Trey, digital is far more than tweets, memes, links, and likes. It’s about the spread of stories. The kind of stories we’ve always told one another but now share faster, farther, and more transparently than ever.

So the words we use and the opinions we voice–the products we sell and the brands we champion– have to be genuine, inclusive and, above all, very engaging.

Just like Trey. TREY GREEN: Digital Strategy A culture and content specialist who helped launched YouTube TV while at Google, Trey joined The Richards Group in 2018 and lends his outsized skills to brands including Choctaw Casinos & Resorts, Snapple, Metro by T-Mobile, Firehouse Subs, the SEC, and The Home Depot. When he’s not at work, you can usually find Trey entertaining his nieces, nephews, and thoughts of pro football glory while playing Madden.

34 COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Helina Seyoum

Helina believes that brands and culture should work in perfect harmony. Maybe it’s due to her background. Upon graduation from the acclaimed Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Helina left Dallas to pursue a degree in sociology with a minor in the music industry from the University of Southern California.

While in Los Angeles, she explored a career in the music business through internships at Roc Nation and HELINA SEYOUM: Universal Music Group. Digital Strategy

Returning to her hometown of Dallas, Helina felt drawn to explore the different collaborative relationships between artist and listener, management and client, story and soundtrack. Naturally, this led her to advertising.

Today she serves as a digital curator of sorts, expanding and shaping the conversation between consumers and brands like Keurig Dr Pepper, Go RVing, and Choctaw Casinos & Resorts. Typically while enjoying one of her 200 Spotify playlists.

35 BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE 1

Digital content and e-commerce are in a key transition period. It’s time to start thinking about how your brand’s commerce experience will evolve into the next decade.

Have you felt an overwhelming desire to upgrade your smartphone in the past six months? Maybe not this year. It’s likely your current device is doing everything you already need it to do, and digital adoption has reached a saturation point. But this digital ubiquity is now allowing for different innovations to make our digital experiences more useful since the major Internet and (admittedly more flashy) digital changes have started LAKEN FACCIO: to slow. Beyond the big tech companies, platforms and publishers are also finding new ways to engage their Digital Strategy users, particularly through e-commerce, and brands are reassessing their digital ecosystem of owned channels, giving a new importance to e-commerce as a part of that mix. E-commerce is often thought of as rather straightforward for marketers, but I’d like to challenge that notion.

Before we can even talk about new opportunities, it’s important we acknowledge the way people shop is rapidly changing. Due to advancements in commerce technology, as well as nontraditional financial services such as Venmo and CashApp, consumers are now more comfortable sharing financial information on mobile devices through apps and even voice assistants than in years past. Forrester estimates that by 2021, consumers will spend $152 billion through mobile phones, which would equate to nearly 24 percent of total online sales. Consumers’ willingness to spend in channels in which norms and expectations have not been firmly cemented opens up fascinating new opportunities for brands to experiment, as these dynamic touchpoints will reward creatively engaging experiences surrounding the digital point of sale.

As Tom Goodwin points out in Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption, a majority of today’s brands are still providing an online shopping experience comparable with viewing a print catalog from the early 1900s. Why? Because we innovate within experiences that feel familiar to us. Very rarely does a new technology get applied in the most useful way the first time around. Goodwin illustrates this concept with electricity, noting that we first created on and off light switches that were attached to the lamp itself. It took years to establish a useful on/off system that you could operate on the wall as you enter the room. Today we’ve reached a similar turning point with commerce.

The world is ready for the next development in e-commerce, and we’re already beginning to see successes from apps, publishers, and brands who are approaching their point of sale differently. The point of sale has drastically transformed and multiplied in a way that’s making it accessible almost everywhere. This change will have implications on a brand’s commerce channels as well as how that brand approaches their messaging distribution to complement their e-commerce strategies.

APP INSPIRATION FROM ASIA

It could be argued that China has already figured out the future of e-commerce with their widely popular app, WeChat. In 2017 WeChat launched what’s called a mini-program that many describe as “an app within an app.” These mini-programs allow users to interact with advanced features such as e-commerce, task management, and coupons while staying in WeChat. Today, 18 percent of WeChat mini- programs are focused on e-commerce. While the United States is switching from app to app for many of the digital needs we have, China has already found a way to streamline this process and it’s working.

36 BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE

Source: jingdaily.com

One brand leveraging this well is Sephora. The beauty brand has taken note and uses WeChat mini-programs to market within the app, embracing the social culture of their China consumers. Their mini-program is designed to help users discover the newest beauty regimen based on Sephora’s recommendations and then make their purchase. The mini-program in WeChat also shows consumers the nearest location and helps them book services for the next time they’re in-store. The easier and simpler for consumers, the more they’ll enjoy the brand experience and want to come back next time. WeChat makes this even easier for Sephora to accomplish.

As a direct lift of this concept, over the past couple of years Facebook and Instagram have been developing and rolling out features of their own to encourage in-app shopping. While Facebook and Instagram have seen great success with e-commerce internationally, it’s only recently that we’ve started seeing the U.S. take note. As a natural extension to their online catalog, brands are able to set up collection ads and dynamically rotate in products that drive user interest. These ad units are meant to include 50+ products to keep optimizing the digital storefront as products go out of stock and new ones need to be rotated in. IKEA and Adidas have seen impressive results from these new features.

Instagram is also creating new ways for influencers to add products to their content that are pulled in from brand catalogs. Now consumers aren’t distracted by external links and a variety of items; rather, they’re clearly directed to the product of interest. Brands like Outdoor Voices jumped right into these platform opportunities as they launched earlier this year. Personally, I love how users can actually see the apparel on the influencer while they’re out and about. It might still be a posed shot, but it feels a lot more personal than the catalog images we typically shop from.

Source: nytimes.com 37 BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE

In good company, the other big tech leaders of today, Google, Apple, and Amazon, are all focused on making their user experiences seamlessly shoppable as well. Apple and Android are competing head-to-head to develop their own payment structures, making our mobile devices powerful tools for quick transactions. As we continue toward this era of digital transformation, nearly all experiences on mobile have the potential to be shoppable regardless of the brand, product, or digital ecosystem you’re engaging with.

Today we tend to think about shopping happening on our mobile devices, but this radical transformation in e-commerce is not just being able to shop on a mobile device. Instead, it’s about our on-the-go shopping behaviors that can be paired with a different e-commerce infrastructure with your mobile device as a layer of that experience. Imagine if you could take a photo of a sweatshirt someone is wearing, and your phone’s iOS system provides options to text it, email it, share it to social platforms, and actually shop it. It’s not far-fetched to think the capabilities Google Lens is testing will be widely available in the next decade with advancements in image recognition and commerce capabilities.

PUBLISHERS WITH A PASSION FOR FASHION AND RETAIL

In the past, publishers left commerce to the ad space dedicated among their pages, but today the publisher landscape is looking much different. Gaining online subscribers was never the main priority for a cultural documenter like Hypebeast, a premier destination for fashion and culture on the Web. Each month, over 9 million visitors log on to view the latest in fashion, art, design, and music. Their editorial work not only documents culture, but they contribute to culture in different ways, going far beyond traditional media and advertising tactics to make money. The Hong Kong-based publisher covers fashion, music, and drops in their editorial content, but has diversified revenue streams that contribute to culture. These manifest themselves in events like Battle at the Berrics and Hypefest. These events bring in revenue and grow a loyal fan base that strongly identifies with Hypebeast as a brand.

Think about Hypebeast as the new MTV, and instead of Spring Break, they’ve created even more cultural moments to be a part of. Beyond events, their social channels aren’t used to repurpose article content, but rather tell stories through Snapchat TV and feature collaborations that are happening all over the U.S. And to top it off, they have a clothing line, HBX, that bridges the gap from editorial content to e-commerce. This area of the company is growing as they’re opening their first HBX brick-and-mortar store this year, putting them in an entirely new category when we talk about publishers today.

Sources: gq.com and hypebeast.com

Another publisher redefining the media space today is Complex. As a lifestyle brand and media company, they generate over 1.2 billion video views a month across their owned digital channels, and they’re a top 10 publisher in the U.S. for social engagement on channels like Facebook and YouTube. With so much engagement, you’d probably be surprised to hear that their food vertical, First We Feast, doesn’t get much of their revenue from ads. In fact, 85 percent of First We Feast’s revenue comes from e-commerce sales of hot sauce, stemming from their popular YouTube series, Hot Ones.

38 BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE

If you’re not familiar with Hot Ones, I encourage you to check out their episodes and pick out a show with one of your favorite celebrities. Many different people of influence are interviewed as they go through an increasingly challenging hot sauce taste test. The conversation in each episode isn’t focused on the sauce the entire time, but it might as well be. They compare the releases of their hot sauce to a sneaker drop. And for anyone who knows sneaker culture, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear their hot sauce sold 1,000 bottles in one short hour.

Source: wsj.com

Looking beyond streetwear culture, The Strategist, a New York magazine-owned website, exemplifies thriving with a nontraditional publishing model. Even though it launched less than four years ago, The Strategist already makes up 60 percent of New York Media’s online traffic. As the team at The Strategist told Digiday, “The brand has delivered double- or triple-digit growth in revenue every quarter since its launch, and its yearly revenues are projected to more than double in 2019.” But surprisingly, given The Strategist’s sizable audience, very little of their revenue comes from selling advertising targeting their readers. Their content focuses on fashion and the latest trends, allowing you to shop their product recommendations while the publisher is compensated through affiliate agreements.

So is e-commerce the secret to publisher success? It’s tough to say. Because apps and publishers are finding new revenue streams through e-commerce, advertising isn’t as important to their business model as it once was. If publishers have direct influence over sales, whether it be hot sauce or fashion, that changes the value they offer to brands and marketers like us. These publishers are no longer selling just impressions, attention, or even awareness, but instead they are able to sell brand revenue. This brings me to my final question, where does that leave brands?

BRANDS ARE BETTING ON DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER RELATIONSHIPS

Many brands winning today have scrappier business models. They’re going direct-to-consumer because they don’t need to rely solely on traditional distribution with major retailers now that their products can reach consumers and be purchased in alternative ways thanks to the Internet. The script has flipped, and for scrappier brands like Halo Top and Glossier, it’s not about filling the upper funnel first, but rather starting with the experience closest to the brand’s product, commerce. This doesn’t mean the direct-to-consumer approach supersedes distribution, but it should have a stronger role for your brand in 2020.

Think about this as a shelf-out approach. If you start with your product and wrap a creative storytelling experience around the point of sale, you’ll be reaching your consumers with your best brand experience in the place where they have the strongest interaction with your brand. This shift in brand ecosystems is creating a blur between distribution and promotion, therefore the advertising and messaging we have historically prioritized has to adjust accordingly. What if a brand’s larger awareness messaging was a part of the creative storytelling at the shelf? Given this new approach, marketers have the opportunity to build on creative messaging through e-commerce, and it gives brands unlimited ways to impress their customers through storytelling and experience.

39 BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE

Take Dirty Lemon, for example. This company offers a playful, bright beverage that is only available direct-to-consumer through their e-commerce platform that takes place over text. First-time users must start their order online, but then they’re quickly directed to text.

Source: dirtylemon.com

A different approach than most, but Dirty Lemon created a conversational and fun way to order from the brand via consumers’ phones. Their business model is becoming more and more popular for the start-up brands who are focusing on providing the best possible experience for their customers, skipping the big retailer middleman. In addition to their SMS program, Dirty Lemon also has a cashier-less retail store in New York City where users come in and purchase based on the same SMS concept for payment. This personal approach Dirty Lemon took is an advantage over larger retailers. This is why some retailers are finding other ways to be more personal through their commerce experience.

Source: forbes.com

One e-commerce brand we’re all very familiar with, Amazon, is working on influencer storefronts to create more personalized shopping experiences on their platform. Amazon is working on these storefronts to enable influencers with tools to drive sales and attribute their work with a stronger return on investment. Colette Prime has a page today, and it’s said that Amazon is working on making these storefronts even more engaging as they continue to roll out updates that help them foster relationships between their customer and those they see as influential.

Other brands continue to invest and are fighting to keep up with Amazon. Walmart, for example, is pushing their partnership with Google Assistant and their grocery pickup and delivery process. Users are asked to say, “Ok, Google, ask Walmart to add eggs to my cart,” and the Google Assistant will recommend and add your preferred type of eggs into your cart. The program also makes personalized item recommendations based on your Walmart shopping history and preferences. When items are added to your cart, they can be looked over on the Walmart app or their browser. This voice skill is practical, yet it also is a creative opportunity for Walmart to show their expertise and persona to their customer.

While e-commerce isn’t new, the user experience around voice skills is still in its infancy. In a literal sense, voice is truly being an assistant to the shopping process, and we’re still going to our devices to check and confirm our orders are correct before purchasing. It’ll be some time before we fully trust voice skills to understand what we’re saying and know the different SKUs of products we’re looking for. Even 40 BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE

still, starting with voice today will help your brand develop a useful tool rooted in the brand’s personality that can continue to evolve as consumer trust grows.

YOUR NEXT STEPS FOR E-COMMERCE

Recognize that e-commerce is changing. As technology has developed, e-commerce will transform in the next decade, and consumers are ready to explore their shopping experience in different ways.

Experiment with a range of new point of sale opportunities. Think about how your product or service is used and where your consumer is when they’re thinking about you. Should you build out an influencer strategy with e-commerce? Maybe your brand is more likely to be thought of while someone is driving in their car, so voice would be a great area to start experimenting. Do you interact with younger consumers more often? If so, an SMS program might be more approachable and friendly for them.

Rebuild the narratives around these new e-commerce models. E-commerce is ripe for creativity to come in and provide a new experience for consumers. If the content we value in our news feeds and from publishers isn’t catching the attention of today’s consumers, e-commerce presents itself as a possible solution for that problem where consumers will continue to interact with brands at that level.

As we look to 2020, e-commerce should play a bigger role in your customer experience. Transactional content is the future of advertising. Create ads to complement the bigger story you’re telling, but don’t forget to tell your story where customers are paying attention on the digital shelf.

Laken Faccio

Laken has never been shy in front of a crowd. She grew up with a love for music and dance, performing in her own productions starting at 5 years old.

She moved on to local musicals and national dance competitions, but when she realized that her dream of being a Broadway star was too far in the distance, she decided advertising was the next-best thing.

Lucky for us, her passion for entertaining translates well into bringing brands’ storytelling to life online. She LAKEN FACCIO: Digital Strategy collaborates to provide clients with clear, strategic recommendations to put a spotlight on brands in an overcrowded digital marketplace. Since joining us, she’s helped lead clients like Omni Hotels & Resorts, Firehouse Subs, Pedia-Lax, American Cancer Society, and Chick-fil-A into new digital spaces.

Laken is from Wisconsin, making her an avid cheesehead. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, she moved straight to Dallas to join The Richards Group. When not at work, she’s either whipping up something in the kitchen or spending time outdoors. After moving south, one has to take advantage of the nice weather, don’t cha know.

41 A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 1

Consumers and marketers have predominantly used and viewed social platforms as a one-to-many channel, a public forum, a place to drive added-value public social interactions like comments and shares. Through technical platform updates, increasing time spent with specific content formats, and a generation rooted in one-to-one connections on social, the way we currently interact on social platforms is evolving to favor private before public interaction.

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off this year’s F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, stating “the future is private.” While this might sound like social as we know it is being dismantled, consumers should view this more AUBRI ELLIOTT: Brand Media/Planner as an evolution that increases their control: control of content, control of data, control of overall interactions taken by one’s social self. While formats like the news feed are here to stay, we are beginning to see small changes that inherently make the way we interact on these platforms different.

Data privacy and end-to-end encryption are often top topics discussed in relation to the idea of privacy within social, but it is this shift in content creation and communication that plays a key piece in this larger transformation in the social space. To stay relevant, marketers will have to change the way they think about social: First, in how they measure its value and, more importantly, in how they can build and retain interaction on their social channels through this shift.

The solution to social in an age of consumer empowerment and privacy appears too simple to be true. But in this time where brands rich in authenticity trump brands rich in followers, our measurement of success truly becomes the value exchange between consumer and content. Brands thriving in this new environment are confident in their brand and communications strategies, creating intimate social experiences, and are working to connect their social activations to the in-store experience.

Once marketers are able to retrain their mindset to this standard, we will be able to drive deeper and stronger connections with consumers, ultimately increasing their lifetime value to the brand. To understand and evolve with this shift, it is first important to understand where it came from and who will champion the behavior to be expected on social platforms moving forward.

KEEPING INTERACTIONS CLOSE

The increased consumption of the story format greatly accelerated this shift toward one-to-one connections. From its launch via Snapchat in 2013, platforms were quick to adopt the format with Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube all launching story products by the end of 2017, allowing consumers to share ephemeral highlights in their day across their social communities. Instagram saw both the quickest adoption and the most sustained use of this format, with 500 million daily active users as of January 2019.

Some would probably equate stories’ quick success to puppy-face filters and dancing hot-dog augmented reality characters, but the change in consumption is much more rooted in the psychological benefit consumers received from this new format. Facebook news feed consumption saw a decline in 2016 because of increased negative sentiment driven by news and political content being shared at the time. This drove users out of the feed and into other more intimate social spaces like Facebook Groups and Messenger, and to other environments on social like Instagram and Snapchat.

While these environments allowed consumers to escape the political frenzy of the feed, like counts and comments on traceable posts continue to drive high anxiety and promote idealized or inauthentic content. Researchers even found reading comments on others’ posts caused increases in depression. Instagram by far was categorized as one of the worst offenders for mental health. The solution to all of these problems became stories. With the stories format, users could share moments today that would be gone tomorrow. There were no like counts to measure, and all comments were private or could be disabled. This was the perfect balance of connection and control.

This spike in usage coupled with a new initiative to make social a more “be who you are”-friendly environment drove the interest in taking some learnings from its form. Instagram’s chief Adam Mosseri announced a couple of updates currently being tested, including hidden like counts and less prominent follower counts, in an effort to lessen the power of these vanity metrics and to allow users to feel safe

42 A NEW SOCIAL ORDER

to share openly with their followers. More recent updates include the mute feature rolled out in early 2018 and the close friends option introduced in late 2018. Mute allows users to hide posts from a certain person they follow without having to unfollow or block them, while close friends allows users to limit the people who see their story post. While all these features promote safe and happy sharing, they also promote keeping interactions by and between users out of the public view.

NEW NORMS

Gen Z is estimated to have $143 billion in spending power, in comparison to the $65 billion driven by Millennials. As this generation can range from 4 to 24 years old, they not only have their own spending power but influence on their parents’ spending. They also inhabit the life stage when consumers are starting to form preferences, opinions, and ultimately loyalties. The gist is that brands need to get in front of Gen Z and how they interact on social. This generation is leading the charge toward more private interaction for a few reasons:

They are digitally dialed in to their community. Snap allows Gen Z to quickly communicate with their close friends and communities.

Authenticity over quantity. Growing up with social media, Gen Z is well aware that more followers doesn’t necessarily mean quality followers. Only 19 percent say they admire someone for a high follower count, while 67 percent of those surveyed agree that “being true to their values and beliefs makes a person cool.”

Trust is key. Growing up with the Internet has made Gen Z smarter about the negative impacts it can have. They want the control to share the right content with the right people and to ensure certain messages don’t get into the wrong hands.

These things are the standard for Gen Z. Consumption from this generation will continue to skew toward the platforms like Snapchat and Instagram that adapt to provide these consumers the experience to safely communicate and curate with their friends.

Though they are driving the change, Gen Z isn’t the only generation to make this shift. From Gen Z to Baby Boomers, social apps that support private interaction like Instagram and WhatsApp have seen growth in usage. Social apps like Twitter that are still heavily focused on public interaction have the lowest usage numbers across all generations. We also see that across all generations, priorities have changed when it comes to how we interact on social. Instead of being the first place to share our opinion, people are shifting their behavior to increasingly include search and discovery actions within social. While Google might be the first place to go to find the quickest direct answer, social is adding additional context, especially from a product search perspective.

Source: visualcapitalist.com 43 A NEW SOCIAL ORDER

SHIFTING MINDSETS

Changes to the way people are consuming and interacting with social channels mean marketers need to evolve our perspective on the ways social platforms can be used in broader brand-building and sales-driving strategies. The competition for attention remains high, even as consumers shift toward more intimate channels. Brands still compete with top content curators and personalities, but in this new landscape users will place a higher priority on following their friends and family. One-to-one curation can look similar but can be very different than one-to-many curation. In a crowd of 2,000, a tone-deaf loudmouth is one thing. But that same tone-deaf loudmouth at a small 20-person party is an entirely different thing.

So how can brands change the way they are thinking about social to remain relevant and to avoid the extra dissonance that comes from invading an intimate space? A few tips to keep in mind when thinking about strategy on social:

Be who you are and own who you’re not. You must have a distinct and authentic brand voice, period. As competition increases in the channel, brands who don’t have a distinct social voice get lost in the noise and are likely to be associated with a competitor with a stronger presence. Create your brand’s social personality. How would they talk, what would they post, what types of communities would they be involved in? Not only does this help brands stick true to who they are and what’s important to them, but it also provides a consistent and authentic perception for the user that they can relate to. This morphs your brand into more than just a channel to target from and makes it a channel to be followed.

Blurred lines. Many brands draw lines in the sand of what organic content looks like vs. what paid or, more specifically, branded content looks like. While content that looks more ad-like (with traditional elements such as logo, headline, heavy stylization) definitely still has a place, especially with certain ad units, push to find ways to break out of that box. This is where I think large brands can take a tip from the local guys. Find ways to naturally showcase your product or service, and ask yourself: “Could I get the consumer to consider learning more without a call to action?”

Keep it simple. Many times as marketers we try to remove ourselves from the equation when talking strategy (no one likes a focus group of one). Sometimes it is worth looking inward and taking a second to think about your own interactions with content on social. Are you typically liking or commenting on brands’ posts? Likely not. It is more likely we are pausing, swiping, and zooming in. Part of being relevant on social is posting in a way that fits the conversations or content in which your target is engaging and how they are engaging. Take a step back, think of the most fundamental interactions on social that a user must take just to engage with content, and lean in to those.

Take it offline. If brands are losing opportunities for interaction on social, what can they invest in to retain connections and drive interest? The answer: In-store experiences that create shareable moments. If content is trending toward ephemeral moments and users are trending toward authenticity, positive in-store experiences create both content brands can use and content users want to share with their community. This also allows the brand to take their social persona one step further, associating real people with their perception through behind-the-scenes or insider looks. This allows the consumer to feel closer and more relatable to the brand because it’s a deeper look that goes past the idealized form a brand takes in traditional advertising.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The shift in behavior seems abrupt, but we have naturally been making this shift for some time. While some might think it is making our job as advertisers harder, I find it pushes brands to be better than just being present. This new shift toward privacy, whether it be from a data or interaction perspective, forces brands to think of what value we are providing the consumer not just in our products and services but also in our communications. What has historically been a very one-sided relationship can and should now be mutually beneficial.

The solutions to keep brands relevant are simple. A focus on authenticity and respecting our invitation into these intimate channels on social can bring brands great success in fostering relationships with current and new customers. The walls and constraints we have previously put on the way ads should look, feel, and do aren’t as sturdy as they once were. Ultimately, as an advertiser, if you think you are not in the business of creating personal relationships, you will get left behind.

44 A NEW SOCIAL ORDER

Aubri Elliott

Aubri came to The Richards Group in 2015 as a media planner working on Chick-fil-A. Witness firsthand (firsthoof?) to the online connection the cows had with their fans, she made the move to our social team and has been happily posting and pinning ever since. Aubri’s love of social stems from her love of making connections–she wants great brands to create relationships and reward loyalists with smiles. When consumers feel engaged and heard, Aubri feels happy. AUBRI ELLIOTT: A graduate of the University of North Texas and a recent Interactive Marketing Awards winner, Aubri Brand Media/Planner spends most of her office time on brands including Firehouse Subs, Charles Schwab, and Sub-Zero. Her non-office time is spent moving, as either a dancer or a very social–and inspiring–spin instructor.

45 DEEPFAKES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURKY 1

Hopefully by now all of us know what a “deepfake” is; if you don’t, I will give you a quick recap. Deepfake is a technique for video manipulation common in academic research institutions – and by amateurs in online communities – using machine learning (generative adversarial neural networks or GANNs) to augment and distort a base video in differing degrees. Deepfakes commonly involve replacing or augmenting an actor’s face with another to change what they say or their appearance while saying it. The phrase “deepfake” was coined in 2017, and it’s a portmanteau of the term “deep learning” and “fake.”

JAYR SOTELO: This technique has been used for entertainment purposes and academic research for now. The ability to put Motion Graphics/Group Head somebody’s face into an existing video creates a lot of different reactions, from laughter and awe to paranoia and fear. Just type the word “deepfake” into YouTube or Google, and you will get explainer videos and profiles that specialize in taking movies or TV shows and swapping actors’ faces with other actors’ faces.

It’s like that ’90s movie Face/Off, but without getting Nicholas Cage to act like John Travolta for an extra cringe factor. If you haven’t had the privilege of watching Face/Off, then you can search YouTube profiles like Ctrl Shift Face (226,000 subscribers) and The Corridor Crew (2.4 million subscribers) that have shown how these are made and even specialize in making deepfake videos for the fun of it.

A good reference for how much reach this new technique has in current popular culture is the deepfake that BuzzFeed did a while ago featuring President Obama saying things that Jordan Peele is mouthing, and it even shows a side-by-side comparison of Obama and Peele so you can see that it is fake. Ellen DeGeneres did something very similar as well, although that one was made just using video and compositing tools, no deep learning needed.

46 DEEPFAKES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURKY

THE BAD

Much has already been written (Wired, MIT Technology Review, HelpNetSecurity) about what this means to our future media habits and our culture of Internet and content freedom. At the most basic level, how do we know if the videos we are seeing are real? There is already problematic content that misinforms people – you know, actual fake news – imagine the day when this technique gets so sophisticated that “we” are not going to be able to discern fake from real. Another way this is getting used is with voice, being able to synthetically fake the voices of popular world leaders and celebrities regularly in the media.

Well, I have really bad news for you. Top artificial intelligence researchers across the country say there is no reliable method for detecting deepfake videos programmatically, even by analyzing videos for telltale indicators of a fake: assessing light, shadows, blinking patterns, and even how a person’s facial movements – such as the angle they tilt their head when they smile – relate to one another.

And just this September, a new Chinese app called “ZAO” has gone viral. It uses only a picture of you to insert yourself into movies as Leonardo DiCaprio or one of the cast members from Game of Thrones. This app can only be accessed using a Chinese phone number, but a number of hackers have been able to use it in the U.S. The technology, sophistication, and ease to create deepfake videos – already outpacing our ability to detect and police this content – is accelerating faster than techniques designed to prevent bad actors’ use of deepfakes.

THE MURKY

New academic and commercial research into deepfake detection is constantly underway, with new articles published almost every month. Yet with each update, it seems more and more difficult to overcome the challenges that the deepfake technology creates – especially when paired with the scale and impact videos can achieve through the distributed media landscape.

Delip Rao, Vice President of Research at the AI Foundation, agrees that the challenge is far greater than simple detection and says that these papers need to be put in perspective. One deepfake detection algorithm unveiled in May 2019 boasted 97 percent accuracy, for example, but as Rao notes, that 3 percent could still be damaging when thinking at the scale of Internet platforms. “Say Facebook deploys that [algorithm] and assuming Facebook gets around 350 million images a day, that’s a LOT of misidentified images,” says Rao. “With every false positive from the model, you are compromising the trust of the users.”

It’s incredibly important we develop technology that can spot fakes, says Rao, but the bigger challenge is making these methods useful. Social platforms still haven’t clearly defined their policies on deepfakes, as Facebook’s tussle with a fake Mark Zuckerberg video recently showed, and an outright ban would be unwise.

If there is no way to discern the manipulation by assessing the visual part of the video, is there another way of analyzing the video to figure out if it is augmented? This opens a very interesting security and authenticity concept that is currently being explored by tech and media companies: Is it possible to encode metadata to any video file that verifies post-capture handling? This concept is akin to creating a new file extension – an edit record that is inseparable from the data of the file itself that would allow users to certify a video is genuine. An ideal form of this concept also gives you a history of how, when, and if the video has been modified and with what end goal. If this concept were adopted, the onus is then placed on file-sharing platforms, social media sites, and media companies to authenticate files prior to publishing in any public setting. Despite the promise of this approach, innumerable questions remain to be answered before it could be implemented. Some are technical – does this system require a distributed ledger (such as blockchain) to independently validate the metadata attached to various files? And some are logistical – how would this system adapt for files created prior to its existence?

Furthermore, let’s say the verification mechanism works, but there are still videos of people doing things that could damage their public perception or otherwise threaten their livelihood. Not only in the court of public opinion or psychologically – some images simply cannot be unseen – but also legally as a video holds evidentiary value in the judicial system. In that scenario, who holds the responsibility for verifying the authenticity of the footage? Is the individual the sole arbiter of what they said and not what they were filmed doing?

In a world where video has played a pivotal role in shaping modern history, solving this challenge is vital. Without a viable method to consistently spot the deepfakes, the broader consequences if the authority of video slips away are enormous.

When it comes to voice, there is a lot of research and content being generated by deep machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI). Consider The Joe Rogan Experience AI experiment. Nearly 1,300 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience provided the training data for a system to create fake ramblings with not just Joe’s voice but some of his beliefs. This could be labeled under murky, for taking people’s words and using them in a different context, but it could also be labeled under good, as the idea behind the system might be applied to

47 DEEPFAKES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURKY

keeping some of the great thinkers, writers, and podcasters alive in an AI form. Imagine George R.R. Martin passes away without finishing the last books in the Game of Thrones series – well, maybe we could use AI and deep learning to finish his grand opus.

THE GOOD

There are clearly perils brought on by the existence and unregulated use of this technology. But what about the positives? When it comes to advertising and entertainment, this could be a huge disruptor. The potential for personalization and magical experiences is boundless. For a very simple example, imagine “Elf Yourself” revitalized for 2020, taken to a whole new level. With just a single photograph, people can be dropped into fully realized narratives rather than simple animations.

Pick any movie or sports footage, and put whomever you want at the center of it with no editing, coding, or technical expertise needed. Talk about catering to the individual. Or another way of using this technology would be taking a new movie and being able to experience it as a home casting director – replaying it with your favorite actors or actresses in whatever roles you should choose.

Deepfakes could be a new platform paralleling the trend of having advertising be closer to the audience, either through user-generated content or by playing within the context of the media. Despite the risks, I remain hopeful this would be a good opportunity for brands to mine for creative potential, making every one of us the star of their ads. And when talking about imagination and creativity, this is where we should be thinking about how we can use these types of technologies to enhance the future and how to caution the young and old alike on the landscape of media that we will be seeing in the future.

Three decades in, the Internet keeps proving that what we think is impossible can be made possible. But also what we believe to be true can be challenged by technology and the people seeking to manipulate it.

Deepfakes are a rich topic for discussion, involving social media mechanics, democratized content creation, celebrities, politicians, media responsibility, and ethics. But at the end of the day, what we consume in our digital diets needs to follow the same basic rules as our food consumption: We have to understand what things are indulgent and what are good. If we want to keep a healthy mind, we need to feed it content that is good for our minds. And that sometimes means limiting our click-bait, if not completely eliminating it.

Despite the constant change, with the continual revolution from impossible to possible and back again, I feel the statement “don’t believe anything you see on the Internet” remains as true today as when it was first coined in the ’90s. Be careful out there and beware of the deepfakes.

Jayr Sotelo

Growing up in Mexico, when Jayr wasn’t playing soccer, he was watching The Simpsons. Homer taught Jayr three things: how to speak English, that animation was his life’s calling, and that donuts really are man’s best friend.

Jayr knew that textbook doodles alone weren’t enough to launch a career, so he went the old-fashioned route: college. At Texas Christian University, he majored in graphic design with a minor in computer science. JAYR SOTELO: He attended the art academy of Trier in Germany. Then he backpacked and doodled his way through Motion Graphics/Group Head Budapest, attending the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He’d come a long way since Homer Simpson.

Jayr began his career at Janimation Studios working on McDonald’s, MTV, and VH1. He joined The Richards Group in 2010 and founded our motion graphics group, where he now creates award-winning doodles for Orkin, Clamato, The Home Depot, and Ram Trucks.

Jayr lives in Dallas with his wife, Gaby, and the two characters he is most proud of creating–his kids, Jimena and Melquiades.

48 UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION 1

Facebook and Google have been predicted to control an estimated 59.3 percent of all digital ad spend in the U.S., according to recent reports. Part of the appeal of both platforms is the ability to manually create precise targeting segments and optimize based on a variety of performance metrics. But as Google and Facebook continue to expand their advertising offerings, the role of the traditional media planner is evolving to adapt for less hands-on control of their campaigns.

Both platforms have launched a series of capabilities to bring more automation into campaign management. Fundamentally, Facebook and Google’s updates are building machine learning into campaign strategy at CONOR MACDOWELL: Brand Media/ a level not seen before from either company. These tools are primarily aimed to assist small businesses by Group Head–Search simplifying the platforms’ algorithms. However, these updates represent a tectonic shift for the major walled gardens, and agencies are having to adapt how they plan, buy, and optimize their digital media. So while these changes make the platforms more accessible, the trade-off is less visibility in how and why the systems are spending.

BIDDING ACROSS GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ANN PETER: Historically, advertisers were able to manually control budget using a combination of targeting, placement, Social Media/Planner audience signals and affinities, bidding strategies, and keywords. This approach allows advertisers to manually control spend toward different audience segments – for example, advertisers could assign spend to prioritize new customer acquisition while also allocating spend for brand loyalty initiatives.

However, Google and Facebook have been moving away from this traditional model with the release of new ad formats that simultaneously start to minimize day-to-day management operations from agencies and push advertising dollars toward historically underutilized ad inventory in their respective ecosystems. Product releases such as Google Local Ads and Facebook’s automatic placements automate where ads are shown across their available inventory while limiting transparency into where ads are shown. In addition to automatic placements, Google’s Smart Bidding and Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization go a step further and implement automated budget management strategies across all campaigns. It must be stated that by and large these tools remain opt-in as incremental capabilities rather than standard practice for both Google and Facebook; however, the consistent expansion of capabilities following this pattern and the urgency with which the platforms advocate their use suggests this trend will only continue to grow.

While Google and Facebook claim these changes were made to increase performance and provide media planners with more time for high-level strategy, there could be a fear that this lack of control will be accompanied by a misunderstanding that the role of agencies is no longer needed.

But you can rest easy. We are here to quell those fears.

PLACEMENTS: GOOGLE LOCAL ADS

Introduced in 2019, the Google Local Ads format is designed for one purpose: to drive brick-and-mortar store visitation. Google Local Ads use a combination of display, text, and video assets across Google search, Google Maps, Google Display Network, Google My Business, and YouTube to optimize across platforms with the goal of driving brick-and-mortar store visitation.

As you may have guessed, the catch here is a lack of transparency. Advertisers are unable to select target audiences or even keywords they want to target. Campaign reporting is no different, as advertisers lose visibility as to where their ads were shown or even which Google channel received impressions.

49 UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION

So how does it work? Google Local Ads use a “black box” targeting/bidding strategy that ingests several million data points to identify their target audience and optimize toward users most likely to visit an advertiser’s brick-and-mortar location. Google collects data on their more than one billion active users across three million websites and apps to identify users’ demographics, behavior, location, and intent. They then use machine learning technology to identify consumer patterns to optimize budgets toward users most likely to visit a store location.

Even with the lack of visibility, Google Local Ads have proven to be a valuable addition to several of The Richards Group’s clientele. This is where the importance of strong media planning comes into play – the ability to identify when sacrificing transparency and control is warranted to achieve campaign goals. To ensure brand safety, The Richards Group developed a proprietary exclusion list that limits where ads can be shown across YouTube and Google Display Network while not sacrificing performance.

PLACEMENTS: FACEBOOK AUTOMATIC PLACEMENT

When Facebook initially launched their ad platform in 2007, advertisers could only showcase ad units on the right-hand side of the news feed. Since then, similar to Google, Facebook includes a laundry list of inventory where advertisers can purchase media, including Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook’s related mobile apps, mobile websites, Instant Articles, and videos. In June 2019, the platform slowly started to introduce Instagram Explore as an additional placement for advertisers to display creative messaging. By October 2019, Facebook Search will also be available to all advertisers.

Despite the platform increasing their available inventory, the feed still continues to be Facebook’s primary source of advertiser revenue and to drive bottom-line results. At The Richards Group, we’ve tested bidding on placements in addition to the feed across dozens of in-house clients. Some campaigns have allocated 98 percent of total media spend toward feed placements and up to 95 percent of total trackable conversions.

Advertisers are strongly encouraged to bid on automatic placements to achieve more efficient campaigns by selecting all available inventory. In 2019, 68 percent of competitor agencies have started adopting automatic placements or using at least four placements. Facebook’s bidding system leverages machine learning to help automate where ads are seen to maximize results. The trade-off, however, is limited visibility in where the platform is prioritizing spend.

50 UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION

The bidding system is designed to get the best results at the lowest cost on the campaign level, not necessarily by individual placements – this can be misleading when we look at more granular-level reports. For example, let’s say an advertiser opted in to automatic placements through Facebook and Instagram. The platform will look across all placements and predict where the opportunities are.

In this example, even though Facebook and Audience Network placements look more efficient on average, the system predicted that the cost of Audience Network placements was going to rise and shifted budget.

Source: facebook.com

The lack of visibility in automatic placements affects how agencies should approach creative storytelling. When bidding across channels, agencies need to be smarter about how to develop creative that resonates in a variety of placement experiences.

AUTOMATED BIDDING: GOOGLE SMART BIDDING AND RESPONSIVE ADS

Local Ads aren’t the only product that Google is moving into “black box” territory. From bidding strategies to search ad copy, Google continues to move more and more pieces of their advertising business into automation.

Google’s Smart Bidding algorithms differ from traditional cost-per-click bids as they are automated to optimize toward specific goals. Whether advertisers want to drive website conversions, maximize traffic to their website, target a specific return on ad spend (ROAS), or target a goal impression share, these automated bidding strategies take keyword-by-keyword optimization management out of the hands of agencies and put them under the trust of Google’s algorithms.

Conversely, Google’s responsive search ads use a variety of headline and description variants to create ad copy optimized for performance. While advertisers can see how each piece of ad copy is performing at a high level via a “best/good” rating, they do not have any control over which pieces are served nor are they able to get impression totals for each line of copy.

While these solutions may work for a large majority of advertisers, it’s important for agencies to recognize that each campaign is nuanced and these automated bidding strategies may not work across the board. For example, Smart Bidding strategies such as maximize conversions may work to generate certain website actions, but they cannot accurately put weight behind multiple conversion actions happening on a page. This may cause lower-value conversions to generate higher volume than other actions that advertisers deem to be of higher value.

The role of agencies and media planners continues to be a critical piece to an effective Google strategy. From having a deep understanding of the client’s goals to having the ability to implement a nuanced strategy that can achieve these goals, agencies bring experience and expertise to advertisers’ Google campaigns that automation simply cannot match.

51 UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION

AUTOMATED BIDDING: FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN BUDGET OPTIMIZATION

Campaign Budget Optimization was introduced in November 2017 as an alternative bidding strategy. Instead of controlling spending by individual targeting, Campaign Budget Optimization looks at the campaign holistically across all audiences and placements within the same campaign to determine where the lowest cost per action or the highest return on ad spend is projected to be. This update was especially useful for small businesses – Campaign Budget Optimization became the solution to simplify difficult budgeting questions and inform daily spending. Simplifying daily spending decisions would also free up valuable time: Advertisers could spend less time establishing daily budgets and instead focus on higher-level strategy and optimizations.

Source: Campaign Budget Optimization compared to manual bidding strategies

Starting in September 2019, Campaign Budget Optimization became a fixed default across all accounts. While beneficial in creating efficient campaigns, it will impact the way advertisers build and strategize for campaigns.

One of the main drawbacks in simplifying the bidding process is less flexibility and limited optimization in how the platform prioritizes spend. For example, let’s say that an advertiser’s end goal is to raise online donations for a nonprofit brand. The advertiser would likely buy and plan for media around this goal. In this example, let’s say they launched the following audience segments:

Audience that’s interested in competitor nonprofits: $1.26 ROAS

Audience that’s most similar to historical donors: $2.00 ROAS

Campaign Budget Optimization would likely allocate the majority of budget to the audience that’s most similar to users that have historically donated because they have a more profitable ROAS. But what if the first audience had more recurring donations compared to the second? Even though the first-time donation looks less profitable for this audience segment, the projected lifetime value might be worth paying the extra premium. Campaign Budget Optimization wouldn’t be able to differentiate this nuance.

52 UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

As both platforms place an emphasis in automating their advertising platforms, the role of media planners and subject matter experts will likely shift to a strategic focus. In this new automated landscape, it is important that brands have clearly defined goals and an experienced agency that understands what mixture of each channel best achieves these goals and how to maximize return from each.

Platforms become more accessible for small businesses by automating day-to-day responsibilities.

Signals a trend to automate all digital campaigns within Google and Facebook, with more data signals to optimize what would be difficult to do manually (smarter campaigns).

Demand for experienced agencies to assist with technical setup and optimizations given lack of flexibility.

Think about creative messaging across inventory and multiple placements.

Conor MacDowell

Talk about your finely tuned instruments.

After graduating from Kent State University in 2006 with a BA in advertising, Conor moved to New York City and spent the next eight years managing paid search and affiliate marketing initiatives for Apple iTunes, Walmart, Lending Tree, Office Depot, and Guthy-Renker. CONOR MACDOWELL: Working with Fortune 500 clients in such a fast-paced environment clearly helped Conor hone his skills to Brand Media/ absolute pitch perfection. Group Head–Search

Speaking of finely tuned, while still at Kent State, Conor minored in classical guitar and was a member of the Kent State Guitar Ensemble. He has spent most weekends since then in local guitar shops, fretting over his Slash impression. (Sans the top hat. And the hair, for that matter.)

Conor joined The Richards Group in 2017, lending his expertise to brands including Firehouse Subs, Cardinal Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, and Charles Schwab. Having quickly embraced life as a Texan, he is probably searching Google for cowboy boots as you read this.

Ann Peter

Ann’s experience is wide-ranging. Seriously. As a solo traveler, she’s explored the culture and countryside of Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Iceland, England, Malaysia, and Thailand. So she knows firsthand how to connect with new people and their stories.

Past lives as a digital marketer in Washington, DC, and a policy debate coach in Chicago gave Ann an even greater understanding of the overlapping arts of listening, speaking, and appreciating all that ANN PETER: Social Media/Planner differentiates and unites us.

It only makes sense, then, that Ann would take her skill set into the social sphere, where an entire interconnected world is eager to hear and tell stories. Since joining The Richards Group in 2018, Ann has helped lead online conversations with The Salvation Army, Farm Bureau Financial Services, and Hobby Lobby. She specializes in scaling social connections from the personal to the brand- and bottom line-altering. And she very much looks forward to her next international adventure.

53 THE ANTI-AESTHETIC 1

Every cultural phenomenon that rises to define a generation seems to be followed by an underlying youth counterculture that challenges the social norm. The post-war consumerism and conformity of the 1950s gave way to a radical freedom and rebellion counterculture in the 1960s. The corporate greed yuppies of the 1980s set the stage for the teenage slackers who made up the grunge subculture in the 1990s. Most recently, the Pinterest-perfect, Instagram-flawless social media profiles that defined the 2010s will fuel a more digital anarchy among teens in the 2020s.

The Anti-Aesthetic: The rejection of a curated feed in favor of an unfiltered look that shapes a more authentic LAUREN KAINDL: Brand Planning sense of self-expression.

I know what you’re thinking. This isn’t anything new.

#nofilter has been a thing for almost a decade.

For those who opt for a filter, apps that make it look like photos were taken on a disposable film camera have already filled the feeds of big-name influencers like Selena Gomez, Millie Bobby Brown, and Kim Kardashian West.

54 THE ANTI-AESTHETIC

And Finstas are so common among teenagers that even the TODAY show is warning parents about them.

But if the only difference between a fading fad and a true trend is staying power, the Anti-Aesthetic is not only here to stay, but it is gaining momentum as we head into the new decade. That’s because this modern form of rebellion illuminates an underlying shift in mindsets between generations.

For starters, living in the complicated world of social media just comes naturally and intuitively to today’s teens. These are people who are growing up alongside the Internet. Their earliest memories are riddled with smartphones and tablets. Their wildest curiosities could be explored with a quick Google search. Their understanding of the world has always been just one notification away from the latest headlines. This generation has not needed to grow accustomed to the rapid updates that demand our attention at all hours of the day. They expect it. In their digital world, spontaneous immediacy trumps perfectly filtered, polished, and produced. They treat every post as the next stream-of-consciousness sentence in a fast-paced and unfolding digital conversation.

But even for these digitally savvy natives, having a universe at their disposal can be exhausting to navigate. “Infobesity” is a cute name for a real epidemic with real consequences: shorter attention spans, worse memory, and limited development of problem-solving skills. To avoid feeling overwhelmed with information, the younger, evolved generation has developed a rigorous BS filter to be more selective about what they devote their attention to. They have been trained to question the validity of everything. Don’t believe the fake news. Don’t fall for the click-bait. Don’t blindly trust the strangers you connect with online. It was a lesson that Gen Xers and Millennials learned the hard way, but one that this new generation has actively guarded themselves against. They crave authenticity from the content they consume.

With this strict filter working in overdrive, these individuals have honed their ability to curate the content they post on their own social media channels. With every scroll through their news feeds, they are constantly studying the tiny nuances of each social media channel. They appreciate that each platform can be a tool to define a different version of themselves. Gen Zers don’t want to be limited to just one identity. As the most diverse generation in America’s history, they love the opportunity to traverse through all the subcultures of which they are members to show various sides of their personality. While a refined and professional persona does deserve a place in their social media lineup, so too does their messy, rough-around-the-edges persona.

Finally, as they post their way through identity exploration, they do so much more visually than we’ve ever seen before. “They’re more comfortable communicating in a visual rather than verbal way,” says Ellen Eastaugh, RPA’s strategic planner and Gen Z researcher. They are developing new ideas about creativity and applying them to every aspect of their life. Grainy photos and orbs of light are just tools of free-form self-expression that get further amplified with tools like Giphy, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitch that reward unfiltered but not spurious forms of creation in their daily engagement with the world they inhabit.

55 THE ANTI-AESTHETIC

In contrast, the mindset of the Millennial generation is flawlessness. Entrepreneurial. Striving. Self-optimizing through the seamless use of technology to craft a unique “personal brand” that could be deemed worthy of others’ attention both at the time of posting and in the future. It’s no wonder that the idea of “influencers” was born out of the digital behavior of this generation.

But the Gen Z rebels aren’t buying it. Armed with their powerful cyber superpowers, they are skeptical of the very social media platforms that have quietly and powerfully shaped influencer culture. To prevent information overload, they are well-versed in sorting through the “fake news” and brand-sponsored sellout posts that take away the relatability and feeling of connection for which these channels were built. They have an outlet to show a different side of themselves and the creative ability to do so.

But is this just creativity for creativity’s sake? During a time when we have even more sophisticated tools at our disposal to take the most professional-looking photos, why is a grainy, oversaturated, and occasionally light-streaked look the chosen method of rebellion?

56 THE ANTI-AESTHETIC

I don’t think that the ’90s-style rival is by accident. We see it popping up in fashion. We see it all over meme culture references and TikTok trends. There is a deep appreciation for a time period that the majority of these people have not even lived through, a nostalgia over simpler times they never experienced firsthand. The Anti-Aesthetic pays homage to a past that feels absolutely genuine to its core compared to the virtual/augmented/digital, aka fake, reality in which we are currently living. Compared to past generations, this is the first group that won’t have physical items to serve as connections to older people and older times. Sure, this treatment of a picture on social media doesn’t really help much in that regard, but it is another example of this younger group actively grasping for the authenticity that can stand the test of time.

This is a shift that is causing a lot of brands to take notice. First and foremost, Instagram announced in May that they were experimenting with hiding the number of likes from their social feed. An Instagram spokesperson explained that they were testing the change because “we want your followers to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.” Chipotle adopted this absurdist, Anti-Aesthetic tone throughout their social media ecosystem in an effort to drive greater daily relevance in the feeds of their most active guests. Although it must be acknowledged that this is just one of the many initiatives Chipotle has pursued in the digital realm as they revamp their marketing strategy following public relations and operational challenges. Chipotle’s adoption of this approach may differ from the blunt, unpolished style of another Anti-Aesthetic early adopter – Balenciaga – but it reflects a transparency and willingness to share the imperfect that truly defines the Anti-Aesthetic ethos.

To truly connect with this sophisticated generation, brands are challenged to have a deeper understanding of their target audience and to create content that closely mirrors the real-life experiences that are actually relevant to these users. It’s a risky move to ditch the perfection for blurry, grainy, low-resolution pictures – and despite appearing to be solely a stylistic choice, adopting the Anti-Aesthetic reflects a deeper strategic decision to connect using the language of your audience. For such a skeptical, Anti-Aesthetic generation, it may be the key to building a real connection with these important individuals.

How can brands respond to this trend?

Have a clear understanding of your target audience(s) and what they expect from your brand. Brands with younger, more skeptical audiences and those intending to stake out first-mover positions will be among the first to be interested in this trend. But Anti-Aesthetic creative is not right for all audiences, regardless of age, mindset, or historical role in culture. How your target audience reacts to music, fashion, and the broader entertainment industry will give you clues as to how they may engage with more adventurous communications from brands.

Look deeper at the conversations you are having with your customers – how they incorporate your products and services in their own expressions, how they communicate among themselves – and learn to speak the language. Understand that there may be more subtext involved in each piece than immediately meets the eye. Unvarnished does not mean lazy or unconcerned.

Seek meaningful partnerships and collaborations with groups or individuals fluent with Anti-Aesthetic creation. They will help your brand find an approach to this space that is welcomed, or at least endorsed, by those already on the inside.

57 THE ANTI-AESTHETIC

Lauren Kaindl

Lauren believes in the power of people. It’s not like she had any choice–she was born into a family of six. An extended family of 82. Her high school senior class numbered over a thousand, and her college population pushed 50 times that. So other than “strength in numbers,” what did she learn from all this company? She gained a great appreciation for the power of stories. Of the strength in shared experience, and the welcome delight of individuality. Channeling both of these for her favorite brands became Lauren’s mission, so a career in brand planning came almost as second nature. LAUREN KAINDL: Brand Planning Lauren’s path to Dallas took her from McKinney in North Carolina to Cramer- Krasselt in New York before she landed at The Richards Group in late 2017. Her current clients include Cache Creek Casino Resort and The Home Depot. A “dog mom” soccer player with a weekend arcade-bar gig, Lauren loves to experience culture as much as she loves to influence it. For her, that mostly means gathering stories from all sorts of people as often as possible.

58 REFERENCES

STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU BY MALLORIE RODAK

1. Thompson, Derek. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.

2. “Tsundoku: The Art of Buying Books and Never Reading Them.” BBC News, July 29, 2018. 3. “10 Key Marketing Trends for 2017 and Ideas for Exceeding Customer Expectations.” IBM Marketing Cloud.

4. Kemp, Simon. “Digital Trends 2019: Every Single Stat You Need to Know About the Internet.” The Next Web.

5. Wolf, Maryann. “Skim Reading Is the New Normal. The Effect on Society Is Profound.” The Guardian, August 25, 2018.

6. Mele, Christopher. “Too Many Favorite Shows? Take Them in at High Speed.” The New York Times, December 12, 2016.

7. Lanquist, Lindsey. “I Speed Up Every TV Show, Movie, and Podcast I Consume.” Self, April 23, 2018.

8. “Structuring Content Through Timeboxing.” Story Needle, July 3, 2019.

9. Schaefer, Mark. “Content Shock: Why Content Marketing Is Not a Sustainable Strategy.”

10. “As Attention Spans Get Shorter, Content Gets Even Shorter – What Would Ken Burns Do?” HuffPost, January 12, 2018.

11. Zajonc, R.B. “Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal.” Sage Journals, December 1, 2001.

12. Fombrun, Charles and Shanley, Mark. “What’s in a Name? Reputation Building and Corporate Strategy.” The Academy of Management Journal, 1990.

13. Compare Memes and Jesus. Google Trends.

14. Cuomo, Jason. “The Meme Files: ‘Me Explaining’ and Abstract Familiarity.” The Georgetown Voice, July 3, 2019.

15. Aslan, Erhan. “The Surprising Academic Origins of Memes.” The Conversation, February 12, 2018.

16. Shorin, Toby. “Report: The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics.” Subpixel Space, September 14, 2018.

17. Weiden+Kennedy. “How to Catch Lightning in a Bottle.” Medium, May 4, 2017.

18. Tyree, Andrew. “25+ Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the US in 2019.” Digital Marketing Community, April 30, 2019.

19. Swant, Marty. “Every Ad Is a Tide Ad: Inside Saatchi and P&G’s Clever Super Bowl Takeover Starring David Harbour.” Adweek, February 4, 2018.

20. Tide Super Bowl Commercial 2018 It’s a Tide Ad. YouTube.

21. Magill, Ken. “How Purple Nets Viral Hits Out of Video Ads About Mattresses.” Marketing Dive, July 24, 2017.

22. Monllos, Kristina. “Why DTC Mattress Brand Purple Is Spending More Money on TV.” Digiday, July 1, 2019.

23. Unlock Your Hidden Potential When the Fourth Awakens. YouTube.

24. Purple Channel. YouTube.

25. Original Prongles.

26. Machado, Fernando. “The Inside Story of the Burger King Campaign That Changed the Brand’s Entire Outlook on Marketing.” Adweek, May 17, 2019.

27. Griner, David. “How Geico Became the One Advertiser It’s OK to Love.” Adweek, February 5, 2019.

28. Jardine, Alexandra. “Geico’s Halloween Campaign Stars a Witch With Her Own Cooking Show.” Ad Age, September 30, 2019.

29. “Formal Bayesian Theory of Surprise Home Page.” iLab, University of Southern California.

59 REFERENCES

SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY PATRICK O’NEILL AND KYLE DAVIS

1. “Episode 1: The Alibi.” Serial.

2. Podcast Analytics & Attribution. Chartable.

3. White, Jordan. “In the Race to Turn Podcasts Into TV Shows, the Podcasts Are Winning.” The Verge, January 8, 2019.

4. Maron, Marc. “Episode 613 – President Barack Obama.” Stitcher, June 22, 2015.

5. “New BMW Owner Demographics: Income, Age, Gender and More.” Hedges & Company.

6. Callahan, Sean. “‘Wall Street Journal’ Readers Have Highest Household Income, According to MRI.” Ad Age, November 18, 2009.

7. My Favorite Murder.

8. Lee, Wendy. “Podcast Listening Has Reached a Zenith – Thanks to Millennials.” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2019.

9. Revisionist History.

10. “Episode 348: Josef Mengele Part I – The Rise of Eugenics.” Last Podcast on the Left.

11. “The Podcast Spit.” 23andMe Blog, September 14, 2018.

12. “Episode 14: Why Is Everyone So Nice?” Inside Trader Joe’s.

13. “Out of the Darkness, Episode I.” On Life & Land, The Furrow.

14. Werblow, Steve. “Out of the Darkness.” The Furrow.

15. Lee, Wendy. “Spotify’s Deal Signals a Golden Era of Podcasting.” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2019.

16. Segers, Grace and Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. “Howard Schultz Tells “60 Minutes” He’s “Seriously Thinking” About Independent Run for President.” CBS News, January 27, 2019.

THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM BY SARAH WALKER-HALL AND KELLY PILAND

1. “Americans More Loyal and Willing to Defend Purpose-Driven Brands, According to New Research by Cone.” Cone, a Porter Novelli Company, May 30, 2018.

2. “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2019.” Pew Research Center, April 11, 2019.

3. Sweeney, Erica. “53% of Consumers Believe Brands Can Do More to Solve Social Problems Than Governments.” Marketing Dive, October 5, 2018.

4. Parker, Kim. “The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education.” Pew Research Center, August 19, 2019.

5. Jones, Jeffrey M. “Presidential Moral Leadership Less Important to Republicans.” Gallup, May 29, 2018.

6. “In Brands We Trust?” 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report.

7. Fitzgerald, Maggie. “The CEOs of Nearly 200 Companies Just Said Shareholder Value Is No Longer Their Main Objective.” CNBC, August 19, 2019.

8. Pelley, Scott. “Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Says He’s Considering Independent Run for President.” 60 Minutes, January 27, 2019.

60 REFERENCES

TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE BY LUKE DAMOMMIO

1. “2020 Attention Tracker.” Axios.

2. “Earned Brand 2018.” Edelman, October 2, 2018.

3. Buss, Dale. “Popularity of Jeep’s Digital-Only Ad Ratifies Fiat Chrysler’s New Super Bowl Strategy.” Forbes, February 5, 2019.

4. Perrin, Nicole. “Political Ad Spend to Reach $6 Billion for 2020 Election.” eMarketer, July 19, 2019.

5. Chadha, Rahul. “Consumers Want Brands to Take a Stand.” eMarketer, January 17, 2018.

6. Jagannathan, Meera. “Equinox Could Experience Lasting Damage From the Anti-Trump Boycott, Despite Other Companies Escaping Unscathed.” MarketWatch, August 14, 2019.

7. Marzilli, Ted. “One Year After Jenner Ad Crisis, Pepsi Recovers But Purchase Consideration Hasn’t.” YouGov, April 17, 2018.

8. “Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2019 Index.” Ad Age, June 23, 2019.

9. 2019 Twitter Business Calendar.

10. The LGBTQAlphabet | Powered by Pride | Equinox. YouTube.

11. Lockwood, Lisa. “SoulCycle to Launch Pride Collection.” Women’s Wear Daily, June 6, 2017.

12. Smith, Alexander. “Pepsi Pulls Controversial Kendall Jenner Ad After Outcry.” NBC News, April 5, 2017.

13. Nike TV Commercial, ‘Dream Crazy’ Featuring Colin Kaepernick. iSpot.tv.

14. Jeep “Big Game Blitz” | OneRepublic | “More Than Just Words.” YouTube.

15. “A Man Like You” | A Short Film From Harry’s. YouTube.

16. We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (Short Film). YouTube.

COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT BY TREY GREEN AND HELINA SEYOUM

1. Buff, Christina. “Literally Nobody Asked for This KFC Streetwear Collaboration.” Revelist, November 15, 2018.

2. Jones, Riley. “Adidas Unveils More Sneakers in Collaboration With Arizona Iced Tea.” Sole Collector, August 20, 2019.

3. Denton, Elizabeth. “ColourPop and Halo Top Are Collaborating for a New Makeup Line That’s Inspired by Ice Cream.” Insider, July 19, 2019.

4. Subair, Eni. “The IKEA x Virgil Abloh Collection Is Finally Dropping & Here Are the Pictures.” Refinery29, October 10, 2019.

5. Sawyer, Jonathan. “Human Made & KFC Debut NIGO-Designed Collection.” Highsnobiety, November 14, 2018.

6. Boatman-Harrell, Jamier. “Here’s Every Piece From HUMAN MADE’s Collaboration With KFC.” Hypebeast, November 14, 2018.

61 REFERENCES

BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE BY LAKEN FACCIO

1. Weissbrot, Alison. “Amazon Wades Deeper Into Influencer Marketing With Influencer Storefronts.” Ad Exchanger, September 16, 2019.

2. “The Rundown: Content and Commerce Gets a Second Look.” Digiday, September 12, 2019.

3. Sullivan, Laurie. “Search Contributes to Mobile Influence of $1 Trillion in Retail Sales.” MediaPost, April 26, 2017.

4. Chu, Franklin. “Why China Ecommerce Is Going Crazy for WeChat Mini-Programs.” Digital Commerce 360, April 16, 2019.

5. Willens, Max. “New York Media Is Bringing The Strategist to the UK.” Digiday, September 12, 2019.

6. Caldwell, Georgina. “Sephora Appeals to Chinese Shoppers With WeChat Program, Z Tao as Brand Ambassador and Concept Store.” Global Cosmetics News, September 12, 2018.

7. Herman, Barbara. “The Future of Commerce and Payments.” FutureVision: The Commerce Evolution, R/GA.

8. Nwokeabia, Benjamin. “Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Trends Roundup 2019.” eMarketer, September 5, 2019.

9. Zheng, Ruonan. “WeChat Leads the Future of Luxury Social E-Commerce With Mini Program.” Jing Daily, April 17, 2019.

10. Graziani, Thomas. “What Are WeChat Mini-Programs? A Simple Introduction.” Walk the Chat, October 6, 2018.

11. Griffith, Erin. “Paying Is Voluntary at This Selfie-Friendly Store.” The New York Times, September 13, 2018.

12. “Voice Ordering for Walmart Grocery Pickup & Delivery.” Walmart.

13. Schneier, Matthew. “Instagram Introduces Shoppable Influencers.” The New York Times, April 30, 2019.

14. Google Lens. Google

15. Wolf, Cam. “At Hypefest, the Brands Won’t Save You – But the Teens Might.” GQ, October 8, 2018.

16. Eng, Eddie. “Livestream the Battle at the Berrics 11th Annual S.K.A.T.E. Competition.” Hypebeast, December 7, 2018.

17. Steinberg, Don. “Celebs Will Say Anything if You Blast Them With Hot Sauce.” The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2018.

18. Dirty Lemon.

19. Decker, Vivienne. “Text-to-Buy: Wellness Beverage Company Dirty Lemon Pioneers a New Retail Model.” Forbes, Januar y 26, 2017.

20. Colette Prime. Amazon.

A NEW SOCIAL ORDER BY AUBRI ELLIOTT

1. Wiltshire, Emma. “The Rise of the Story Format [Infographic].” Social Media Today, February 2, 2018.

2. Southern, Matt. “Instagram Stories Are Viewed by 500 Million Users Per Day.” Search Engine Journal, January 31, 2019.

3. O’Dea, Bridianne. “Social Networking Sites, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review.” JMIR Mental Health, November 23, 2016.

4. Ghosal, Abhimanyu. “Instagram Now Lets You Mute Annoying People Without Unfollowing Them.” The Next Web, May 23, 2018.

5. “Instagram Now Lets You Share Pics With Just ‘Close Friends’.” Wired, November 30, 2018.

62 REFERENCES

6. Tabaka, Marla. “Forget Millennial Purchasing Power. Gen Z Is Where It’s At.” Inc., April 23, 2018.

7. Viens, Ashley. “Visualizing Social Media Use by Generation.” Visual Capitalist, September 21, 2019.

DEEPFAKES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURKY BY JAYR SOTELO

1. Deepfake. YouTube.

2. Deepfake. Google.

3. Ctrl Shift Face. YouTube.

4. The Corridor Crew. YouTube.

5. Knight, Will. “Even the AI Behind Deepfakes Can’t Save Us From Being Duped.” Wired, October 2, 2019.

6. Chen, Angela. “Three Threats Posed by Deepfakes That Technology Won’t Solve.” MIT Technology Review, October 2, 2019.

7. Balasubramaniyan, Vijay. “Deepfakes and Voice as the Next Data Breach.” HelpNetSecurity, October 21, 2019.

8. Sabir, Ekraam; Cheng, Jiaxin; Jaiswal, Ayush; AbdAlmageed, Wael; Masi, Iacopo; and Natarajan, Prem. “Recurrent Convolutional Strategies for Face Manipulation Detection in Videos.” USC Information Sciences Institute, May 16, 2019.

9. Kelly, Makena. “Instagram Will Leave Up Deepfake Video of Mark Zuckerberg.” The Verge, June 11, 2019.

10. Elf Yourself.

11. RealTalk: We Recreated Joe Rogan’s Voice Using Artificial Intelligence. YouTube.

12. Vincent, James. “This AI-Generated Joe Rogan Fake Has to Be Heard to Be Believed.” The Verge, May 17, 2019.

UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION BY CONOR MACDOWELL AND ANN PETER

1. Sterling, Greg. “Almost 70% of Digital Ad Spending Going to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Says Analyst Firm.” Marketing Land, June 17, 2019.

2. Biddle, Sam. “Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document.” The Intercept, April 13, 2018.

3. “Campaign Budget Optimization.” Facebook Business.

4. De Poulpiquet, Pierre. “What Is a Walled Garden? And Why It Is the Strategy of Google, Facebook and Amazon Ads Platform?” Medium, November 3, 2017.

63 REFERENCES

THE ANTI-AESTHETIC BY LAUREN KAINDL

1. Lorenz, Taylor. “The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over.” The Atlantic, April 23, 2019.

2. Spinks, Rosie. “The Age of the Influencer Has Peaked. It’s Time for the Slacker to Rise Again.” Quartz, April 27, 2019.

3. #nofilter. Instagram.

4. Selena Gomez. Instagram.

5. Millie Bobby Brown. Instagram.

6. Kim Kardashian West. Instagram.

7. Varma-White, Kavita. “Parents: You Follow Your Teen on Instagram, But Do You Know About Their Finsta?” TODAY, October 17, 2017.

8. Ophir, Eyal; Nass, Clifford; and Wagner, Anthony D. “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, August 24, 2009.

9. Uncapher, Melina R. and Wagner, Anthony D. “Minds and Brains of Media Multitaskers: Current Findings and Future Directions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, December 6, 2017.

10. Baumgartner, Susanne E.; van der Schuur, Winneke A.; Lemmens, Jeroen S.; and te Poel, Fam. “The Relationship Between Media Multitasking and Attention Problems in Adolescents: Results of Two Longitudinal Studies.” Human Communication Research, Oxford Academic, January 1, 2018.

11. Levin, Dan. “Generation Z: Who They Are, in Their Own Words.” The New York Times, March 28, 2019.

12. “Who Are You on Social Media? New Research Examines Norms of Online Personas.” EurekAlert!, American Association for the Advancement of Science, April 11, 2017.

13. Von Sadovszky, Mia and Watts, Jess. “Identity Shifters – an RPA Report.” Rubin Postaer and Associates.

14. Wu, Jasmine. “The 90s Are Back. Here Are the Companies Trying to Cash in – and the Ones That Are Failing.” CNBC, August 3, 2019.

15. Scott, Kristina. “The Evolution of Internet Memes.” Medium, June 10, 2018.

16. Kiley, Rachel. “TikTok Users Are Traveling Back to Previous Decades in This POV Meme.” The Daily Dot, May 30, 2019.

17. My Mom’s Motorcycle: My Rode Reel. YouTube.

18. Fitzgerald, Madeline. “Instagram Starts Test to Hide Number of Likes Posts Receive for Users in 7 Countries.” Time, July 18, 2019.

19. Chipotle. Instagram.

20. Sparks, Daniel. “Chipotle’s Digital Sales Are Soaring. Here’s Why.” The Motley Fool, July 24, 2019.

21. Monllos, Kristina. “Inside Chipotle’s TikTok Strategy.” Digiday, July 26, 2019.

22. Balenciaga. Instagram.

64 Have a question or would like to debate a particular trend? Please feel free to contact us. We love this stuff.

Ten Digital Trends for 2020

2801 North Central Expressway Suite 100 Dallas, TX 75204-3663 214-891-5700