BrandKnew August 2022 by Brand Knew

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by 08.22#117

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Dear Friends This issue you are truly in august company when it comes to content versatility and depth. We take stock of where the Twitter brand will go from where it is today. On the other side of the spectrum, we talk about Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the kind of risks he has been taking. NFTs and brand loyalty seem to the new siamese twins on the block. Know more about it in this issue. The advertising industry is known for the fetishes that its professionals have. Understand them in this edition. In a day and age where print and newspaper’s obituary have been written many times over, it is an absolute wonder to see the digital transformation of The New York Times. Read about it in this issue. Content, connections, community and social media- the 3C effect to follow to build strong connections. We take a look at it in this edition. The Uber brand has been taking a lot of heat from people in the recent past. Know more about why there is no love lost for the brand here.The power of writing persuasive copy has never been more needed than in the post pandemic world. Thinking like a futurist can future-proof your job. Read about it here. There is ample more to soak in from in this edition and I leave you to just that. Till the next my very best.

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda

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CONTENTS How NFTs are unlocking brand loyalty Why sustainability is the industry’s greatest creative brief 5 Ways Brands Can Create An Equitable World In The Metaverse The Richest Person on Earth Breaks Every Rule, And You Should Too 5 Common Fetishes of the Advertising Professional The Doomsday Clock is ticking on the world’s biggest advertising festival Where does the Twitter brand go from here? 14 Creative Ways Marketers Can Use 360-Degree Images And Other Unique Visuals What We Can All Learn From the New York Times’s Amazing Transformation How brands can make the most out of the return to live experiences Can Amazon Prove It Has Style? Building Strong Connections With Your Social Media Content How to future-proof your job by thinking like a futurist Why people feel so little love for Uber’s brand Saudi-backed LIV Golf shows how ‘sportswashing’ can backfire Streaming platforms: Be brave, be brand-led How to Write Copy That Sells in a Post-Pandemic World Will The Latest Dramatic Evolution Of Holograms Be The Next Big Media Format? The data-driven future of storytelling: MIT’s Deb Roy on the message and the medium Mapping the metaverse: 4 critical concepts business leaders must focus on Book, Line & Sinker

How NFTs are unlocking brand loyalty By Marketing Mag Staff

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have taken the art world by storm by creating ways for musicians, designers, and other creatives to control how their work is distributed. Finder’s 2021 NFT Adoption Report found that 4.6 percent of Australian internet users currently own an NFT. However, the NFT market is growing at an exponential rate. The global market for NFTs recorded sales of AU$35 billion last year and according to Shopify research, more than one-quarter (27 percent) of Australian and New Zealand consumers said they will likely purchase an NFT this year. And, while some people think of NFTs as a passing fad or something for the cool kids, brands are tapping into NFTs to create deep connections with consumers and build long term loyalty. What are non-fungible tokens (NFTs)? “NFTs are non-fungible tokens stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger that stores a record of each transaction that takes place,” says Raj Kallem, Head of Development at the 1687 Club, an NFT-based membership club. It’s become common practice to attach digital content— such as art, music, or videos—to these tokens. A token is something that represents something else. In some instances, NFTs can be used to unlock certain consumer benefits — we call this tokengating — and in other instances NFTs are used for authentication and to prove ownership.

Let’s break down the phrase “non-fungible token”. “Fungible” means replaceable or mutually interchangeable. A spoon is an example of something fungible because it lacks unique properties and can therefore easily be replicated or replaced by an identical item. While “‘non-fungible’ simply means that the token is unique and not interchangeable. Real estate, land, and diamonds are examples of assets that are non-fungible because they have unique properties. Authentication is an important part of NFTs and blockchain technology. Even though people who don’t hold an NFT may be able to view or access digital content attached to someone else’s NFT, only one wallet can own the NFT. What is token gating? Token gating is “a way of adding more value to an NFT by allowing the holder exclusive access to a community, content, or even physical products in addition to the digital token,” Kallem says. For example, Shopify merchants have begun experimenting with token gating NFTs, a strategy that gives token holders access to exclusive products, experiences, early access to store openings, or invitations to members-only events.

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Ownership needs to be verified for NFT holders to receive access to tokengated perks. NFTs are owned and stored in a customer’s crypto wallet and tokengating works by peeking into a wallet to see if it has a particular NFT or not. A tokengating app on the online store is used to check the customer’s wallet to validate that it contains particular NFTs. The customer is prompted to allow the store to view their NFTs in their crypto wallet. After the online store confirms that the customer has the required NFTs, the customer can access the exclusive content. NFTs: the new loyalty program? Today, we’re seeing the exponential rise of brands that were born on the web and offer attractive online experiences and strong and loyal relationships with customers. With customer acquisition costs on the rise, brands are experimenting with new ways to foster a deeper connection to their customers. Things like customer loyalty programs and exploring new engagement channels has become increasingly important as brands invest in both short-term performance initiatives and long-term brand building to create lifelong customers and brand evangelists. For retailers, exclusive product access is one of the most practical tokengating use cases where limited edition items are only available to token holders as a way to reward loyal customers and fans. Tokengated commerce can also be used to access future

NFT releases and airdrops, as well as exclusive access to communities, including Discord channels, in-person events and retail store activations. In the US, many brands like the Chicago Bulls and Martha Stewart are beginning to experiment with NFTs. Shopify recently partnered with NFT collection, Doodles, at SXSW 2022 to create an immersive experience called Doodleland for festival-goers and Doodle NFT holders. While the event was open to everyone, Doodles customers could unlock all kinds of experiences, including exclusive access to apparel and limited-edition merchandise. Tokengating “yields amazing benefits because of the FOMO (fear of missing out) it can create,” says Ty Daniel Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of crypto brand marketing agency Coinbound. “Word of mouth is one of the most undervalued marketing variables, but tokengating truly proves a case for word of mouth’s ROI potential. When done correctly, NFT projects can go viral with a great concept and utilise tokengating.” While applications for blockchain technology are constantly evolving, the benefits are clear — it’s secure, builds buzz, and is a great way to build and reward brand loyalty. This is a really exciting moment in time for both brands and consumers. From crypto to NFTs and tokengated commerce, we’re witnessing the foundations of a world in which Web3 technologies are transforming the types of experiences brands create for their customers to build loyalty, community and connection.

Why sustainability is the industry’s greatest creative brief By Anna Lungley

At the Cannes Lions in 2019, Dentsu hosted a workshop for the Young Marketeers Academy – the future leaders of our industry. The workshop focused on the launch of #BrandsForGood, an initiative involving Sustainable Brands and household names including P&G, Visa, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Nat Geo. We talked about the need to make sustainable behaviours aspirational and rewarding, and accelerate the shift to plant based lifestyles, electric vehicles, renewable energy and a circular economy. The energy in the room was amazing. This is what Gen Z want to work on. Three years later the industry will convene again. And this time the call to action has become urgent. Sustainability is on everyone’s lips. And we are under pressure to change. This is no longer about purpose marketing. On 22nd April 2022, the IPCC released its final report. It included for the first time a chapter devoted to “|demand-side activation” – the need to create demand for low carbon products and services, to reduce dependency on the lifestyles that got us here in the first place. That’s a challenge directed at our industry. And the prize? A reduction of between 40% and 70% of global emissions. A prize worth fighting for. And the greatest creative brief we’ve ever been given. For the past 70 years, we’ve driven demand for products and services the world over with little consideration of the carbon emissions generated by those sales – or arguably the water consumed, or waste generated. It’s time to use this superpower in a more enlightened way. Cannes Lions – a chance for real change? At Cannes this year, there will be no escaping this debate. “Advertised emissions” has been hotly debated – a concept highlighted at COP26 by the Purpose Disruptors and longterm climate activists including Futerra’s chief executive Solitaire Townsend. It’s time to pick a side. But is this even up for debate? Our role as an industry is to help our clients, and their customers, plan for what’s next. A world where media plans are optimised for carbon, as well as performance. Where inclusive design is not optional, and where consumers will boycott your brand if they don’t believe it is acting in the best interest of society and the environment. It’s also our role to help our clients thrive, navigating the inevitable

disruption of the net-zero transformation. So, as all the biggest names, brightest creative minds and influential businesses unite on Le Croisette, we must not miss this chance to use that creative firepower to do more than congratulate ourselves on getting through the past two years – years marked by Covid, the climate crisis and conflict. The industry’s path to net zero We must leave Cannes with an action plan, united in a common goal and with the inspiration to help create change. To start, our commitments to sustainability – particularly net zero – must be authentic, transparent and underpinned by Science Based Targets, with plans to deliver demonstrable progress. We also need to recognise that net-zero is not just an environmental challenge – we need to think beyond carbon to adopt strategies, business and resourcing models that are net-zero, circular, restorative and inclusive. Strategies that work for people as well as our planet. Dentsu’s social impact strategy sets out targets across three pillars: a sustainable world, a fair and open society, and digital for good. They are deeply connected, and diversity, equity and inclusion run as a theme throughout. And we need to recognise that net-zero strategies apply to our entire value chain. That includes the products and services we sell to our clients, and the impact generated by them, both positive and negative. We have the opportunity to help our clients transform their business models, bring new and inclusive, low-carbon products and services to market, and – as highlighted in the IPCC report – inspire people to buy them. We can help consumers reduce meat consumption, rent clothes instead of buying them and buy electric cars over petrol. Every business needs to look through the lens of sustainability and reimagine the future using creativity and expertise to create a new status quo for consumerism. We can facilitate that. So, after two years that have changed how we work and live forever, we’re excited about the opportunity to come together again with colleagues from around the world to celebrate the best that this industry has to offer, and to recognise our ability to use our creativity and passion to be a force for good. Let’s make this moment count.

5 Ways Brands Can Create An Equitable World In The Metaverse By Achilleas Boukis

Marketers should serve humanity both in their vision of the future and the role of commerce The metaverse is marketing’s new shiny object. Countless brands from Microsoft to Benetton are looking to gain a foothold in the nascent 3D social network, where avatars will hang out in lounges, play games, share news and buy stuff—with real money. While some marketers are racing to these new platforms, others are sitting back to watch the successes and pitfalls of their peers before diving in. The metaverse offers the opportunity to re-envision the future. Rather than simply replicating video games or cartoon environments or putting the real world in virtual spaces, its technology gives creators and marketers a second chance to create a more perfect world—one that serves humanity and stretches our imagination. The brands that will win the race to envision our best future will be those who embrace a “protopian” view in their vision of the future and in the role of commerce in the metaverse. The protopian view We’ve all heard of utopian and dystopian societies—one that achieves perfection, the other marred by repression and fear and seen in gaming and science fiction (think “Dune,” “Blade Runner” and “Minority Report.” Protopian lives in between, defining a society that strives to be better by overcoming injustices and inequities. Abolishing slavery, universal suffrage, civil rights and same-

sex marriage are hallmarks of the protopian progress we have achieved, wrote author Michael Shermer in his 2015 book “The Moral Arc.” This is the template we should apply when thinking about the metaverse. Protopian movements already exist in the real world, so we can certainly create them in the metaverse. Here are five ways that brands entering the metaverse can promote a protopian vision for the future: Treat the planet like it’s your client The metaverse can be a transformative medium for promoting a greener economy. The building blocks of the metaverse—blockchain technology behind bitcoin and NFTs, augmented and mixed reality, AI and 3D Web— require enormous amounts of energy. Brands entering this space must measure the carbon footprint of their presence and find offsets. Companies need to balance this energy overload by using their R&D teams to invent and find new solutions, planting trees and funding renewable projects such as carbon capture. Invite more voices and perspectives to define the future If the future is to be diverse and inclusive of all sexes,

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then brands must make sure their Web3 technologies are fashioned by diverse creators. Right now, mostly white male developers are building the metaverse—only 24% of game developers worldwide are women—and people of color are even less represented. And the metaverse is already experiencing sexual harassment issues. A more inclusive team of builders will bring fresh ideas and a bright vision that avoids bias and negative stereotypes. The metaverse should reflect the population, with a plethora of choices for avatars, from skin tone to body type to gender and sexual orientation and beyond. Including builders of differing abilities and socioeconomic levels will ensure the metaverse is inclusive, democratized and respectful of all cultures. Make love not war Conflict encourages clicks, but can we shift focus to participatory engagement instead of competition and division? Brands building the metaverse can take cues from different kinds of thought leaders who project harmony, inclusiveness and a peaceful future. This is a chance to avoid all the pitfalls that have led to societal problems created via social media and gaming including societal polarization, mental health degradation and violence. Create a caring economy, not a sharing economy While many positives have come from sharing promoted

by some brands, including Uber and Airbnb, sharing apps have also helped to disrupt the economy. Instead, brands and tech firms should join in the caring economy—a system that promotes equality and opportunity and stewardship of the planet. Companies including Warby Parker, Patagonia and Tom’s have been giving back and thriving for years and their customers reward them with dollars. Brands’ metaverse presence should be free, fair and engaged with nature. Consider technology a servant, not master Many tech firms were launched by idealistic entrepreneurs trying to democratize society and create positive change, but it hasn’t always played out that way. Brands and tech firms must ask how technology can be of service to the vision of fostering a great civilization, not the almighty dollar. Benevolence, inclusion, cooperation, sharing and helping others are all markers of a great civilization. Consider how technology can service these masters. Use technology to educate and create empathy. The bottom line: Building and entering the metaverse donning rose-colored glasses is a recipe for failure. That doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands in apathy. The metaverse is a great opportunity to repair the damage of the past and move forward with incremental improvements from a protopian point of view.

The Richest Person on Earth Breaks Every Rule, And You Should Too By Liliana Pertenava

Who is Elon Musk? Is he an entrepreneur? An immigrant success story? A Twitter troll? Labels are important, because they give us context for what to expect from a person. Musk most recently earned the title of the richest person on earth, but I’d argue, “most influential person on Earth” might be more fitting. Musk’s influence is not a fluke. It’s a result of deliberately subverting norms and challenging expectations at every turn.

Though financial resources differ greatly among entrepreneurs, a calculated media strategy is something every entrepreneur can add to their toolkit. Let’s unpack Musk’s rise to fame, from his publicly celebrated business successes to his Twitter game, to see how any entrepreneur can take a note from Musk’s playbook. Strategy 1: Pour gasoline on the fire In the heat of the dotcom boom, Musk was sending sparks

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flying. In 1995 he founded Zip2, an internet company that provided city guides and business directories for newspapers, and four years later he became a dotcom millionaire. Zip2 sold for $307 million, and Musk took home $22 million. As public fascination with Silicon Valley grew, Musk invited the cameras to get a first-hand look at his success. When his millions started pouring in, he welcomed CNN over at 7 a.m. to witness the delivery of his new $1 million McLaren F1 sports car. Although it was difficult for the public to understand the inner workings of Silicon Valley and VC money, Musk created an instantly recognizable icon in his sports car. The media wanted a success story, and Musk gave them the ultimate interview. If you’re an entrepreneur, especially in a complex industry, consider how you can drop in on a pop culture wave. Strategy 2: Make your business personal Although conventional wisdom suggests business is not personal, Musk’s persona has become inseparable from Tesla and SpaceX. This is no accident. In his early ventures, Musk lost control of his own companies, learning the hard way that in business, everyone is replaceable. With Zip2, his investors appointed a more experienced leader, Richard Sorkin, to position the company for an acquisition. After his second company, X.com, became PayPal, he was again fired from his role as CEO while he was away from the office. With SpaceX and Tesla, Musk combined his personal goals with his business goals, tying his public persona to the performance of both companies and securing his place at the top. He even went as far as changing his job title at Tesla from CEO to Technoking. Everyone can be replaced. Think about how you can intertwine your public persona with your company objectives to keep your seat at the table. Strategy 3: Set unrealistic goals

mankind, Musk spends a calculated amount of time crafting his image. As a company leader, your role is bigger than keeping operations in order. Pursue unexpected engagements that can propel your company into the spotlight, and they will pay you back with bigger opportunities. Strategy 5: Say what’s on your mind Musk’s stunts range from unusual to contrarian, such as naming his newborn son, X Æ A-12 in 2020 and his daughter Exa Dark Sideræl in 2022. He uses Twitter like a personal playground, influencing stock prices of his own businesses and others using less than 280 characters. From comparing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler, to remembering Bernie Sanders is still alive, no one is off limits to Musk. Musk’s Tweets range from random Baby Yoda memes, to conversing with world leaders, to announcing important news about Tesla and SpaceX, such as the decision to no longer accept bitcoin. As an entrepreneur, remember that everything you post is a reflection of you and your business. When Musk posts nerdy memes, he’s affirming that he’s a part of a subculture that many of his customers associate with. When he offers emergency assistance to Ukraine, he’s demonstrating the viability of his business goals. When he posts updates about his business, he’s signaling to the world and his employees that he’s in charge. What appears random is all a part of the bigger media strategy. Think about the image and signals you want to convey, and engage accordingly. All entrepreneurs are rule-breakers You are where you are because you challenged a convention, did something in an unexpected way or created something new. Know your end goal, and craft your image around it. From there, you can determine which rules were made to be broken, and how you will bend them in your favor.

Rather than focusing on a clear path to profitability, Musk declares impossible feats to the world, such as getting humanity to Mars before he dies. People love rooting for success against all odds. As one of the richest and most powerful people in the world, Musk positions his companies as “Davids” by creating seemingly unbeatable “Goliaths.”

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Can Rituals Fix Our Soulless Corporate Culture? A Ritual Designer Says Yes, But Some Fear Giving Even More of Themselves to the Office.

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These College Kids Bought a Custom T-Shirt Company With Their Bar Mitzvah Money. Now It’s a $40 Million Business.

Strategy 4: Ignore your lane

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5 Streams of Income That Will Grow Your Wealth

Entrepreneurs know that the key to success is to stay laserfocused on their goals and objectives. Yet while Musk is so busy that he sleeps on an uncomfortable couch at the office, he always has time for the spotlight.

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This Cult-Favorite Pottery Brand Was Founded by the Great-Grandson of Henri Matisse. Now, Its Factory Is an Experiment in Equitable Labor Practices.

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Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Missing the Mark? Here’s How to Tell.

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‘There’s Often No Right Answer’: A Famous Economist Explains the Smartest Way to Tackle Life’s ‘Wild Problems’

With the exception of Bill Nye, most scientists aren’t drawn to the big screen. Except Musk, who can be spotted in Iron Man 2 rubbing shoulders with Tony Stark, on South Park and The Simpsons, and hanging out with Howard on The Big Bang Theory. For someone focused on advancing

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5 Common Fetishes of the Advertising Professional By Ryan Goodpaster

Did you find it hard to choose what to wear today? Or what to eat for breakfast? If so, you’re not alone. According to the American Psychology Association, 32% of adults are so stressed they struggle to make everyday decisions. Much has changed over the past two years. From hoarding and unprecedented DIY projects to supply chain disruptions and mass unemployment, to social unrest and the Great Resignation, the pandemic has radically altered our outlook in many ways. The issue of mental space existed well before COVID-19 hit, but the barrage of events over the last two years has made it even more challenging for people. As the APA study indicates, a large number of us simply have less headspace available than we did before the pandemic. It’s a significant shift, and one that prompts profound questions for those leading brands. Perhaps it’s time to declare a ceasefire in the decades-long battle for mindshare and find a new way for brands to be relevant to people’s lives. MOVING ON FROM MINDSHARE First and foremost, the old tropes of adland need to be radically overhauled. It was back in 198o that Al Ries and Jack Trout urged brands to seize mindshare. Their book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, famously argued that a key measure of success was being top-of-mind among consumers, to occupy more space in people’s minds than competitors. The text set the scene for the marketing of the past four decades, in which brands have aimed to position themselves to conquer minds and seeing it not as the minds of people, but merely of “prospects.” Today, the world feels very

different, as consumers don’t have mindshare to give–let alone for brands to capture. Some companies recognize this and are adapting. Nike, as it so often does, points the way for others. Last November, it launched its program Mind Sets, which expanded the brand’s focus from physical achievement to include mental well-being. It’s a recognition that even athletes like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, and Ben Simmons don’t feel they can “just do it” today. It’s not only Nike that’s increasingly alert to this cultural shift. Walk into any outlet of UK retailer Selfridges at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday and there will be no in-store music, fewer screens on, and people enjoying its recently introduced quiet shopping hour. Originally conceived for people on the autism spectrum, the initiative now aims further: to offer a calmer environment for shoppers and space for reflection and relaxation for team members. INTERACTIONS OVER TRANSACTIONS This is about more than messaging though. The very fundamentals of commerce have changed. There’s no new normal, and consumers aren’t interested in returning to the status quo. Wading through the aftermath of the pandemic, we now navigate mass polarization and a greater collective awareness of social issues. This existential struggle has led many to wholly reconsider the path ahead. This is well documented in Britt Wray’s recent book, Generational Dread: Finding Purpose in the Age of Climate Crisis. She shows how eco-anxiety is resulting in burnout, avoidance, or a disturbance of daily functioning. For the most part, people are coping with it by becoming more

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selective and more intentional in their consumption choices. Brands and businesses don’t sit outside cultural aftershocks: They must respond to them. In fact, they’re more subject to rising consumer expectations than ever before. The pandemic accelerated the technological metamorphosis that was already underway. According to a McKinsey study, over the course of eight weeks, people adopted as many new forms of digital communication as we’d expect to see in seven years. Fuelled by the pandemic, installation and implementation of self-service and contactless kiosks and mobile check-ins jumped by 66% in U.S. hotels alone. Where brands used to focus on human interaction and realtime, personable responses, they now must offer platforms that can provide personal agency and optimized human experiences. Automate the simple, repeatable elements of the experience by all means, but also find new ways to connect in real time with people. Allow them to check into the hotel on their phones, but perhaps have someone call their room to make sure they have everything they need for their stay. CULTURAL ALIGNMENT In many cases, the shift in organizational mindset will need to be even more profound. Where brands add value in our lives has fundamentally changed. Thirty years ago, people may have welcomed the noisy, brash intrusion from brands–to a point. From United Colors of Benetton’s thought-provoking and confronting suite of print ads that included the faces of death row inmates to Tango’s video of an orange man slapping people, this was a time of unashamedly in-your-face marketing. But this is 2022, not 1992. Times have changed.

None of this is to say that brands can’t play a role in our lives. It’s more that they need to ensure they’re relevant there. And in many cases, this is about meaningfully aligning a brand’s ethos with culture. Brand makers of today could take note from the likes of Ben and Jerry’s. In the midst of ’80s materialism, the brand chose to extend itself beyond ice cream and labeled itself as a “social justice company that sells ice cream to be able to fuel its advocacy work.” Today, the brand continues to meaningfully engage in the conversation with campaigns like “Silence is NOT an Option” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. In recent years, it’s been joined by others. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty was revolutionary, using bodies of all shapes and sizes in their marketing, paving the way for a new cohort of inclusive female representation, from plussize models to Lizzo, arguably one of the most recognized faces of inclusive beauty. Crayola’s “What If?” positioning emphasizes the importance of imagination over product in order to inspire the next generation of creatives and individuals. The key to it all is ensuring that it’s done in a way that feels authentic. Especially today, consumers have become very wary and critical of greenwashing or, worse yet, empty statements that aren’t backed up by real action. Ad by ad, brand by brand, day by day, the orthodoxy of capturing mindshare is giving way to that of allowing for mental space. We are seeing audiences become freer and less pressured into buying specific products, and instead being more mindful of brand purpose and goals–and that’s what creates true brand loyalty in 2022.

The Doomsday Clock is ticking on the world’s biggest advertising festival By Thomas Kolster

Six key takeaways from this year’s Cannes Lions and how your campaigns can be better Cannes Lions is to advertising what Cannes is to film - the biggest global gathering of the industry. The change is visible, but is it simply what advertising is so good at: overpromises and sustainable fireworks without any real impact? I’ve been coming to Cannes since I was a young, hopeful copywriter and the work has truly changed. Just a decade ago, the awards (the Lions) that focused on sustainability could be counted on max two hands. Today, you can count the highest awards (the Grand Prix winners) focused on sustainability on two hands and, moreover, the change is visible across hundreds of awarded works across metals and shortlists. The content across the Festival and its fringe events also had a strong focus on sustainability, which is great to see. Yet, I still believe we need to invite more voices around the table. Greenpeace protested this year at Cannes; I rather want to invite them to a cup of organic herbal tea. For the first time, we got Cannes and many of the venues to open-up and welcome all to an Open House for Good (Thank you); next

year, we’ll make sure more take up the invite. Lack of education and naïve band wagoning on issues like ocean plastics That said, there’s sadly still hard work ahead. The lack of knowledge and education across the industry from brand to agency side is concerning, as pinpointed by reports by WFA and Act Responsible/Nielsen. It’s like a lot of the winning work is only skimming the surface of the problem rather than fully engaging and committing. The very campaign-like nature of advertising looking for short term results clashes with the long-term nature of, for example, changing behaviors. Usually, it takes 3-6 months for a new habit to kick-in – ask any smoker. Another issue I witness across campaigns is the bandwagon-like focus on popular issues like ocean plastics or whatever else is hitting. It’s a naïve and gutless approach where marketeers trying to engage on these issues look to data and social listening to see what the topic of the day is. It’s as uninteresting as a parrot at a dinner party repeating what everybody else is saying. Your brand can be a mirror of

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society - or it can move society. I don’t have to tell you what builds brand fame and legacy. Many issues still go unnoticed or lack more support and we seriously need a stringent focus on the Global South - we all share this beautiful blue planet and its destiny. This is a shared effort as an industry – every time one brand or campaign fails, it falls back on all of us, turning people skeptical towards what is so critical: sustainable change at scale. And who can blame them? Take my nieces (11 and 18 years old), all they’ve witnessed in their lifetime is companies being guilty of environmental degradation and social injustice and all they hear from those very same companies are: look at us, look how good we are! Let’s get this right together, here’s a few hacks based on this year’s Grand Prix winners. The heat is on from Greenpeace protest at Cannes to concerned citizens and legislative pressure. If there was a Doomsday Clock for advertising, it would probably be ticking fast from 100 to 50 seconds to midnight—closest ever to apocalypse. You can make your work count. Don’t waste your money preaching to the converted! Billions of dollars of media and advertising money are lost because campaigns are targeting the people who are already agreeing with the issue. Take the much-awarded anti-gun commercial, The Lost Class. Do you really think it’s going to convince any hard-headed anti-gun folks in the Midwest? Or think about most climate campaigning? Be innovative in your media choice and creative strategy – target the others instead of the Patagonia wearing climate clan. You don’t need to be a Black Lives Matter activist to embrace the usefulness of Google’s Real Tone technology, which introduces new software to its camera phones to better capture darker skin tones in photos. The Lost Class, Change The Ref, Leo Burnett, Chicago Real Tone, Google, Agencies: Google/T Brand Studio, New York/Wieden + Kennedy, Portland/Gut, Miami Sweat and tears, not just clever ideas Ideas won’t cut it, we need real change and that demands hard work, not just upbeat case videos promising everything from potential legislative change and millions of eyeballs. Our industry is not set-up for the more entrepreneurial nature this change demands. An issue is not solved in a campaign cycle, but might need an independently run origination, business unit or thinktank. See how fintech climate start-up, Doconomy, turned from a great idea in Cannes to a well-run business. A highlight this year was Data Tienda, which allows Mexican women to build a credit score – vital for bank loans – based on interactions with the local shops that have offered them informal credit for years. Data Tienda, WeCapital; Agency: DDB Mexico, Mexico City Choose the right spokesperson Advertising has a love relationship with celebrities and animals, but who you pick matters. Sorry, Frankie the dinosaur is a cliché and I’m not convinced it’ll get any hard-

headed UN bureaucrat to go up against fossil fuel subsidies (or for that sake convince any climate skeptics). Choose spokespersons these people listen to – maybe an oil exec or a deep-pocketed political campaign sponsor? It can sometimes be as easy as choosing a rapper to teach children about sugar such as Lil Sugar. Don’t Choose Extinction, UNDP, Activista, Los Angeles Lil Sugar – Master of Disguise, Hip Hop Public Health; Agency: Area 23 Get married – collaboration rules! Oh yes, if we are to succeed with any of these challenges, we need to work together. Brands and agencies can benefit tremendously from non-profits and other NGOs’ insights and knowledge as well as they can benefit from market insights and commercial ingenuity from the industry. One example is Dole and Ananas Anam working together on Piñatex, a sustainable leather substitute made from the cellulose fibres extracted from pineapple leaves, which has been used in collabs with over 200 brands, including H&M and Nike. Collaboration is also about not keeping the blueprints for success to yourself but sharing them with others like when Volvo in 1959 gave away the patents to the safety belt for every automaker to use. When it comes to sustainability, we win more by working together. Think about how you can create new processes, new working groups across stakeholders to create the best of all worlds team. Piñatex, Dole Sunshine Company/Ananas Anam; Agency: L&C, New York Real impact I’m sick and tired of witnessing one case video after the other claiming all sorts of good. It’s tough to be in the jury and dissect the BS from the real impact. No wonder people are getting increasingly skeptical of brand claims. If you claim something – make sure to put those facts and figures into context. Michelob Ultra’s programme to help farmers in the US switch to organic farming is a no BS case. Contract for Change, Michelob Ultra; Agencies: FCB Chicago/New York Don’t brag. Empower If we are not to further jeopardies people’s trust in brands, it’s about time we stop pitching brands as these Saint-like saviors and instead empower people to take part in the change. After all, we won’t succeed if people don’t take the charge. Stop the preaching, and create brands and campaigns that coach people towards a better version of themselves: more sustainable, healthier, or more knowledgeable. Plus, you turn people from a passive target group into active ambassadors – you can’t ask for better engagement as hinted by a Goodvertising/GfK report. Whisper’s #KeepGirlsInSchool initiative in India aims to help educate girls about menstruation, a taboo subject in the country and a major reason why girls drop out of school at puberty. They cleverly empower the community to do their part.

Where does the Twitter brand go from here? By Rob Walker

Elon Musk left the Twitter brand battered after the company gave up control of its own story. Now it needs to win that back. Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. It seems like only yesterday that Elon Musk declared Twitter was a diamond in the rough and promised that he would soon “unlock” its vast potential. He’s not saying anything like that now. Instead, he has become a full-on Twitter wrecking ball, lacing an ill-fated takeover bid with a steady beat of critiques that have left the company looking like an unsalvageable basket case. Seldom has one man done so much damage to an established brand. And to a surprising extent, Twitter itself has basically conceded to—and at times even abetted—this reputation

thrashing. Now that Musk has definitively switched course and declared that he wants no part of Twitter, the company has of course filed a lawsuit in an attempt to force him to make good on his $44 billion offer. Among other things, the suit calls out “Musk’s repeated disparagement of Twitter and its personnel,” and argues Musk cannot “trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.” (Twitter’s share price has fallen more than 30% since Musk’s bid.) So perhaps we are seeing evidence that Twitter is, finally, beginning to defend itself—not just in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, but in the court of public opinion. If so, that defense is overdue. Whatever happens with

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Musk, the company has its work cut out for it. But Twitter badly needs to start thinking about how to tell its own story again—and what that story is going to be. Where, in short, does the Twitter brand go from here? Yes, it’s hard to answer that question in such a volatile moment for the company. But that’s partly because Twitter has pretty much let Musk define its meaning since this saga began in early April. When news got out that the Tesla founder had amassed a 9.2% stake in Twitter, its share price spiked. “[Musk’s] mere presence within Twitter’s ownership structure was enough to boost confidence in the power of not just the social platform’s product potential but even more so its brand,” Fast Company’s Jeff Beers pointed out at the time. (Of course, as Beers noted, it was really a coup for the brand called Musk—and his singular ability to attract attention and move markets seemingly at will. That has certainly held true.) When Musk went on to make an unsolicited bid to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, well above market price, the company resisted—briefly. That stance quickly gave way to not only agreeing to the deal but also to seemingly capitulating to the Musk rationale for it: namely, that Twitter was not well managed, flawed on a product level, and completely failing to live up to the endless potential that supposedly only Musk could really grok. Among those who seemed to agree: Jack Dorsey, a Twitter cofounder and until recently its CEO. “Elon is the singular solution” for the challenge Twitter faces, he tweeted— not exactly a vote of confidence in his successor, Parag Agrawal, or the rest of the management team. Not long after, even Agrawal seemed to offer evidence of Twitter as a big problem for Musk to magically solve when he fired two of the company’s top growth and revenue executives in May. The timing seemed odd given that Twitter was still mid-deal, underscoring the sense that the company knew it was adrift and had no plan of its own. Combined with a hiring freeze and subsequent layoffs, the move surely unnerved Twitter’s existing workforce. The company practically announced: “We are in a holding pattern, and all we’re sure of is that Twitter has problems.” As for the future, both Agrawal and Dorsey essentially endorsed the somewhat hazy Musk vision, echoing his highfalutin promises about the service as a global town square and (profitable) haven for productive public discourse. (“None of the parties seems to care much about any of this rhetoric now,” Ina Fried of Axios noted the other day.) Unfortunately, someone soon launched a thundering campaign against Musk’s vision of Twitter’s future: Elon Musk. Set aside whether Musk had a genuine change of heart, was trolling all along, or whatever other motive he may have. What matters is that he has essentially framed his new skepticism as resulting from looking under Twitter’s hood and finding it so thick with spam bots and other problems that it’s simply not worth the money (and is certainly not a diamond in the rough). That’s an accusation

that of course gives advertisers pause, harming Twitter’s business. “The real victim from all of the drama that’s going on right now is Twitter itself,” Forrester analyst Mike Proulx told Yahoo Finance. And for now Musk will simply keep assaulting Twitter’s public reputation—especially to his audience of more than 100 million Twitter followers. It’s understandable that after conceding so much of Musk’s critique, Twitter wants him to follow through and somehow save the day (or at least absorb the blame when none of his rhetoric pans out). But maybe the opposite course makes more sense: Find the quickest way out of this mess and start owning the Twitter story again. There is, after all, a Twitter story. While Twitter does not have the massive audience of Meta (which claims 2.8 million users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), its user base has actually been growing. In its most recent quarterly results—announced after the Musk deal broke, when some observers assumed its numbers would disappoint—its revenue rose to $1.2 billion from $1.04 billion in the prior quarter; users rose to 229 million (better than analysts’ expectations) from 214 million last quarter, and 199 million a year ago. For all the negative critiques of the platform, Twitter has fans. In fact, millions of devoted users clearly enjoy and/or rely on it, including major cultural influencers and media professionals. So maybe instead of asking why Twitter isn’t as big as Facebook, it’s worth focusing on why so many such figures— like Elon Musk—apparently prefer Twitter anyway: It’s hard to ignore that for all his spam-bot complaints, Musk keeps on tweeting. Despite everything, Twitter arguably punches above its weight. It needs to focus on that story, not on its ongoing failure to be some kind of idealized anything-goes town square that it will likely never achieve. Would shareholders scream bloody murder at accepting an exit that involved anything less than Musk’s original offer? Perhaps. But the protracted litigation and resulting strategic limbo that would entail will just further erode Twitter’s position—as a product, as an employer, as an entity. That said, since we’re dealing with Musk here, it’s worth acknowledging that all sorts of outcomes are possible, including a renegotiated deal that puts Twitter in Musk’s hands after all, and his current brinkmanship may have factored in all of the above. Maybe the game, at this point, is to acquire Twitter not only for a more modest price, but with more modest expectations. Just saving Twitter’s brand from the dysfunctional rep that Musk himself has been perpetuating would make Musk look like a genius. It’s a completely self-serving scenario—and thus, for Musk, completely on brand. Rob Walker Writes Branded, A Weekly Column About Marketing And Branding. He Also Writes About Design, Business, And Other Subjects. His Newsletter Is The Art Of Noticing.

14 Creative Ways Marketers Can Use 360-Degree Images And Other Unique Visuals By Forbes Councils Member

Consumers tend to find visual elements more compelling than simple text or audio. With recent, exciting innovations in video production and photography, digital marketers and advertisers have a literal smorgasbord of unique visual assets to choose from to capture the attention of ideal audiences.

bonus, surprise your audience with something unexpected, such as a scavenger hunt, surprise guest or unexpected object that makes it worth sharing. - Eric Gilbertsen, REQ 4. Let Users Get Immersed In Your Properties And Events

From 360-degree images to panoramic, aerial videos and 3D animations, special types of video and photography can be incorporated into content marketing and digital advertising strategies in myriad ways on a variety of platforms. Here, the members of Forbes Agency Council share creative ways to leverage these intriguing visual elements and gain more traction with campaigns.

Product demos, live events and tours of spaces are excellent ways to leverage 360-degree images and video. By allowing users to immerse themselves in your properties and events, or interact with your product in a dynamic way, you create experiences that will attract your ideal audiences to your brand. - Mary Ann O’Brien, OBI Creative

1. Use AR Filters In Social Creative Campaigns

5. Use Special Visuals In Your Homepage Banner

We’ve been using augmented reality filters in several of our social creative campaigns for clients and partners. Beyond engagement, they create fan interactivity with the brand. Giving fans this fun tool to play with leads to sharing and reposting. It also puts fans front and center, elevating them from passive audience members to active brand ambassadors. Note: This works best when you have an existing fan base! Marc Becker, The Tangent Agency

Use short videos and special photos in your website’s homepage banner. An effective website is one that instantly catches the visitor’s attention, so surprise your audience by using unique photography rather than a stock image. Hannah Trivette, NUVEW Web Solutions

2. Provide A 360-Degree Glimpse Behind The Scenes Customers love behind-the-scenes content, so 360-degree images and videos can provide a great immersive experience. If it’s a product, you can demonstrate to the audience how it’s being made and showcase your assembly line. If it’s a service, you can invite people to take a look at what’s going on in your office on a regular day. There are lots of creative options for any business. - Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS 3. Surprise Audiences With Something Unexpected 360-degree images can benefit any destination, event, showroom or experience, and even companies competing for talent and wishing to offer an insider look. As an added

6. Show Fashion Or Homeware Products In Context 360-degree imagery can be great for fashion or homeware products. There’s the one side where the user is simply rotating a product from all angles, but if the product is also part of a collection, you can create user experiences where someone is immersed in that collection. Imagine not just showing a single chair, but how that chair can be contextualized in a room fully outfitted with your designs. - Tellef Lundevall, Accelerated Digital Media 7. Use 360-Degree Images On The Right Marketing Platform The key is to choose the right marketing platform to improve engagement. Each social platform has its own audience and interest group, so a company needs to know where and when to post its content. For example, if you use Facebook to

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promote your products and services, you can post 360-degree images summarizing many details and easily capture the audience’s attention. - Dmitrii Kustov, Regex SEO 8. Showcase Photography

Products

With

360-Degree

For e-commerce developments, we use 360-degree photography to show three-dimensional products to the end user. This technique allows for user-friendly, experiential e-commerce design, produces more conversions and reduces the number of product returns. We also started utilizing 360-degree imagery in product personalization as well as environmental design for walk-through facility presentations. - Goran Paun, ArtVersion 9. Use Mid-Action Images To Show How People Experience The Brand Use mid-action images showing people or influencers using the product or experiencing the brand. A viewer can use their mouse to see all angles of the image and will want to engage more to become a part of the moment in the imagery. Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC 10. Connect A Series Of 360-Degree Images With Clickable Hotspots Connect a series of 360-degree images with clickable hotspots so viewers can navigate through a physical space or store online. Pair these hotspots with click-to-buy links or pop-up windows for detailed product information. This can extend an exclusive or limited-time retail pop-up shop to a much broader audience, driving engagement and sales. Matt Miller, X-FCTR 11. Drive Interest With A 360-Degree Short Film/ Advertisement 360-degree images can be very useful for company showcases such as office tours, networking events and product

demonstrations. However, one of the more interesting uses that I’ve seen is a 360-degree short film/advertisement. A unique experience alone, which actually grants agency to users, can drive interest and engagement. - Tomas Oscar Andrén, UPRISE Management 12. Gamify Images And Reward Users For Finding Items In Them Common ways to use 360-degree imagery include showing real estate, motor vehicles and holiday accommodation to prospective buyers. However, brands could be creative by gamifying these images so that you win rewards, discounts or vouchers by finding certain items within an image. This sort of interactive experience can boost customer loyalty and engagement in new and innovative ways. - Azadeh Williams, AZK Media 13. Provide More Immersive Home And Apartment Tours These innovations in video and photography are fantastic for providing more immersive home and apartment tours. It allows renters and buyers to have a more tangible look at their next home. These innovations can also expand the market of buyers who may be moving “sight unseen” from one state to another. All in all, this can reduce buyer friction and convert interested parties faster. - Bernard May, National Positions 14. Immerse Online Event Attendees In 360-Degree AR/VR Formats Immersive experiences are taking over the world. For marketers, this could be hosting online events using 360-degree visualizations to bring them as close to the human world as possible. Imagine the concept of having an expo floor, meetings and concerts all in 360-degree augmented and virtual reality. We’ve missed experiences! Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day

What We Can All Learn From the New York Times’s Amazing Transformation By Tien Tzuo

Over a decade ago, the newspaper industry as we know it

charge their customers for the work that they do! Many

was on its last legs. Circulation for nearly half of the daily

predicted that readers would just go elsewhere for news.

papers in America were dropping by 2-3 percent a year

“Successful media companies go after the audience first,

ever since their peak in 1984. It got worse in 2010, when

and then watch revenues follow” wrote Reuters, “Failing

newspaper circulation fell nearly nine percent. Nearly every

ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize

publication was scaling back and laying off journalists.

short-term revenues”. Ouch. The most optimistic projections

People feared the disappearance of the fourth estate and the implications this had on democracy itself.

had the The New York Times achieving 300K subscriptions in one year, worth $78M a year, a drop in the bucket

Against that backdrop, The New York Times decided to take

compared to circulation and advertising revenue from print.

the step that “tempted and terrified much of the newspaper

A cottage industry even sprung up teaching people how to

industry”. Against widespread skepticism, they decided to

get around the paywall.

Of course, we now know that the naysayers were wrong. The

in 2017, priced at $40 per year. If you binge watch and

New York Times hit their first 100K subscribers in the first

want to understand the entertainment landscape and what

month. I blogged congrats. It took the gray lady four more

the top movies are right now, then you can subscribe to

years, in 2015, to reach one million digital subscribers,

the Watching section, launched back in 2016. If you are

generating $200 million in revenue. I said the The New

old enough to remember the Sunday paper, you’d start to

York Times should be viewed as a tech unicorn.

realize that The New York Times is making subscriptions

Fast forward to 2022, and The New York Times has reached

offering out of the various sections.

10 million subscribers, ahead of schedule. They’ve clocked

For sports, The New York Times decided to acquire The

in a revenue of $594.2M, with an adjusted operating profit

Athletic, bringing it another 1.2M subscriptions, along with

of $109.3M, and subscription revenue of $351.2 million.

its own staff and a younger audience. This followed their

Oh, and they are now talking about reaching 15 million

purchase of Wirecutter back in 2016, which completely

subscriptions by 2027. Mic drop.

shook up the technology review blog industry. The New York

It’s a fairy tale made real, yet nothing about the The

Times has since made the reviews site paywalled, offers a

New York Times’s success is fictional. You can subscribe to as many music and video streaming services as you’d

separate subscription for $5/month, increased its search engine optimization (SEO), and increased its production

like, but there are only a handful of international news

frequency. These are real subscription power moves.

organizations you’d be willing to pay for. The New York

Recently, the media company also purchased Wordle, which

Times’s subscription offerings have found themselves in a position that many other companies dream to be in: they’re indispensable.

has millions of daily addicts, including yours truly. Again, it’s going through a similar process: it was acquired, integrated into the website, and will eventually have a version that

How did The New York Times move beyond advertising and

becomes a paid subscription. But don’t get it twisted. The

into the World Subscribed? The New York Times had a plan:

Times is showing us all a solid cross-sell strategy that is

gaining subscribers and offering subscriptions. The New

working because its core subscriptions are successful on

York Times wrote a column to address its readers about

their own. There is no cookie cutter approach here; good

the upcoming sub changes. Why? Because its customers

subscriptions are chess, not checkers.

(subscribers) are seen as valuable. And they talk. The only way to show them they are valued before they sign up for a subscription, is to make it known that their input will be considered moving forward. And unlike digital publications

And of course, there is an all-inclusive NYT subscription (the print/digital paper, Wirecutter, Games, Cooking, etc.). It’s $300 for the whole year.

like Buzzfeed that rely on cheap, click-bait headlines, silly

Seen over the arc of the last decade, it’s clear that The New

quizzes, and ad revenue, The New York Times model is

York Times has been slowly transforming from a newspaper,

built on an avid membership base which appreciates true

to an online publication, to a media conglomerate

journalistic integrity.

complete with technology-focused employees, apps, and

But more than that, like the best subscription services out there, the The New York Times has used pricing and packaging as a key strategic tool to grow – both in subscriber count and revenue. In fact, over the last 10 years, the NY Times has been curating an ever growing,

new offerings every few financial quarters. Now The New York Times is effectively a tech company, with data scientists working just as fervently as its journalists. And they’ve done an impeccable job orchestrating several services and offerings into one platform, The Times.

ever evolving portfolio of content. Their year-long plans

So, what can an aspiring subscription business learn

are also straightforward: $75 for basic digital access to the

from the last 12 years of the New York Times’s amazing

online articles and app. Want only the physical paper to

transformation? Simply put, if you want to keep up with

be delivered to you on weekends? There’s a $10 weekly

the times (no pun intended), you need to be flexible and

subscription for that, too. But they’ve gone far beyond simple news. Puzzles for example. Crosswords were one of the first subscriptions for

use technology, data, subscriptions, and ultimately, make what the subscribers want your main focus. The New York Times thinks of its customers as subscribers, who have

NY Times, actually launched back in 2008 during the dawn

subscriptions, and ultimately, assets to the brand. If you

of smartphone apps. They then launched an HTML5 version

don’t have that sort of hunger for growth and subscriber

in 2012, and then took their successful crossword puzzle

retention, you’ll be left outside on the doorstep, like an old

app in-house by 2014, despite some player pushback.

newspaper.

Today, you can subscribe to Games for $40/year, with 6 other games beyond Crosswords. But wait, there’s more! For those of you who are foodies and like to cook, there’s the Cooking subscription, launched

Tien currently serves as CEO of Zuora (NYSE:ZUO), a company he co-founded in 2007 and took public in 2018. Under Tien’s leadership, Zuora has emerged as the leading evangelist of the Subscription Economy -- the idea that all industries are shifting to a customer-centric, subscription-based business model.

How brands can make the most out of the return to live experiences By Gabe Boyd

Brands should embrace the consumer’s increased willingness to engage with digital experiences in a post-pandemic world, writes Imagination’s Christophe Castagnera. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a seismic shift in the way people enjoy brand experiences. Social distancing measures introduced across the world forced brands to adapt and find innovative and safe ways to communicate with audiences. Digital technology adoption made a quantum leap and pushed people onto digital platforms, where brands could offer virtual and hybrid alternatives to in-person events and experiences. Brands became reliant on technology to stay connected with their audiences and took to the virtual world to produce staple events like product launches and conferences. So, while lockdown felt restrictive for many, it also opened opportunities for experiences to not only reach larger and more diverse audiences but also to create new types of experiences. With events now available to people in a new format – and often in the comfort of their own homes – consumer behaviour and expectations started changing. The wide array of options made the experience landscape more fragmented than ever and fuelled sub-versions of events in each category. Web Summit welcomed back a huge physical audience of over 40,000 in November 2021 but also achieved its biggest remote audience ever to its virtual live-streamed event in 2020, so while normal business has now resumed in most markets (except Asia of course), the fragmentation

of experiences has remained. Brands have seen there are even more ways to deliver great experiences – that can be tailored to reach new audiences both in person and online – and they want to build on that. So how can brands make the most out of the return to live experiences while catering to the new, richer experience landscape? Planning for success First and foremost, brands must spend more time during initial planning stages. This is to ensure they know exactly the audience they want to target, and to determine which experience will best communicate with them: Do they want to return to in-person events? Would they prefer to enjoy an experience from the comfort of their own home? Or would a simultaneous ‘hybrid’ blend of the two be best? Similarly, be clear about what you are trying to achieve through the experience. Is it to build awareness? Is it engagement and advocacy? Is it conversion and sales data? Or all three? A good example of this is the automotive industry. After a flurry of dull ‘DIY’ launches from factories and offices came a rich array of experiences such as Ford’s Horizon programme, a virtual experience building awareness and engagement for media and internal audiences. Alongside this was the Ford Go Electric programme which began in 2019 as an immersive physical experience for

customers but returned as a more curated experience in 2020 – still immersive but now COVID-safe. Brands should define their business objectives and segment their diverse audiences in a more coordinated and specific manner, enabling agencies to design a tailored programme of experiences that can mix physical, virtual-only or hybrid approaches. This involves more planning but delivers better quality, better ROI and happier, more engaged customers. Embrace the new COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by several years, resulting in new options being available for brands to use when designing experiences. However, the speed with which these advances were made meant it was harder for brands to keep pace with the innovations available; clients used to managing complex logistics were suddenly getting to grips with live film production or even interactive features like augmented reality during virtual experiences. The best approach for marketers is to get out there and build their knowledge – learn about what’s available, explore new avenues and test and learn where possible. For example, Pernod-Ricard has a wealth of Brand Homes across its portfolio, these highly immersive destinations are the ultimate in sensory discovery of the liquid, in a superb setting. COVID-19 was a huge challenge to this physical experience, but many of its Brand Homes such as Perrier Jouët in Epernay adapted its offer to create virtual experiences and remote tasting experiences to enjoy at home. Since the doors reopened, they have learned that virtual tours offer a great experience ‘taster’, complementing the full physical

journey people still want to enjoy in person. Be ready for the unexpected If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that in the blink of an eye, everything can change. So having a backup plan or contingency options is now essential. It’s also good protocol. Even without a global health crisis, a celebrity could be ill, a headline act fails to appear, a local issue impacts a global event. Have a physical and virtual plan A, and a physical and virtual plan B. Expo 2020 Dubai had planned large-scale in-person audiences for its Headline Talent live shows, but COVID meant it needed to flip to a model with large-scale virtual audiences. It created the Infinite Nights series to connect with millions around the world online while offering a highquality show to a smaller number in person than originally planned. Acts like Coldplay and Alicia Keys reached hundreds of millions worldwide, including appearing in Oculus. Don’t forget to collaborate Lastly, one of the positive things to come out of the pandemic was the enthusiasm for community and collaboration. Brands moved into new categories to meet demand, businesses stepped up where needed and partnerships thrived. These benefits can continue. So, whether it’s looking at joint events, brand collaborations or turning to partner agencies for more input and advice, the advantages of working with others, with experts in specific fields, who can guide you through this new landscape, are huge.

Can Amazon Prove It Has Style? By Santiago Gallino

Clothing stores are disappearing across America by the tens of thousands, yet even the so-called retail apocalypse isn’t enough to scare away Amazon from the apparel business. The company announced it will open its first clothing store, called Amazon Style, later this year at a shopping center in suburban Los Angeles. The 30,000-square-foot space will offer men’s and women’s clothing from well-known and emerging brands at prices up to $400. While that sounds like a typical department store, what’s different is the use of technology. Amazon Style customers will use an app to facilitate most of their shopping. Santiago Gallino, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, said a physical store is an important next step for Amazon, but there’s no guarantee that the company will succeed where so many other retailers have failed, especially lately. More than 80,000 stores are predicted to close by 2026, devastated by financial woes, declining sales, high rents, and pandemic-related problems. “It’s going to be an interesting challenge for them because the fashion business is one that requires excellent execution,” he said during an interview with Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM. (Listen to the podcast above.) “We have yet to see if Amazon can do something as great as they’ve done in the online space.” Fashion is fickle, and so are consumers. Clothing stores need to carry desirable styles in a range of sizes, or they risk customers going elsewhere to find what they want. Availability is a critical component of success for clothing stores, Gallino explained, but so is the shopping experience. In-store customers are looking for great service, personalized attention, and perks they cannot get from shopping on a tablet while lounging on the couch.

“It’s going to be a challenge for them because the fashion business is one that requires excellent execution.” –Santiago Gallino Amazon certainly has experience with brick-and-mortar stores. The company has opened Amazon Go, Amazon 4-Star and operates Whole Foods. But Gallino said that as a customer in those stores, he’s been “a bit underwhelmed.” “There’s nothing wrong with those locations, but there’s

nothing game-changing that will make me think of Amazon as my first stop when I go to a physical store, like it probably is when I think of my online transactions,” he said. “I’m still wondering how much of a disruption they can create in the physical world, and for me that’s yet to be seen.” Amazon said in a release that it plans to provide a techdriven shopping experience in the California store. An app will enable shoppers to request items be sent to a fitting room or directly to the pickup counter, find different sizes and colors, and explore similar items. “Amazon Style is built around personalization,” the company said. “Our machine learning algorithms produce tailored, real-time recommendations for each customer as they shop.” The Omnichannel Experience The professor pointed out that many retailers have realized the value in an omnichannel strategy that seamlessly integrates online and offline shopping. Even digital-native companies like Warby Parker have opened physical stores to expand their reach. Gallino said savvy brands know that it becomes more difficult over time to attract new online customers, so building a brick-and-mortar store is an opportunity to lure shoppers with the promise of an experience. “I think Warby Parker understood that very well,” Gallino said. “If you are thinking of your company as an omnichannel company, it makes sense to think of the offerings in the same terms. You’re going to be taking care of your customer regardless of whether that customer is approaching you online or in a physical store.” Amazon Style is also a way for the company to compete in the clothing segment against Target and Walmart, which both sell a significant amount of apparel through hundreds of stores nationwide. That’s a high bar for Amazon to hurdle, Gallino said. But with online retail accounting for only about 13% of all retail sales, it’s smart for Amazon to try. “I think it’s a move that makes sense, but it’s not an easy one,” he said. Santiago Gallino is an associate professor in the Operations, Information and Decisions department at Wharton. He is interested in operations management challenges in the retail industry. Santiago studies both omni-channel integration and store execution issues in retail.

Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers. Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro

Building Strong Connections With Your Social Media Content

By Michael Stelzner

Struggling to attract and connect with your audience on social media? Could you be working with outdated content strategies and tactics?

time, the two of you would learn more about each other— moving on from general topics to specific, personal feelings and opinions.

In this article, you’ll discover common content strategy mistakes and learn how to develop content that draws a loyal community to your business.

There’s a psychological framework behind that process of getting to know someone new. It’s called social penetration theory, and it applies to social media connections just as much as real-life friends.

Building Theory

Relationships

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Penetration

Most social media managers are great at strategy. They know what their goals are and they know where and when to post. But actually implementing that strategy is more difficult. So what are they missing? The answer is connection. Social media was built for human connection and connecting with people is still the best way to convert customers online. All of the automation, scheduling, and analytics tools in the world won’t help you if you can’t build relationships with your followers and potential customers. How can you connect more deeply with people through emotional social content? First, let’s think about how people build relationships in general. Think about the last time you met someone new and started chatting. You probably started with some common, general topics. You wouldn’t tell them straight away about your medical history or family drama. But if you stayed in touch with that person and gradually became friends, you’d start to share more information. Over

Social penetration theory lays out the different stages of building a relationship with someone. When we want to connect with someone new, we usually do so by sharing information about ourselves. This is called selfdisclosure. Self-disclosure happens in four stages. Each stage is a little more personal than the one before it. Level one: cliché. Unless you’re an exceptionally gifted conversationalist, your small talk is probably a little bit cliché. Topics like sports and weather aren’t very exciting—in fact, they’re cliché—but they help you to establish a basic rapport. Level two: facts. As we open up, we start to share more information about ourselves. In a conversation between friends, this might be facts about what you do for work or where you went to school. As part of branded content on social media, it might mean the story behind your business or specific product details. Level three: opinions. The next stage of self-disclosure is sharing opinions. This is an important phase because it means showing our values and experiences. Whether you’re talking to a friend or advertising to a customer, sharing opinions is key to finding out whether you have much in common.

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Level four: feelings. Our feelings are the most intimate level of conversation, which is why we don’t share them right away. But when you’re ready to discuss feelings, the relationship reaches a new level of closeness. How Emotional Social Media Content Converts Now you might be thinking that this is a lot of focus on emotions and relationships. What about product information? What about sales and discounts? What about brand positioning? The fact is that people don’t make purchase decisions based on logical reasoning. They make emotional decisions. So if you want to sell on social media, you need to appeal to emotion by building real connections with people through self-disclosure. Too many brands limit their social media content to clichés and product descriptions. In other words, they’re stuck on small talk, instead of building relationships with their customers. This is true for B2B brands just as much as B2C. Remember, even if you’re selling to a business, there are individual people making decisions within that business. And they’re just as emotional as anybody else. How to Use 4 Types of Emotional Social Media Content Now, we’ve seen the power of sharing opinions and feelings on social media. But that doesn’t mean you should skip the small-talk stage completely! Every person who finds your brand on social media will build their own relationship with you. So you’ll need content that speaks to people on different levels. There’s a right way and wrong way to share each type of

content. Let’s take them one by one. #1: Cliché Real talk: we all love a good cliché. Clichés exist for a reason! They’re easy to write, everyone recognizes them, and sometimes you’re just too busy to come up with something original. But the problem with cliché is that it invites clichés in return. Never forget that your social media community isn’t just built through content. It’s built by conversations. If you speak in parroted phrases, it can shut the conversation down. There’s no new information to discover, no opinion to agree or disagree with, and no real feelings to share. Imagine this: a florist posts a beautiful photo of a seasonal bouquet, with the caption “take time to smell the roses.” It looks good. It’s a cute phrase. But… what are people going to say in response? The bottom line is that cliché posts can fill out your content calendar and may even attract a few users with the right images or tags. But these posts won’t do anything to develop a relationship with your followers. It’s time for the next level… sharing facts. #2: Facts Sharing more information about yourself and your brand is a good way to connect with people. It’s also essential to conversions. People need to know what they’re buying. However, when we think in terms of social penetration theory, our aims are a bit different.

Informing people about a product often involves repeating the same information so everyone has heard it clearly. But when you’re using facts to build a relationship, you want to reveal new information. Think of it this way: imagine you’re getting to know someone. You’re excited to learn more about what makes them tick. But every time you talk, they just tell you the same story from their childhood. There’s never anything new. You wouldn’t really feel like you were making progress, would you? In the same way, you need to share new information with your followers on social media. Show them something different: a behind-the-scenes perspective, new product design, or member of your team they haven’t met yet. #3: Opinions In today’s world, most people are happy to share their personal opinions on social media—everything from books to movies to politics to restaurant recommendations. Brands have been more reluctant to share opinions. They’re worried about dividing their audience or causing controversy. However, if you never express an opinion on your professional social media channels, you’re missing out on connections. Your values and opinions are signals your ideal customer can use to align with your brand. What’s more, research shows that consumers want brands to take more active stances on big issues. That’s especially true for the key Millennial and Gen Z demographics. While we’re often tempted to chase growth at all costs, you should really focus on reaching the right people. Even if that means a smaller audience in the short term. It’s not a bad thing to lose some followers if the people who remain are truly committed to your brand. If you’re still not convinced, there are multiple different ways you can build relationships by sharing opinions. And they come with differing levels of risk. Low risk: solicit opinions. Get people to buy into your brand by asking them what they think. You’re still sharing opinions, which moves your relationship up a notch, but you don’t have to offer your own ideas. Alternatively, you can solicit opinions and then offer your own take in the comments of your post. That way, you participate in the conversation but let others take the lead. Medium risk: uncontroversial opinions. If you’re just getting started with sharing opinions, start low-stakes. Start a discussion about which one of your products you like best or around personal preferences. For example, a snack company could declare a preference for brazil nuts over almonds. Result: plenty of discussion, an opinion shared, but no one’s going to take the conversation too seriously. High risk: controversial opinions. There is space in social media for brands to share more controversial opinions. But before you go down this route, you’ll need to understand your audience very well. Controversial opinions are often safer for big brands, which

have a huge amount of customer feedback and market research to draw on. For example, in 2020, the outdoor clothing company Patagonia announced that they would stop advertising on Facebook because of the social network’s lack of regulation around misinformation and hate speech. This was a very risky move, not the least of which is because Facebook is the biggest social network out there. But it paid off for Patagonia because they knew that the opinion would play well with their target audience. #4: Feelings You’ve drawn in your audience, shared information about your brand, and ventured a few opinions. Your relationship with social media users is growing and deepening through self-disclosure. It’s time to share some feelings. When we talk about feelings, we’re not just talking about “happy” or “sad.” Instead, think about all of the emotions that someone might go through during a buyer’s journey: curiosity, anticipation, frustration, confusion, satisfaction, impatience, delight… You can tap into both positive and negative emotions to build connections. Remember, you’re not trying to tell people how to feel, you’re trying to relate. It’s OK to mention the negatives as long as you’re doing it in a relatable, meaningful way. Social media isn’t just a great place to share emotional content; it’s also a great place to research it. Social networks are free, broad-based focus groups, and they work around the clock. Watch how people respond to your content and the feelings it brings up, and feed that back into your strategy. How to Research and Plan Your Social Media Content There’s a lot to think about here and potentially lots to add to your social media content strategy. But before you start posting, it’s always worth taking some time for research, especially for trickier content types such as opinions and emotions. So what kind of research do you need? Social listening. Monitor tags, keywords, and hashtags that are relevant to your business. See what people are saying about your products, brand, and industry. You can set this up manually using free tools such as Google Alerts or work with a social monitoring platform such as Agorapulse or Sprinklr. Tone of voice. You’re not just looking for content ideas; you also want to find out how your target audience speaks. Mirror their voices to help build connections with your community. This can even apply to details such as emoji use. For example, Millennials often use the cry-laughing emoji to show laughter but Gen Z are more likely to use the skull emoji. When you understand how your customers talk and what they talk about, you’ll be able to share more meaningful, relatable content. You’ll start more conversations and make deeper connections. And you’ll see the effect in higher conversion rates and customer loyalty.

How to futureproof your job by thinking like a futurist By Mark Schaefer

The other day a marketing professional asked people in her community to comment on her blog post. I won’t get into specifics because I don’t want to embarrass anybody, but the post headline was something like “Four Tips for Better Content Marketing.” I’m generous with my time and I help people every day, but I couldn’t bring myself to even open this link — the headline was so boring! She couldn’t earn my attention with that headline, even when I wanted to help her. This highlights the point I want to make today: The most important part of your content marketing isn’t your content, it’s your headline. Whether a blog post, a podcast episode, or a YouTube video, the headline is the first thing subscribers and browsers see. They make a. decision to consume your content based on that headline. So to get any traction with your content marketing, everything depends on the headline. Unfortunately, writing a headline is often overlooked. I’ll admit that sometimes I fall into that trap, too. I’m trying to hit a publishing deadline and don’t spend enough time wordsmithing the headline! The original title for today was “The most important part of your content marketing is not your content.” I decided to add the word “sexiest” instead because that would be an unexpected and perhaps provocative word for my blog! There are a few tried and true ideas that contribute to better

headlines in your future. Let’s go: 1. Make it yours When people contribute a post to this blog, I always challenge them to write something only they could write. I’m not going to read “Four content marketing tips.” But I will definitely read “How content marketing saved my marriage.” That promises a unique story. Give me something I can’t find a million times on Google. 2. Add positive emotions Research into the most-shared articles on the web uncovered these most popular emotions: • Awe (25%) • Funny/Laughter (17%) • Amusement/entertainment (15%) Content with a positive sentiment goes viral more than negative content. A useful tool to create a better headline is the free Analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute. It works on the theory that increasing the emotional marketing value (EMV) of your headline drives more social sharing. In my independent research, I’ve found that social sharing drops off if the headline is too emotional. The ideal score seems to center around 30–40.

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My headline today received an EMV score of 56, against an internet average of about 35. Sexy for the win! 3. Great headline trigger words There are certain headline words that seem to prompt clicks: Give: Offers, discounts, deals, or contests that can benefit a wide audience. Advice: Tips, especially about problems that everyone encounters. Examples are how to lose weight or how to choose a college. Add the word “secret” and it is even better advice!

A few rapid-fire ideas: Make your headline tweetable (i.e. short). Make it descriptive and accurate. Never mislead readers. Make it creative enough to stand out in a crowded blog reader. Reference a numbered list (increases social sharing by 50 percent). Numbers are headline brain candy. And use digits instead of words in your headline. Ask a question. A reader’s instinct is to find the answer.

Warning: Posts about dangers that could affect anyone in your audience.

Include one keyword or phrase to help a search engine determine the theme of the article and aid your SEO.

Inspire: Inspirational quotes. Love them or hate them, they work.

5. Warm words

Unite: Posts that highlight a danger, an evil, an enemy, a cause, or a personal or community need. And while we’re at it, there are negative themes that shut down readers: Talking about yourself Being too edgy or offensive Being too obscure or niche Publishing technical words nobody can understand 4. Make your headline succinct and accurate

In a study of blog posts that had received more than 1,000 social shares, a headline that featured a “human” word like “food,” “home,” and “lifestyle” accounted for 85 percent of the world’s most viral content. Words like “business,” “tech,” and “news” made up just 14 percent of this traffic. Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.

Why people feel so little love for Uber’s brand By Mark Sullivan

A large AI-assisted sentiment analysis shows that Uber is among the least-loved brands among consumers. The study, conducted in 2021 by the branding agency MBLM, analyzed the use of more than 1.4 billion keywords on various social media channels to measure consumers’ emotional connection with known-name brands across 19 industries. Since April, the agency has been gradually releasing sections of its findings and on Wednesday, it released its results for Tech & Telecom sector companies, including Uber. Of the 435 brands in the study, Uber ranked 421st (just ahead of Kylie Jenner’s makeup line, Kylie Cosmetics). Uber ranked 23rd out of the 26 companies in the tech/telecom group. The study rates consumers’ emotional connection with brands using a 1 to 100 composite score that “combines the intensity, prevalence, and character of the relationship between consumers and brands,” MBLM explains. A higher score means a more intense “emotional relationship with a brand.” Uber scored 18.7 out of 100. Why might consumers’ relationship with the ride-hailing brand be so troubled? There are plenty of reasons. While the company’s history of scandals and privacy fouls probably doesn’t help, the main reason is likely that Uber’s entire business is built on a bait-and-switch. The service is an improvement over taxi service, making life a little more convenient and hassle-free for riders; and for many years, it was relatively cheap. For most of Uber’s history, the company and its VC backers have subsidized the real cost of providing the rides. The plan, of course, was to get people so hooked on the convenience that they’d consent to paying higher prices for it in the future. But the subsidies are one of the big reasons Uber has struggled to reach profitability. In fact, the company has lost massive amounts of money since its founding in 2009, including more than $30 billion since it began making its financials public in 2016. Uber faced major headwinds during the pandemic as demand for its core ride service plummeted, forcing it to rely

far more heavily on its Uber Eats delivery service for revenue. Uber’s rides business has since recovered: In the first quarter of 2022, the company surprised analysts with revenues of $6.9 billion. But the bill for the subsidies has come due. That’s why the cost of Uber rides has been rising since before the pandemic. Rakuten data says the average Uber ride price rose 92% between 2018 and 2021. Bloomberg estimates that Uber and Lyft ride prices have risen 45% from 2019 to 2022. The MBLM study found that the main keyword consumers used in connection with Uber was “convenience.” That’s understandably the most many riders can say for the brand. The convenience of the service is the same, but even in times of stagnant wages, high rents, and inflation people are being asked to pay a premium for a ride to the airport. Naturally, then, there’s not much love left for the Uber brand. In a sense, the brand’s customers have been played by the company and its VC backers. Investors don’t have a lot of love for Uber at the moment, either. The company’s stock closed at $21.50 Wednesday, representing a more than 50% drop from the start of the year. In the Tech & Telecom group, Apple placed first with a brand intimacy score of 65.3, followed by Sony and Android. Apple ranked 3rd across all industries, while Sony ranked 4th overall, and Android ranked 10th. “Tech & telecom has gradually moved up in our Brand Intimacy study over the years, which demonstrates the category’s growing importance in our daily lives,” says Mario Natarelli, managing partner at MBLM. “This trend was accelerated by COVID-19.” Disney earned the highest level of brand intimacy of all the companies studied, while Tesla came in second. Uber didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fast Company Senior Writer Mark Sullivan Covers Emerging Technology, Politics, Artificial Intelligence, Large Tech Companies, And Misinformation. An Award-Winning San Francisco-Based Journalist, Sullivan’s Work Has Appeared In Wired, Al Jazeera, Cnn, Abc News, Cnet, And Many Others.

Saudi-backed LIV Golf shows how ‘sportswashing’ can backfire By Rob Walker

LIV Golf wants to be a game changer. The new tour, backed by the government of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, has been making a lot of noise lately, trying to establish itself as a rival to the famous PGA Tour, and a familiar brand to golf fans and the public at large. And that’s happening —but not quite in the way LIV Golf organizers had in mind. For starters, pretty much all press coverage of the upstart tour and its attempt to challenge the PGA has cited Saudi Arabia’s troubling human rights record and links to 9/11, as well as the assassination of U.S.-based journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. This, of course, is just the sort of subject that LIV was dreamed up to avoid; it was meant to emphasize Saudi Arabia as a sponsor of world-class athletes and a home of innovation, not as a sometimes-brutal regime. In other words, it’s an example of what some have dubbed “sportswashing,” a trendy term for controversial governments using involvement in sports and tournaments to burnish their national brands on the international stage. Think Russia or China hosting lavish Olympic Games, or Qatar’s upcoming role as the setting for the World Cup. But LIV is, so far, offering a running example of how sportswashing is not only questionable, but also it may not even work. Indeed, LIV’s actual launch is so far having the opposite of the presumably intended effect. The tour has eight events in its first year, four in the United States. (Two of which are at Trump properties.) The first U.S. event got underway this week at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, about 20

miles northwest of Portland, Oregon. Local politicians and officials, including Senator Ron Wyden, have openly objected to the proceedings, once again forcing LIV players to defend their involvement with the enterprise. The group 9/11 Justice, made up of individuals who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks, has also called out LIV golfers for accepting “blood money.” It turns out that in addition to more familiar critiques and criticisms, in Oregon there’s also a local outrage angle on dubious Saudi government behavior. In 2016, a 15-yearold student named Fallon Smart was killed in a hit-and-run accident. The accused driver was a Saudi student named Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, who “was facing a trial on first-degree murder charges when he removed a tracking device and vanished,” according to The Associated Press: “U.S. authorities believe the Saudi government helped arrange for a fake passport and provided a private jet for travel back to Saudi Arabia.” In 2020, 60 Minutes did a segment featuring the case, but the topic is resurfacing now because of LIV—the whole ostensible point of which, remember, is to partly soften the Saudi image. Instead, we now have Wyden declaring: “It’s wrong to be silent when Saudi Arabia tries to cleanse blood-stained hands.” Not exactly the brand message LIV’s backers likely had in mind. The term “sportswashing” dates to 2015, when critics argued Azerbaijan hosted the European Games partly to divert attention from its controversial human rights record. In a recent interview for the Freakonomics radio show, College of

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the Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson traced the broader idea of government exploiting sports back to ancient Rome, where the ruling class famously relied on “bread and circuses”—including chariot races and gladiator contests—to keep the populace distracted from societal shortcomings. But in the context of modern geopolitics, there’s actually not much evidence that this strategy works. “I don’t know who’s looking at China any differently now than they did six months ago, and there’s been an Olympics in between,” sports commentator and television host Bomani Jones told Freakonomics. “I don’t think there’s a single person in the United States who, between the 2008 Olympics and the 2022 Olympics, has changed their opinion of China based on what they’ve seen on television [Olympics coverage].”

“Human Rights Watch asserts that thousands upon thousands of migrant workers experienced grave labor abuses while helping Qatar prepare for the World Cup,” The Nation adds. LGBTQ rights are another potential topic: A same-sex relationship can put you in prison for years in Qatar. Plus, women’s rights are severely restricted. That’s not the kind of attention Qatar presumably wants, but it seems inevitable. The best—and most deeply cynical—case for sportswashing as a tactic is that it invariably sets off a chain of whataboutism debates on ethical transgression. LIV is backed largely by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund; so what about that fund’s extensive investments in familiar startups and businesses, from Uber to Boeing? A fair question. Nevertheless, the very debate does nothing but underscore grim Saudi policies and behavior.

For modern sportswashers less widely familiar than a global power like China, the gambit can actually call attention to societal shortcomings. Consider Qatar’s upcoming World Cup. The decision to grant Qatar its role as host of the massive event—which would normally be gearing up right now, but has been pushed back later in the year because soccer in the desert isn’t practical in the usual summer months—was the result of a scandal-ridden process that sparked international investigations and tarnished the reputation of FIFA, the sport’s governing body.

In fact, that debate not only undermines the brand it was supposed to enhance, but also sets off a kind of reputational contagion. The LIV is offering marquee players massive, eye-popping paydays, and some have accepted; it probably doesn’t hurt LIV’s case that a lot of players have problems with the PGA. But despite this, the majority of the best-known pro golfers have so far declined the opportunity. Why? Partly because they’re thinking about the longer run—and they’re protecting their own brands.

And while much of the world really doesn’t know much about Qatar right now, we’re all going to hear quite a bit in the months ahead. Its treatment of migrant workers is one likely topic—The Guardian has reported that more than 6,500 have died there just since the hosting decision was made.

Rob Walker Writes Branded, A Weekly Column About Marketing And Branding. He Also Writes About Design, Business, And Other Subjects. His Newsletter Is The Art Of Noticing.

Streaming platforms: Be brave, be brand-led By Zoe Denny, Kantar UK

Video on-demand (VOD) brands are under pressure. After record numbers of people signed up to subscription services during the pandemic, we’ve seen demand fall as restrictions have eased. Against this backdrop, the spectre of inflation is now looming. People are looking at their monthly budgets and searching for ways to make savings. Streaming services have been on the chopping block for many. In the first three months of 2022 alone, Kantar Worldpanel data shows that 1.5 million VOD subscriptions were cancelled, with cancellations outnumbering new signups by 300,000. Amid this battle for customers, the way that platforms promote and advertise themselves has never been so important to convince consumers why their brand is the one they simply can’t do without. Entertainment brands are investing significantly in content and advertising – they were the biggest advertising spenders in the UK last year. But this investment isn’t working as hard as it could be. Crucially, our analysis shows that VOD brands aren’t reaping the commercial rewards from their ad campaigns. Lights, camera, action! So what makes great streaming advertising? There is a lot that VOD brands can learn from wider creative techniques, and some are already successfully putting these into practice. The first thing to recognise is that people like adverts that get them to feel something – and that’s particularly the case for VOD marketing. We know that humour is the most powerful way of making consumers more receptive to an ad, across all age groups. In fact, people’s engagement with funny ads increases by half compared with non-humorous content. For streaming services, however, it doesn’t just have to be about people feeling good. Consumers still react positively about VOD trailers even when they provoke negative emotions like fear or sadness. What’s most important in trailers is that they sell the story, and get people hooked – without giving away the entire plot. Getting celebrity faces on screen is also a good way to boost consumer engagement. Our use of facial coding analysis, which tracks consumers’ emotional reactions as they watch adverts, shows peaks in audience expressiveness when they see a famous person. Streaming services should therefore use the recognisable faces from their shows front and centre in ads, getting them into clips early to get people hooked. Wielding brand power

Streaming services are getting a lot right when it comes to advertising, but there is one major area where they are falling down: clear and obvious branding. Prominent branding is the most important predictor of whether an ad will translate into commercial success. Yet our testing found that consumers struggle to identify which brand a streaming ad is for. Streaming service adverts score 13 percentage points lower for their branding than the average base line for all adverts in the UK. In most VOD ads, the brand assets tend to appear at the beginning and end of a clip as a ‘bookend’. This approach is not strong enough. As services invest more and more into high quality content to attract viewers, they need to make sure they close the loop on that investment by helping consumers associate content directly with their platform. There’s undoubtedly a tricky balance that advertisers must grapple with. Overt branding shouldn’t come at the expense of the overall ad experience. Some streaming services have done this successfully by weaving the brand creatively into the content. Disney+, for example, has blended its logo with the iconic lightsabre for the new Obi Wan Kenobi series. Doing so helps to build associations between the Star Wars franchise and the Disney brand. It’s also important for services to demonstrate difference and make themselves stand out. Film franchises or longer running series can be valuable for this – most people know that shows like Stranger Things or Bridgerton are Netflix programmes, or that Line of Duty is BBC. By leaning on and encouraging these associations streaming platforms can make sure people recognise their individual offer. VOD services should also think about balancing trailers with ‘showreel’ ads, which highlight different content available on the platform. These demonstrate the unique selling point of the streaming business, and help to attract a wider audience with just one ad. Boost your brand power It’s a challenging market for VOD services at the moment. Streaming platforms are competing for the same space, but the room to accommodate them all is getting smaller. In this context, their investment in content and ads has got to work harder to pay commercial dividends. Focusing on branding adverts to help consumers connect the great content with the service hosting it is critical if VOD services want to weather this inflation storm.

How to Write Copy That Sells in a Post-Pandemic World By Michael Stelzner

Do you want more sales? When did you last revisit your messaging? In this article, you’ll learn a framework for writing persuasive copy that delivers results in today’s FOMO-saturated climate and discover a method to fine-tune your copy so you hit just the right tone. Why Has Copywriting Changed? From 2020 to 2022, our entire working world changed. It wasn’t just the switch from live to digital, office-working to remote, in-store shopping to online, although the pandemic surely has accelerated the pace of tech innovation. There’s been a bigger change in the zeitgeist. We’ve all been through the experience of a global pandemic together and

it’s changed how we empathize and communicate with each other. We’ve been forced to make big behavioral changes to protect each other such as wearing masks and going into quarantine. And we’ve become tired of fear. That’s not to say that fear has lost its power. Fear is still a strong motivator and it’s still a popular tool in copywriting. It’s also still possible to sell by offering people an “us versus them” mindset. But there’s a new, different way to approach copywriting. We’ve had enough of fear and division. For the collective health, wealth, and well-being of everyone on the planet, we need to move on. This might sound pretty idealistic for an article on copywriting

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Brand Builders

Role Models

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techniques. But at its heart, copywriting is about persuasion. It uses people’s experiences and emotions to encourage belief in a product or a service. That means that copywriters have to be in touch with the zeitgeist. We have to know how people feel and be ready to adapt. Good copywriting is powerful, and as we all know from the movies, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s take a look at how that works in practice. Copywriting With the PASTOR Framework One example of the new approach to copywriting is the PASTOR framework, developed by copywriter Ray Edwards. Fear-focused copywriting can be summed up as “the wolf at the door.” It works by making people afraid of something— the big bad wolf, the missed opportunity, the bad outcome.

lose your suitcases. It’s frustrating, complicated, and ruins the break. Once you’ve amplified the pain, you can offer an alternative. Paint a picture of a better experience, where everything runs smoothly and you always have the right information at your fingertips. Now you’ve given your audience something to aspire to. S: Story So we’ve got a customer, their problem and their pain, and a vision for the future. It’s a pretty strong sell already. But you’re going to hammer the point home by telling a story. Specifically, you’re going to tell a story in three parts: •

The PASTOR framework replaces the wolf with a shepherd. It guides people, like a pastor or a shepherd, toward positive decisions that will benefit them.

Struggle. Tell your own story or someone else’s story of the problem in question, offered as a testimonial. This could be anything from your quest to get fit, to a small startup’s quest to find better accounting software.

•

Because copywriters love lists, it breaks down into a step-bystep method for writing copy, too.

Solution. Explain the solution you discovered and how it solved the problem and removed the pain.

•

System. Prove that this solution wasn’t just a one-off. It’s a system—a process, a service, a product, or a course— that other people can access, too.

P: Person, Problem, Pain Every piece of copy has to start with the audience. •

Who is the person you’re writing for?

•

What problem can you solve for them?

•

What pain does that problem cause them?

Let’s look at those three points a bit more closely. First, even though you’re presumably speaking to a wide audience, you should write as if you’re speaking to just one person. Have an individual in mind. Speak to them directly and make them feel seen. Second, there’s a difference between pain and problem. The problem describes their situation; the pain is how they personally experience it. For example, when someone is booking a vacation, their problem is “logistics.” But no one says, “Ugh, these logistics are a nightmare.” They say, “Ugh, I have to call the hotel ahead of time and I need to text my partner the reservation number and I’m not sure what time baggage drop-off opens…” That’s the pain. That’s the experience you want to empathize with. Remember, you’re not trying to push fear onto people. You’re trying to understand how they feel and support them from there. A: Amplify and Aspire

The “system” part of the story is essential. You can read about someone else solving their problems and think, “Great! Good for you!” But there’s no guarantee that the same solution will work for you. Persuade readers that the solution will help them, too. Whether it’s a new product, a more efficient service, or a course that will teach them the secrets of entrepreneurship, it should be available to everyone. T: Transformation and Testimony When someone goes from having a problem to finding a solution, they’ve been through a successful transformation. People love hearing about transformations. When you want to sell people on a transformation, there are two things you can do. First, ask people what their transformation would look like. If they could get rid of this pain point, what would their life look like? Maybe they’d earn more money, feel better about themselves, or have more free time. Invite people to imagine a better life. Second, show them the proof of someone else’s transformation. There are lots of ways to do this. Beforeand-after photos are always popular. You can also ask for testimonials where people describe how their life changed; for example, the skills they learned during a course and how those skills have transformed their business.

Now that you’ve put yourself in the reader’s shoes, you want to do two things:

O: Offer

•

Amplify the pain. Turn up the volume on those complaints. Make people aware of their problems.

So far, you’ve done a lot of empathizing and storytelling. Now it’s time to get down to brass tacks.

•

Aspire to something better.

To go back to our vacation example, you could remind people of how it feels to miss a flight, forget a booking number, or

Never lose sight of the details of the offer. Your audience needs to hear the specifics of what’s on sale: how much it costs, how it will be delivered, how long it will take, and so on.

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Don’t forget that you’re still selling the transformation, too. The transformative power of your offer should be listed right alongside the technical specifics.

Copyeditors and proofreaders are the unsung heroes of good copy. But their job is to focus on the technical aspects. They don’t know any more about your audience than you do.

You can use the F-A-B rule of thumb to check that your offer is comprehensive:

That’s why it’s worth getting a non-expert to read your copy from time to time. Choose someone who knows nothing about what you’re selling and nothing about copywriting or editing, either. Ask them to read your copy and tell you what they think.

•

Features. What does the service or product include? How does it work? What does it cost?

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Advantages. Why is your offer better than the competition? How are you going to make it easier or more accessible for your customers?

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Benefits. How will this offer transform your customers? How will it solve their problems? Which pain points will it remove?

R: Request a Response This final point is where many copywriters lose the sale. Why? Because they forget to request a response. Someone could read through your copy – the empathy, the story, the attention-grabbing transformation, even the detailed offer – and nod along. It all sounds great to them. But they have no idea how to take action. Tell your readers what to do next and exactly what that next step will look like. \Explaining the next step is a great way to reassure people that they’re making the right decision. So, for example, when you encourage people to click a button that says “sign up now”, you should tell them exactly what the signup process involves. That way, customers can trust that they won’t be taken down a rabbit hole of extra paperwork, upselling, and distractions. Keep it simple. How to Edit Your Copy to Be More Effective No copywriting strategy would be complete without an editing phase. It’s always a good idea to check and double-check your work, and use editors and proofreaders, if possible. But if you really want to write more empathetic and effective copy, then there are some extra editing tricks you should use, too. Actually Talk to Your Customers Remember when we talked about really understanding your customers? Writing as if you were speaking to an individual person? You’re not going to achieve that with educated guesswork. If you want to write directly to your audience, you have to speak directly to your customers. Get on the phone or schedule an online meeting and talk to your target audience. Find out what their pain is. Get into the details of their problems. You’ll find it much easier to write truly empathetic copy. Don’t Just Get Feedback From Editors

Use the CUB Method Here’s one more editing tactic that’ll make your copy a lot more direct and relatable. It’s best if you can recruit actual customers or people from your target audience. Avoid other copywriters; you want an unfiltered, untutored response. The CUB critique method is very simple. (It was developed by copywriters Mike Palmer and Michael Masterson in their book Copy Logic.) Ask people to read through the copy and think about three things: •

Confusing

•

Unbelievable

•

Boring

Whenever they read something confusing, hard to believe, or simply boring, they should circle that phrase and mark it up with a C, a U, or a B. This makes it really easy for you to scan through the copy and identify what needs changing. The CUB method works because it picks up on the three most common errors in copywriting. When copy is bad, it’s almost always because it’s confusing, unbelievable, or boring. CUB is also particularly relevant for the new copywriting framework we’re talking about in this article because it’s directly related to the question of empathy. If your copy is confusing, then you’ve failed to explain the offer. If your copy is unbelievable, then you have failed to empathize. You’ve focused on the wrong pain points or you’ve offered impractical solutions. And if it’s boring, then you’ve failed to tell a story of transformation. But if you’ve got things right, then your copy will be clear, attainable, and exciting. And most of all, it will empathize with your audience’s pain. That’s the source of real connection. Other Notes From This Episode •

Connect with Michael Stelzner at @stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on Twitter.

•

Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube. Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner and the Social Media Marketing Society. He’s host of the Social Media Marketing podcast, the Crypto Business podcast, and he’s founder of the Social Media Marketing Society. He also authored the books Launch and Writing White Papers.

Will The Latest Dramatic Evolution Of Holograms Be The Next Big Media Format? By Michelle Greenwald

When Shawn Frayne was just a 10 year old in Orlando, Florida, his dad took him to see Back to the Future 2, which set the trajectory for his life-long passion to advance hologram technology. He was entranced by the holographic shark in the movie and dreamt of one day making holograms much more refined, engaging, and realistic. When Shawn was 14, his dad helped him create a hologram animation studio in his bedroom and he made his first animated hologram. From then on, Shawn kept experimenting and perfecting his techniques. He enrolled in MIT which offered the most cutting-edge undergraduate studies related to holograms, as MIT’s then dean was a strong believer in the field’s future. Fast forward to early June 2022 when Shawn’s hardware & software company, Looking Glass Factory, launched the largest holographic display in the world – the Looking Glass 65”, 4X larger than any other group viewable 3D holographic display. I was one of the first to see it and was amazed by how such a flat screen could convey so much depth and 3D perspective. All of the company’s systems allow large groups of people to view up to 100 different perspectives of 3D, lifelike content at the same time. The holograms feel like they are floating out of the screen with realism and depth, and it’s experienced without a headset, eye-tracking, or 3D glasses. The secret of Looking Glass Factory’s technology lies in the proprietary hardware and software-generated optics that convey subtle shadows and light, not dissimilar to what the French painter Monet did when painting the cathedral of Rouen under so many different light conditions, and Leonardo da Vinci tried captured in his paintings. Shawn quoted the latter who said “the crowning achievement of painting arises from light and shade. The essence of good painting, and the key to making an object look threedimensional, is getting the shadows right”, and that’s why Leonardo spent more time studying and writing about shadows than he did any other artistic topic. Targets users of the Looking Glass hardware and software include individuals and enterprises. The 65” model is great for experiential marketing, 3D storytelling, engineering, design, medical and scientific visualization, R&D, and creating art, photography, and film. Springbok Entertainment

just launched film Zanzibar:Trouble in Paradise, the first ever holographic movie or documentary, in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. According to Brandon Zamel, CEO of Springbok Entertainment, “the massive increase in the holographic size gives 3D storytellers the ideal canvas to push the boundaries of immersive experiences. It’s the beginning of a new way of experiencing movies.” But the technology is not just for movies. Users can use nearly any 3D content including the new capture capabilities in phones like iPhone X, 11, and 12 to create holograms using Looking Glass Factory’s software and creator tools. These holograms can then be displayed on any size Looking Glass; including the 7.9” desktop Portrait model. Looking Glass’s media player, HoloPlay Studio, easily views, edits, and syncs holographic media and direct integrations are available for Unity, Unreal and Blender 3D software and creation tools. There are numerous examples that evidence that the Looking Glass’s holograms are ready for prime time. I recently visited the Louis Vuitton and Nike’s “Dream Now” exhibition in Greenpoint, Brooklyn which used around 50 different holograms to display 3D sneakers. Through touch-free gesture recognition technology, visitors could expand and rotate the 3D collector shoe images. The displays were also used in numerous experiential marketing activations with key brands at the Cannes Lions Festival. Other examples of brand marketing applications that we can expect to see more of include out-of-home advertising, retail installations, trade shows and events, theme parks, and digital art galleries. Another indication is the diversity of heavy hitter, tech savvy board members like Sabrina Kieffer, former SVP at Vimeo and COO of Skillshare, and Brenda Freeman, formerly at Turner Broadcasting, DreamWorks, National Geographic, Magic Leap and Arteza. As always, I like uncovering new media formats that reduce customer friction and provide great immersive experiences. Since it’s just the beginning for the broad adoption of holograms, it’s up to brands and their agencies to start exploring the opportunities which are limited only by our imaginations.

The data-driven future of storytelling: MIT’s Deb Roy on the message and the medium By Deb Roy

The head of MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication talks about how data can help storytellers, what audiences of the future might look like, and why artificial intelligence cannot replace human creativity. Deb Roy has spent much of his career studying the way humans use technology to communicate. As the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Roy leads an initiative to design human-machine systems that improve communication across divides and increase opportunity for underheard communities. The Center grew out of Roy’s earlier work at the MIT Media Lab, where he served as director from 2019-2021 and established the Laboratory for Social Machines in 2014. From 2013 to 2017, Roy served as Twitter’s chief media scientist. Roy spoke with McKinsey senior partner Jonathan Dunn, who co-leads the firm’s Consumer Tech and Media practice, about how audiences and storytelling are evolving, and what the future of media and entertainment might look like as a result. The interview, condensed and edited, appears below. McKinsey: Today we’re talking about the future of storytelling, in the far-out future. Like so many things, the pace of change around storytelling really accelerated over the course of the pandemic. The narrative of the story evolved within social networks, where many of us experienced it during that early March/April period. There was a lot of blurring between entertainment and reality, which social experiences often do. What were the building blocks of the changing

dynamics of audience definitions? Deb Roy: Audience is as important a concept as ever. If you are a storyteller, what’s the point unless you have an audience to communicate and connect with? We’ve known for quite a while that the internet and social media have fundamentally transformed what audiences are, how they form, how they behave, and how they process and respond to the storyteller. What might have been a pretty reasonable model of an audience as a group of mainly siloed individuals that you would reach through some kind of a broadcast channel has shifted to realizing now that the audience is networked. So instead of an audience, you’ve got an audience network. But actually as you look more carefully, there are incredibly complex, subtle structures in those networks. There are various cliques, communities, or clusters. The concept of an enclave, which is essentially a group of people who have a shared experience, or shared interest, describes it best. It’s not that audiences are necessarily cut off from the rest of the environment, as, say, the term “cocoon” would suggest. But there are constricted ways in which information enters and exists in the enclave, and there is some understanding of who’s in the enclave, and what it is that brings the group together. But a person could actually be a part of multiple

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enclaves, and you can’t just map one person into one enclave. And audiences evolve, and they connect to one another. One of the things we’re always striving to do is take a concept like audience enclaves and make it visible through data and analytics. If you’re a storyteller, there is a lot that can be gained from understanding what the structure or invisible patterns of those audience networks are, and being able to characterize them in human terms. In addition to validation that a storyteller knows their audience, there are sometimes interesting surprises to be found about your audience, such as unexpected connections to other audiences you’d also want to serve, or why people actually find a particular story or storyteller worth tuning into.

The network effects of “truth decay” McKinsey: What does this increased visibility for networks and audience enclaves mean for our understanding of trust and influence going forward? Deb Roy: The role of trust in networks is an area where there’s a growing recognition that something is wrong and getting worse. We all rely on networks of trust to decide how to act, and what to believe and not. There’s this notion of “truth decay,” where there’s a kind of a decaying of

knowledge and the shared facts that we actually have in common. I do think that’s related to the dynamics that we can see to some degree in how networks are configured and what and how we’re sharing information. A critical problem in all of this is how to approach sharing a message or story with a larger audience and build some kind of shared understanding. If you have fragmentation in that network, building common ground will be difficult. If you have highly defined and isolated enclaves where the only information that gets through is highly filtered and distorted, you will have breakdowns in the ability to build shared understanding across boundaries. I think our ability to trust one another is rooted in a foundation of understanding others, recognizing our common humanity, even though you may have many differences and therefore be in a different enclave. The power and limits of AI/ML storytelling tools McKinsey: The idea of storytellers better understanding the structure or invisible patterns of audience networks is more or less a fundamental redefinition of audience segmentation that some may view as backward, in that the audience is dictating what the storyteller should create, and that the analytics that enable this reverses the natural order of creativity. What do you think about that?

Deb Roy: There is a school of thought in which advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning sometimes feel almost magical. But it’s interesting to recognize the limits of even the most seemingly magical technologies against the human, social, and cultural context in which a story is told, shared, and builds shared meaning among members of an audience. I don’t see any obvious gains in all the capabilities of artificial intelligence capturing some of that context. It’s not just a strategic error to think about analytics and data informing and taking over the storytelling process in some sense. I think you’ll end up with pretty lousy stories that way. So the question is, what does the ability to make invisible patterns visible from data do for us? How can that help you as a storyteller understand something about your audience that you otherwise would not have seen? And discover connections and possibilities that otherwise would be invisible. I don’t think that challenges or questions the basic assignment of roles, of who’s telling the story, human or machine. But it could really change the possibilities for what kind of stories could be told. And who they could connect with. McKinsey: Talk about power tools that are possible on the horizon. Deb Roy: These are tools that help people tell stories, rather than automate the human out of the job of storytelling. For example, we’ve been building a tool that channels AI in service of the storyteller—a machine-learning writing tool that programs itself. You have to set an objective for it, some kind of a target function, and then the machine will figure out how to optimize for that function given examples of training data. We used pieces of text such as tweets and news headlines as training data for the AI, and looked at media habits of the people who chose to retweet and engage with each of those tweets. Then we asked whether we could predict media habits from looking at the choice of words and phrases that a person chose in engaging with that tweet. In particular we wondered about the political leanings of all of the people who end up interacting with that piece of content. We used more than 100 million retweets to train the AI model, which is where the advances in machine learning really come into play. We were able to build a quite highly predictive system that, when given a piece of text, could predict what kinds of people would engage with it in terms of their political leaning. We took that model and built a writer’s tool with it, so that a writer might be able to broaden their audience with people who are different from themselves, about whom they don’t have the intuition to address on their own. They may even have blind spots to the hidden meaning of words and phrases that they might otherwise unknowingly use, which prevents them from connecting with certain groups.

Casting the roles for machines and automation McKinsey: There are concerns though about using AI that relies on past data that might reinforce offensive behaviors, views or norms that were acceptable at some time in the past. How concerned are you about that in the work that you do? Deb Roy: There’s a growing concern about algorithmic bias, and relying on artificial intelligence that is learning from historical data that reflects biases. There’s growing recognition within technical communities and more generally that any kind of artificial intelligence technologies that rely on machine learning are basically looking back in time and finding patterns within that historical data to make future decisions based on those patterns. The risk is potentially getting locked into our past and continuing or even amplifying those patterns into the future. That’s a super-important concern, especially in the context of storytelling and making creative decisions. In some ways, the death of creativity is to end up trapped in just repeating patterns from the past. There are a number of things that should be done to keep these sorts of problems in check while continuing to explore how we can channel the incredible powers of the technology into human service. One is being thoughtful about what tasks get automated. There is sometimes a default assumption that if you can automate a certain role or job that a person is doing, you should. I disagree with that. I think we need to take a step back and say, “But wait, what’s the overall function here?” In a creative space where we are trying to create stories that inspire and connect with people, I think having that kind of default assumption can really be counterproductive and go against the creative mission. Beyond just thinking about the division of labor between human and machine, I think we should be asking ourselves continuously, what’s the division of agency? What role do we want each to play? Where is there judgment and decision-making involved that we want to remain under human control? It might seem in the moment like the machine is making reasonable decisions, and so we hand more and more agency over to it and get rid of the people who used to make those decisions. But by the time we’ve realized we’ve locked ourselves or our organization into a kind of creative dead end, it’s too late, because the people are gone. They’ve moved on to a smarter organization that understands what the right role is for machines. So I think we need to be mindful of the big picture, thinking holistically about the right ways to bring these incredibly powerful technologies into a human-led process. We should not cede agency to the machines, because in the long run, it’s actually not going to be what we want. The creative value of collective experience

We had some of our partners test the tool. We ran A/B experiments where they used suggestions and input from this tool to help rewrite their initial messages in order to get rid of hidden potential triggers and audience turnoffs that they had never intended.

McKinsey: One of the big developments in media in the last few years is a shift from so much media and storytelling being consumed by large groups of audiences to smaller, very intimate audiences. What does that mean for the way that stories are created or consumed?

And then we ran field experiments and found that in this case the tool let us reach a more politically diverse audience.

Deb Roy: When you talk about all the different ways technology can allow every individual to have what they

want, when they want it, where they want it, that is almost how we define technological progress. This is also making media consumption more and more individualized. When you look at the early days of any of these technologies, before we had the ability to create differentiated, individualized experiences, we had no choice but to have a collective experience. Once upon a time there were fewer television sets than people, and so groups of people gathered to watch TV, which means agreeing on what you’re going to watch together. Today, though, we have individualized delivery, and there’s a cost to that, which is that we lose our sense of connection with others, the shared experience. There will be an inevitable swing back. It’s not that we’ll give up on individualized services. But there was a valuable unintended consequence to being forced to cluster around that television set when there was only one in the neighborhood. The conversation that happens around it actually fundamentally transforms the value of that content and the experience. That is what we’re seeing now with audiences that are networked. They’re consuming content that comes to them through the network, deciding what to share, and participating as active members of the network. There’s no simple way to predict broadcast or diffusion anymore. It depends on people, and how they’re responding to the content. I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more and more old-school broadcast kinds of content serving these groups, because of the value it creates in building that shared experience. Even if it’s just a sunset you’re looking at, it’s just better when you view it together. That kind of synchronous experience in storytelling offers the same kind of value. So I cannot imagine our future progress will take the form of continued individualization of content. It’s not part of who we are. Tapping the full potential of the “liquid medium” McKinsey: One criticism of the evolution of storytelling over the last decade is that although there are so many more stories being told today, and so many technological advances, there’s been very little change in the format of the stories themselves. How do you see format creativity evolving in the long-term future? Deb Roy: When we talk about the format of storytelling, there’s the specific format of the medium—motion and sound, resolution, and aspect ratio—that create a channel within which you have to fit the story. And then there are the diffusion properties that affect where a story can go, how long it’s going to live on, and how it’s going to morph as it passes through the hands and minds of audience members. That’s maybe not part of the format, but it’s part of the medium as well. When you put those two together—format and propagation characteristics—the result can be radical. On one hand, it seems like storytelling formats haven’t changed that much. We’re kind of still stuck with the formats of television and film. Sometimes the evolution seems slow, but if you think of storytellers using Clubhouse, that has a format that they are trapped in, yet there’s already been a wild evolution in the art of audio performance on Clubhouse, and to begin with it’s really different from packing a story into a tweet. And then you think about how Twitter was just tweets, and then

the Tweetstorm came along and changed everything. Each of these little tweaks in how we use these platforms creates a new storytelling format. Perhaps the most dramatic shifts in storytelling can be seen in very short form videos on TikTok and other social video platforms in which the hook for the story needs to land within a few seconds. Before the internet, when you wanted to create a new format, you actually had to create a new technology and roll out a physical layer of infrastructure. And so when we went from telegraph to telephone, and we rolled out the radio networks, the movie studios and the theaters, and the television networks, you actually had to build bricks and mortar, and buy really expensive equipment, or lay millions of miles of cable. It took decades to roll out a new medium. But today, now that the internet has been built, it allows any combination of sight, sound, and motion format to be mashed up with any combination of network diffusion properties, so all you have to do is write some code and you can create a new medium. Also, the properties of each social platform are different, and so each offers a different storytelling format, meaning that even though the underlying technology is the same, the medium is different. You can experiment with how ephemeral something is, and decide what modalities you want: Text? Speech? You want images? What format? It’s kind of like we have a liquid medium. Some kids in a garage could come up with a new storytelling format and blanket the country or the world in the blink of an eye. So yes, on one hand it seems like we haven’t seen much change in storytelling format, but another way to look at it is that we have constantly changing formats that we can’t get a lock on for long enough to even allow the storytelling to evolve into one new format before another popular format arrives on the scene. We have entered an era of medium liquidity. McKinsey: What are the possible implications that “liquid medium” holds for the kind of content that will be created going forward, particularly for all these diffuse audience networks and enclaves? Deb Roy: It does seem like we’re on a path of cultural fragmentation that is unstoppable. It’s not all bad though. It complicates the process of having a functioning democracy, but on the other hand there’s a kind of accelerated evolution and flourishing of culture and language that is fascinating. I don’t know if it’s nine or 19 years out, but I can imagine an evolution of microcultures that are engaged enough that there will be stories and forms of entertainment that may be largely incomprehensible across groups, even though they’re in the English language. There would be an acceleration of a kind of inside speak, with languages and cultures that just continue to evolve more or less independent of one another. It’s the same way that languages and cultures have always formed, but at a new pace in a networked age. I think the big surprise in all of this is for the people who built the internet and all of this technology, with the assumption that the more we connect with one another the more we’ll just all sort of speak one language, and there’ll be world peace. But it’s turned out to be a far more complicated story, hasn’t it?

Mapping the metaverse: 4 critical concepts business leaders must focus on By Marketing Mag Staff

The metaverse is no longer a vague and futuristic concept. It’s beginning to take shape. During the next few years, these immersive and augmented spaces will change the nature of business and life. People will act and interact in different ways, they will shop and purchase goods in augmented and 3D worlds, and new types of products and services will appear. While the metaverse will incorporate elements of the web, smartphone apps, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR), it’s important to recognize that it’s more than a linear extension of today’s digital tools. The mashup of these various technologies will fundamentally change online interactions. As a result, it’s wise for business leaders to plan for the metaverse now. As pieces of this puzzle combine, coalesce and take shape over the coming years, those that establish a robust framework—with talent and technology—will be equipped to navigate this brave new virtual world. VIRTUALLY THERE It’s essential to understand what the metaverse is and what it isn’t. Although definitions vary, it’s clear that the metaverse exists as a persistent space with virtual content that delivers lifelike digital interactions. For example, immersive 3D environments on PCs and smartphone apps might dip into a metaverse and intersect with people accessing the metaverse through virtual reality. This is called a multi-modal experience. Not surprisingly, people will drop in and out of these spaces during the course of a day. They might peruse a 3D virtual storefront using a laptop or virtual reality headset, view items of interest—clothes, food, electronics, travel destinations, virtual objects, whatever—step through immersive environments, watch videos and gather information, and then head to a

physical store. There, augmented reality on a smartphone might guide them to the products they previously looked at. While the excitement around this topic has been heightened in the last few months, a bit of perspective is necessary. The Metaverse has been quietly taking shape over the last several years. At this point, it isn’t a brand-new world to build from scratch. It’s more like a digital jigsaw puzzle that hasn’t yet been assembled. Here are four critical factors that will make or break your organization’s metaverse strategy: 1. Content is everything. As customers float between physical stores and digital locations, populating a storefront in the metaverse with the same products that line the shelves of a physical store will be essential. This necessitates the use of digital twins, which create a virtual copy of a physical item, such as a pair of shoes, a piece of furniture, or even a house. In addition, there’s a need for 3D avatars. That’s because visitors to the Metaverse will spend most of their time and money using their own digital identity: their 3D avatar. Ideally, portability will allow users to bring their digital investments with them once they switch to a different metaverse. It’s likely that the digital identity used to navigate the metaverse will take on greater importance than a Facebook profile photo was in 2010. 3D avatars will become ubiquitous. New ways for avatars to interact will emerge. How people use these avatars and identities will change. 2. The experience you deliver matters. Once portable assets exist, the next step is to get them in front of your audience. While this is a straightforward proposition

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for a webpage because we have web browsers, things get more complicated with AR and VR in the metaverse. This is where 3D rendering engines come into play. They deliver the fidelity and interactivity that the metaverse demands. Already, 3D engines from Unity and Unreal deliver deep and long-form experiences while Adobe Mercury serves up short-form interactive experiences in AR. There are also platform-specific solutions like Snap. Selecting the right delivery engine is key. It’s also critical to pull the right analytics from the engine. This makes it possible to determine how successful your content is and what is driving engagement. 3. AI is the glue that holds the metaverse together. In the metaverse, it’s vital that humans feel they are speaking and interacting with other humans. This is what makes an experience seem real—and compelling. Extended reality (XR) makes this possible. It melds virtual elements and introduces a human-machine interface that makes AI seem “human.” With the combination of 3D, XR, and AI, it’s possible to have human-like digital companions populating our lives. Even more remarkably, these companions can understand who we are, what we’re looking for, and help at the precise moment we need it. But this cannot happen without preparation, including building talent and forming teams that understand everything from visuals and user experience to AI integration. A whole new world of human-machine interactions will be unleashed. 4. Mapping this new world is paramount. The nature of the metaverse is that it is “persistent.” People will move from one metaverse to another with an expectation that they can pick up exactly where they left off—and overlay these experiences to actual geography.

Complicating things is the fact that visitors might assemble in a completely virtual space, a virtual reality copy of the real world, or an actual physical location, with content layers created through augmented reality (see figure). This is no small challenge for content creators. In the case of a purely virtual world, like a video game, we can build experiences that take place in an ever-expanding virtual territory with a constantly changing map. However, when it comes to AR, actual physical spaces in the real world must overlap with the user’s experience. Therefore, locating persistent experiences at a micro level—even down to a centimeter at planet scale—becomes key to creating a compelling experience. Already, there are Virtual Positioning Systems (VPS) from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Niantic, and others. It’s difficult to predict which will prevail over the long run. The upshot? It’s a good idea to implement a level of abstraction above those solutions or to look for one that’s easily integrated and highly flexible. IMMMERSIVE RULES Amid all the hype and uncertainty about how exactly the metaverse will continue to take shape, it’s tempting to dismiss the concept or stand on the sidelines and wait a while. That would be a mistake. To succeed in this emerging world, business leaders must learn about this framework, amass technical talent, and build a technology foundation that’s powerful and flexible enough to support the metaverse when the time is right. At Adobe, we will make this process a little easier by continuing to invest in our 3D and immersive tools, such as Adobe Substance 3D and Adobe Aero, to make metaverse content creation accessible to anyone.

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