As we all enjoy the magnificent Paris Olympics this iconic image from the 1968 Mexico Olympics springs to mind.
The picture is of Dick Fosbury who revolutionised High Jump when he started to do the Fosbury Flop, whilst everyone else stuck with the traditional scissor kick. He won a Gold Medal, set a new world record and changed the sport forever – although many of his rivals stuck with scissors for a while.
What was behind this revolution? Fosbury recognised the world had changed – because landing mats were now substantial enough to make landing on your back safe.
When things change, smart people change their approach.
Which is a great metaphor for marketing and I have used this image in talks and workshops many times.
A new study from OFCOM makes this really relevant again;
For the first time, less than half of 16 to 24-year-olds are now watching traditional TV – live and catch-up programming on a television set at home – each week.
Just 48% of young adults tuned in during an average week last year, compared with 76% just five years before (2018), according to Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report.
They watched traditional TV for an average of 33 minutes each day, down 16% year-on-year.
Remember that half hour includes the BBC, so chances are the average 16-24 sees just one ad break a day.
Which means scissor kick marketing no longer works. The classic model uses trad TV for reach and then cheaper media for frequency, reminding people of the hero ad. But if you can’t get that reach, reminders are redundant.
Smart marketers have solved some of the issues — many CPGs now spend enough on social media to deliver high reach digitally – but does the creative cut through like trad TV does (Did)?
The biggest challenge – and the biggest opportunity – is to develop digital creative that has the brand impact of the classic TV ad. I believe it’s perfectly possible but the talent is a little misaligned; how do we get big thinkers to focus on this huge opportunity?
It’s time to Flop.
An analysis of Nike by a former exec gets into this debate – blaming a shift to digital advertising and DTC for the poor performance of the business – which lost $billions in market cap. Lots of discussion on this and Eric Seufert talk good sense on the controversial views;
It tries to indict the concept of direct response marketing for the challenges Nike faces, to the exclusion of all others (e.g., soft demand in China).
•It depicts direct response marketing as being in diametric opposition to brand-building, which it isn’t. I’ve written about this extensively. Both of these tactics should fit into a broader performance marketing framework.
BTW we shared this reel of classic ads reimagined through AI – which includes a classic Nike ad featuring Spike Lee. Their new Olympics ad is a classic.
And here McKinsey share the advice they gave to Nike
Merchant
Considering why investors fell out of love with Ocado the FT take a good look at the challenges Ocado face as the online grocery world seems to be consolidating around picking and packing from existing stores.
Once Covid eased, shoppers returned to stores with surprising enthusiasm. Supermarkets refined the way they picked and packed online orders from stores, looking to maximise the efficiency of pre-existing assets that are close to customers rather than making big new capital investments.
“Ultimately every store can become more profitable,” says Roy Horgan, a senior executive vice-president at Vusion Group, which is pushing technology that improves the efficiency of physical stores.
“If a store is doing 10 per cent of their baskets online and you can improve the efficiency of that basket . . . by moving the pickers, fewer substitutions, fewer [instances] of picking up the wrong products, there are untold amounts of upside,” he adds.
Building distribution from stores is key and Morrisons have expanded their partnership with Just Eat so more products are available from more of their supermarkets and convenience stores
One huge opportunity for the delivery business is utilisation; adding other products to subside the sunk cost of a delivery. UPS and FedEx are concerned about Doordash and Instacart winning deliveries from Lowes and others. Amazon are expanding their fast delivery into rural areas threatening the hold of the US Postal Service.
Lots more people moving into ads – John Lewis are emulating their Waitrose sibling with a partnership with CitrusAds and GoPuff announce their inhouse ad platform – reporting improvements in performance. Walmart is now pitching their in store ads to new brands – citing the idea of insurance ads running on instore TV screens.
The New Consumer have published their Consumer Trends: 2024 Mid-Year Report. Good insight and data. And it’s free.
AI
Lots of press on Friend – an AI pendant that constantly listens and sends messages on the paired phone. Wired tell us more but it feels like a first try. I’ll wait and see what Jony Ives comes up with.
More examples of early use cases;
McKinsey on healthcare
Eagle Eye on loyalty
WPP & Nvidia making 3D ads
Because of limited access to Chips and regulatory issues, the Chinese AI industry is evolving differently to the West. A good Opinion piece in the FT looks to understand China’s pragmatic AI plan;
…while the US ecosystem has the edge in groundbreaking innovations, China excels in execution: finding product-market fit, scale, and making applications highly affordable.
Matt Brittin (President of Google EMEA) in conversation with DeepMind engineer Kareem Ayoub. They talk Long Context, Multi Modality and Agents. Worth a listen.
Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit? Goldman Sachs questioning whether the $trillion capex will ever pay off. There are other costs to consider – the environmental impact of AI is huge; already data centres in Ireland uses more electricity than all Irish homes combined.
Microsoft report highlights AI efforts around election misinformation and harmful deepfakes
Agencies
Another bold move by Publicis – they paid $500m for influencer marketing agency Influential. Last March, WPP acquired influencer marketing agency Goat, while Mark Penn’s Stagwell this week purchased the Tel Aviv-based digital agency Leaders along with its influencer campaign-planning software, InfluencerMarketing.AI but Influential is way bigger and has a great tech stack.
These tech buys have paid off for Publicis – historically they were a close second to WPP but now have a valuation of c $25bn – 2.5 times bigger than WPP.
Maybe the new chair of WPP can help change that? They have appointed former BT chief Philip Jansen as the new chair – The FT notes he oversaw a £3bn cost-cutting programme there.
newTV
The FT supports the point we have been making — Amazon is winning the ads war over Netflix with higher reach and lower prices
The “bundles” that advertisers buy — in different formats and with various services attached — can make direct comparisons difficult. But multiple executives at rival services, as well as advertising bosses, said Amazon was pricing its spots more cheaply than Netflix, although at a higher rate than others such as Disney
YouTube is having a good Olympics – their CEO Neal Mohan tells the FT
“We’ve seen the growth of YouTube being watched, being consumed on television screens. It’s not just the largest screen in the house, it’s our fastest-growing screen,” said Mohan, who took over as YouTube chief last year. “It’s not surprising because if you put yourself in the shoes of a consumer or a sports fan . . . that’s a great screen to actually consume that sort of content.”
YouTube, part of Google parent Alphabet, is not an official partner of the International Olympic Committee. However, it has deals with some of the biggest Olympics broadcasters, including NBCUniversal in the US and Warner Bros Discovery’s Eurosport in Europe, to carry highlights from Paris 2024.
Rejecting the last minute bid from Warner, the NBA have announced their new deal with NBC ESPN and Amazon and value the deal at $77bn. Disney are pleased to have secured the future of ESPN and explain the importance of the deal in a blog post. In a more prosaic deal CBS have agreed the rights for Championship football in the US. Looking forward to my next visit to the Football factory on 33rd to join the NY branch of Leeds supporters
ITV continue to invest in content with a deal to buy a majority stake in the Sherlock production company
And YouTube gets more accolades with Channel 4 News betting Youtube is ‘where podcast market growth really lies’
Warner have started talks about the UK rights for HBO – currently with Sky/Now but that deal expires when Warner Max launches in 2026. It seems unlikely Sky would lose access given they have 10m subscribers but exclusivity may change.
Adtech
Fix friends at the U of Digital had a good event on cookie deprecation – watch here
Shiv who comperes the discussion, shared a post on LinkedIn reminding us what happened last time a major platform switched its advertising identifier – TLDR – Apple cleaned up.