Making a triumphant return to the hosting chair, Rob Norman (Global Chair, Group M) welcomes fellow big thinkers Vivian Rosenthal (CEO, Snaps), Paul Woolmington (CEO, Canvas) and Ian Schafer (CEO, Deep Focus) to decode the huge opportunities for brands and challenges for creative people to breakthrough in the feed.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, it's the greatest lost tweet of our generation. You
can think of us as just ducks being force fed. Right.
If you just sit in your comfort zone, we're all
going to just die. Welcome to Tagline. Pour a cocktail
(00:24):
and join us for inspired conversations with the best storytellers,
culture makers, and creators, presented by our friends at Bullet
Frontier Whiskey. Please drink responsibly. My boss tells me that
you sleep well if you're either good or you're stupid.
He said, what about you? I said, I don't sleep well.
Tagline is produced by I Heart Radio and partnership with
Advertising Age. Hi. I'm welcome to Tagline. I'm Rope Norman.
(00:50):
I'm the chairman of Group. H'm North America and it's
great to be back. I have wonderful guests today, the
renaissance man and media entrepreneur Warmington, the CEO of Canvas
Worldwide more about which in a second, and Vivian Rosenthal,
the founder of Snaps, a media entrepreneur, one of the
original Google entrepreneurs. In residents and in a little while,
(01:16):
we're going to be joined by Mr met himself In Shaefer,
the founder and CEO Deep Focus, who we believe to
be held up for fifteen minutes in spring training before
opening day. Here at tagline and hello both of you. Hello, Hello, Robbie.
That's so good Robbie. You see, that's what comes from
(01:36):
being close. I am the godfather of Paul's son, and
here's the godfather of my dog, which is unusual but true.
Today we're going to talk about an interesting topic. We're
gonna talk about creativity and the feed. And when we
talk about the feed, we talk about the place where
people are spending more and more of their time in
the Instagram world and the Facebook world, and the Snapchat world,
(02:00):
in the Twitter world, and an area that presents kind
of huge opportunities for advertisers and brands and huge challenges
for creative people. And I'm hoping that this group of
people are going to be able to help all of
us understand feed a bit better and understand what makes
for outstanding content and great user as well as advertiser experiences. Now,
(02:26):
I'd like to start with you, Vivian, because you do
something that very few other people do well. You're maybe
alluding to the fact that we're building chatbots to allow
people to talk to brands, which is even going one
step beyond the feed actually, so we might be jumping ahead,
but you're also probably referring to the fact that we're
(02:47):
creating branded emojis and stickers, which we're doing in droves.
When we think about like how the ad unit has evolved,
it's clearly an opportunity to see it evolved in social
but also now in the message space. If we think
about the feed, the feed is going to be something
that started off pretty narrow, both literally and sort of metaphysically,
(03:08):
and it's going to be something that is actually very
all encompassing, right. I think there's many pros and many
cons to that. So that's something I want to dig
into for sure. Okay, Paul, So you are responsible for,
among other things, the Hyundai and Ka brands that canvas worldwide.
The automotive industry if it's been famous for one thing,
(03:31):
it's been famous for long television spots and huge print
ads and huge billboards. How do you think about this
much sort of narrower canvas in the context of the
brands you work with. Let me try and level set
a bit of the context. We whether it's the auto industry,
(03:53):
almost every other industry has a lot of muscle memory.
And I think Vivian said ad unit, and I think
what we were doing was we always chasing trying to
change consumer behavior, because we're still in that mindset as
it was ten years ago that two thirds of communication
was controllable and therefore ad units the way that you
did it, whereas actually, if you look at today, two
(04:15):
thirds of people's consumption is the opposite. It's actually much
more organic. It's not controlled. Help me help me that
a second. Yeah, I mean that's one of those kind
of great statements. It used to be two thirds like this,
and now it's two thirds like that. Come on to
the day. But so the data thing, I think all
I was going to say is that we've got to
change brand behavior rather than changing consumer behavior. The net
(04:38):
output was let's try and change consumer behavior through communications.
But now I think we have to think about how
brands behave in these environments. So even when we talk
about standardizing AD units, what we're trying to do is
invade feeds and invade spaces with as you said, repurposed
television ads as opposed to thinking about the feed and
(04:59):
a of other communication channels and much more inventive. So
in the In the much beloved and iconic first episode
of Tagline, which I think is now collectible in certain quarters,
Wendy Clark, who is iconically the first guest, said that
we have to be invited into pupil's homes and into
(05:20):
people's lives and permission to do that. Do we need
to be invited into people's feeds? And I mean, I'm
thankful to see consumer behavior changing it. I think they're
really judicious and what they want to see. And I
only want to see a brand in my feed if
it's providing some value to me, right, and that value
(05:41):
you could ascribe many different features to it, So it
could be some type of learning or education, it could
be some type of utility, it could be some type
of commerce opportunity, or it could be entertainment. But to me,
if it doesn't fall in one of those three categories
of value, I'm not particularly interested, right. And I think
this is true particular you with a younger audience that
are more interested in the brands that have some value
(06:04):
that is a creative to their life. Part of it
is that the types of brands that we're going to
see in our feed are going to be more curated
by sort of their values. But the interesting thing is
that the most majority of marketing will crash a feed.
But I think the beauty of crashing it is it's
just like that nerd who crashes a party, gets very drunk,
(06:25):
but still is incredibly funny. So that's what you want
to be as opposed to the sad person who crushes
the party not invited and spoils it. But I think
the truth of the matter is, although I agree with
Wendy and I agree with with Vivian, at the end
of the day, there's the great unwashed there who are
crashing every feed and crushing every social how do you
(06:45):
stand out and touched on it that it's like, if
you crash a party, better damn be funny, right, But
the problem is not every brand's DNA is to be funny.
So it begs the question, Okay, well, if you're not funny,
then what are you provide some other kind of value?
You will well come in a stranger if they're valuable
to the party, right. So I think a brand has
to think about and their agency of record, who they're
(07:06):
working with. How am I going to be valuable? Right?
So if you talk to some of the big operators
of feeds like Facebook, they will tell you that the
key to the puzzle is relevance and that their job,
which they do with machine learning and super computer power,
(07:28):
is to make trillions and many trillions of decisions every
day that matches ads with people's feeds, and that the
key signal that they're looking for is relevance to connect
the user or the consumer of the feed with the AD.
(07:50):
And they would argue interestingly that what will happen is
that the most relevant ads will be the ones that
are fast most frequently. And so, when you're thinking about
it creatively, how do you think about the concept of
relevance that helps that algorithm that's driving that match of
(08:13):
feed and add to surface your clients have. So we
actually coined a term for this um at my company.
We call it intelligent messaging. But it's delivering the right
company is Snap Society, not Snap Singular. No, that would
be even better. But that would be better, but no,
that would be maybe future lifetime. So we call it
(08:35):
intelligent messaging, which is delivering the right piece of content
to the right person at the right time, at the
right place. Right reinvented I am I remember, I am Yes?
If something doesn't have contextual relevance, you're really missing the boat.
If you had the ven diagram, it's like, you know,
something that's contextually relevant cross with something that adds value
to me is the sweet spot. You know, that's the opportunity.
(08:58):
I think both with the feeds and even if we
look at what we're doing now in chat bots as
just another feed, right, So these are chatbots that sit
on top of Facebook Messenger. It's in essence, another feed,
another space for a brand. I think that people will
respond to things if they're pertinent, right. So as an example,
we did a chat bought for bud Light and they
(09:18):
were sponsoring the NFL, and so it would ask me, viv,
where do you live? Who's your favorite team? Just two
pieces of information. So if I say the New York
Giants New York, it goes away, becomes invisible. But then
two hours before game time, it will send me a
text notification saying like are you stocked up on bud Light?
And by the way, don't forget to tune in and
watch the Giants in two hours. So I'd say like, no,
(09:39):
I need bud Light. It kicks me out too many
bar drizzly and I get beer delivered to my door
within kickoff time. I mean, that's a very contextually based
experience that was very successful, and there was very very
high completion rate of like clicking through that funnel because
it was providing value. Okay, so that's a version of relevance, pauls,
(09:59):
so I can kind of get bud and the circumstantial
nature of a football game. For some reason, I don't
know why, but it seemed to me the advertisers worked
out quite a long time ago that men like football
like beer. QE. Ed advertised beer in football games, which
is kind of a prescience notion that still holds up
(10:19):
quite well. But as you know, Mark Pritchett and his
noted speeches at the io B in the a NA
said not long ago that advertisers actually in the era
of digital and oversupply and massive consumption of media, have
fallen into the crap trap that too many people are
producing too much rubbish. And so in your world, and
(10:42):
particularly with your range of clients, where rubbish is not
a good idea, how do you think about that kind
of quality and relevance when you don't have that the
immediate contextual opportunity of men beer football. Yeah. But one
thing I think it's important to remember whether or not
we fall into the crap trap. There was always a
crap trap of all tv ads, as voted by consumers,
(11:08):
and probably most credive directors would be deemed crap. And
it's a crap trap and you've been caught the boom
turn raps. Yeah, absolutely, Well that's the that's the beauty.
The first thing I think is that early adopters, whether
you're crap or not, get this violent reaction against in
(11:29):
a new platform. But also you get huge engagement just
because you're early to it. And then there seems to
be this cycle of adoption and I be a standardization
and then what that does is it exponentially increases crap
because you standardize everything in order to scale it, but
(11:50):
to scale the crap. So let me So that's interesting.
So what you're saying is that when a new platform emerges,
the instant reaction of its users is to reject a
must be very engaged in it. But they're very engaged,
and arguably it can be quite effective. At which point
a well meaning industry body normally multilaterally from the supply side,
(12:11):
the buy side, the technology side, then determine standards to
operate in that platform. But actually what standards do is
allow for the exponential multiplication of crap. Is that what
you're saying. I am, and I think the banner ad
would be the prime example of that in its form
today and its whole history that keeps popping up, and
it keeps popping up. Yeah, yeah, but no, coming back
(12:32):
to the question, by the way, I'm very excited about
what's about to happen here on tagline, very so carry on,
just excited. I think the idea of contextually relevant agree with.
I think you can take it to to literal a form,
and I think some people take it to an extreme,
and that's where I think the human creative power of
(12:57):
then an AI it has to be in there because
sometimes there's serendipity that you do and that's an art
form still, so it's the balance of the art and
the science of anything. Otherwise you know, the machine would
run it. I don't want to bring back one of
my favorite sport piece of content that was for social
was for Heineken, and funny enough, they have been leaning
(13:18):
more into sport and it just so happens that you
keyed me up okay, and we're going to be back
just in one second, because in the on deck circle
playing first base and betting number three for tagline, we
have Ian Schaeffer, the founder of Deep Focus, joining Paul
Warmington's from Canvas Worldwide and Ian Rosenthale from Snaps. Hello. Ian, Hello, Sorry,
(13:45):
we're purposely made entrance were a little bit. We're super
happy to have you, very happy. We're talking about creativity
in the feed. Sorry, Paul, so kindly kind of sports.
So it was just I couldn't resist. You teed it
up Heineken. They obviously sponsor a lot of sports, Champions
(14:09):
League being a particularly big event around the world, everywhere
apart the United States, and they just created some wonderful content.
And there was a particular Italian agency created a beautiful
piece of long form content and I can't think sat
in the feed. I even got it and it was retranslated.
(14:32):
It was a spoof on a guy who watches a
football match with his friends. He then gets an invite
to go to the game, but he doesn't tell his friends.
He goes to the game, and of course they broadcast
it in the stadium with his buddies saying, what the
hell are you doing? You know? But it was a
wonderful just one of many that they're doing, and it's
long form that was very relevant too, I think passions
of fans and things like that. It took all my fancy,
(14:54):
but I think it's another great example of a market
here being adept to understanding they have to change their
brand behavior, be a bit braver and in some ways
be invited into the conversation rather than try and push
a message. It's scary though, when they have to compete
against the likes of Fox Sports and ESPN to produce
relevant sports content for the sports fan. And no, by
the way, they also have to sell beer. Yeah. Does
(15:16):
anyone remember bud TV by the way, Yes, But that's
because no one wants to go anywhere for it, right.
The content is the finer, and I think that's the
complexity of creativity. And the feed is filled with stuff
we've opted in to see. And then yet how does
an advertiser survive in that river? Which is interesting because
the notion of the advertiser content channel, and there have
(15:38):
been many and bud TV is one, and the Coca
Curtla company has been engaged in that kind of area,
and there have been a few others. Do you think
we've finally seen the end of that particular notion that
brand as publisher to that degree as a sustainable idea. No,
because I think that there are some brands out there
(16:00):
that are going to believe that they're diminishing returns in
their core product and that they're such great lifestyle marketers
that they're going to be able to actually compete in
the content businesses. Production costs come down by selling even
maybe like direct subscriptions via some kind of like over
the top. Yeah, and we've seen that done well by
some brands, right, And it's like Burbery to a phenomenal
(16:22):
job Burbery World. And if you talk about music, people
go to the site to watch acoustic sets and we'll
stay twenty seven minutes on the Barbary world side listening
to music, watching music videos. But it's a totally integral
part of their brand, their brand, and it's content, and
I think they do particularly a fantastic job. That's a
(16:43):
good illustration. Yeah. Similarly, I was thinking of go Pro
and I fly Virgin. I actually often find myself choosing
the go Pro channel over other channels, which is the
Virgin Yeah. Um, because it's like phenomenally shot action sports content, right,
but yeah, that's a more immersive experience. Time to take
a break with our friends from Bullet Frontier Whiskey. Please
(17:06):
drink responsibly. As some of you know, our sponsor here
at tagline is none other than Bullet Whiskey. And this
is theater of the mind we're talking about. Here. We
have our guest mixologist who joins us during tagline. He's
actually the world champion mixologists from two thousand and thirteen.
(17:29):
He's been a judge kind of since then. So he
sort of went the other side and he said to
say hi, introduced himself and maybe mix a drink. Yeah,
I'm Jeff Bell. So today we're partnered up with the
Bullet Bourbon to serve you guys to use your Palmer.
Uh it is spring according to the calendar, but not
the weather outside. So we're a little ambitious with the
(17:49):
drink inspired by the Arnold Palmer lemonated nice Tea. We
use a sweet tea sirrup made by some friends of
mine in Charleston, South Carolina, with some fresh yuzu juice
Bullet whiskey, and so it's fair to say this is
the first year that people have been able to serve
Arnold Palmer's went. Arnold Palmer wasn't still alive, and I
think we should take a moment for Arnold on that.
(18:10):
But I see this is a fitting tribute, a tribute good.
What do we think? It's delicious? It's delicious, you see, Jeff,
you're the guy you always were. Well, I appreciate it. Now.
I can sleep well tonight. I'm sure you will. My
boss tells me that you sleep well if you're either
good or you're stupid. And he said, what about you?
I said, I don't sleep well, which happens to be
(18:31):
true because I didn't want to commit either way. Will
you be back later? I'll be back whenever you need me. Fantastic.
My kind of mixologist. You don't just make these cocktails
kind of randomly. You're a kind of subject matter mixologist, right, Yeah,
I think there's a there's a time and place for
every cocktail. You know. When I come on to do
tag on with you guys, I try to come up
(18:52):
with something new that's that's relevant to what your right
minds are speaking about. So the subject today being the feed,
I wanted to bring something that was really like aesthetically pleasing,
and it's really easy for me to say that on
radio because no one can see that and prove me wrong.
It's garnished with fresh mints, super green, none the leaves
or wilt or anything like that. And the feed for
me is that we're kind of subjected to the consumers.
(19:16):
We get between a hundred and fifty and two hundred
people a day, which means that h people a day
could take a picture of a cocktail. That cocktail then
shows up in their feed and their friends feed, and
if their influencers like, it goes on exponentially. This is
kind of like a grassroots marketing for a small business,
is you know, making sure that if you serve a
cocktail in a dimly lit space on a soiled cocktail
(19:37):
napkin with lines that were cut yesterday, you're gonna be
doing a disservice to your bar and you're slowly gonna
plummet down and that's gonna be a reflection of the
product you serve. But if you you know, you source
your ingredients, use everything fresh, prepare things all a minute,
that kind of thing you creates photo moments for people.
I guess I mainly talking about Instagram, but it's a
little detail that takes a lot of extra work. So
(19:58):
you're talking about what we would will return on experience.
So if you give people a great experience, they're going
to share it and come back. Right. Yeah, we are
held accountable by social media. Is almost an extension of
Yelp or Google reviews or anything like that, which we
like to read. But with social media it's whether they
have good words or bad words to say. If the
photos awful, the drink looks awful, and then it has
(20:19):
this kind of sour experience of the bar. So the
goal is to make everything as attractive as possible for
photo moments. And you know, moving forward with designing new
restaurants and bars, you take into account the way the
light comes in from the windows, the kind of lights
to use over the bar. You almost need to idiot
proof the photography set for your consumers. The story that
you just told is actually quite interesting because the same
way that you're thinking about making sure that your environment
(20:40):
looks good in other people's photos, those other people are
making sure that they're going to environment that looks good
in their photos. So every person, literally to a person,
it seems like these days are thinking about themselves in
some ways as a small business, and they may not
actually be selling things, although many of them are. UM,
they're trying to build their social capital, they're net worth.
(21:01):
They're projecting a version of themselves that they want people
to believe they are. By the way, it's like everybody's client,
every brand that's out there, human or otherwise, is projecting
an image of who they want to be perceived as.
And we want to believe that social media is lifting
the veil of transparency in front of everything, but I
think it's actually clouded. I think it's added to the
lack of transparency that exists out there, because you've got
(21:24):
a lot of people again behaving a certain way to
be perceived a certain way as opposed to for who
they really are. And that's really deep. And I apologize
for Thank you, and a big chest to Jeff and
to Bullet for looking after Jeff. You can see you
next time. Thank you, Thank you, Bullet. Don't you go
changing your story. I would Bullet Frontier whiskey, please drink responsibly.
(22:16):
So I habitually quote Jefferson and Churchill car marks from
time to time, um and and and of Corsi and Schaeffer,
And my favorite in Schaefer quote was I've never seen
a skip button on that that I didn't love. And so, Paul,
when you're thinking about the automobile market, and how do
(22:37):
you prevent people in the way you think about it
not using the skip button or not exing out of
their feed because I don't want this at anymore? What
kind of processes do you go through with their client
and your creative partners to get the great question. I'll
give you an illustration. So I view someone like Amazon
(22:57):
as a feed. It's not a formal feed, but it's
something that's digitally enabled. It sits there, it's an application
and I go to it. We did a partnership so
Hyundai we were the first and we have exclusive in
category and we are offering Prime now Drive Now. So
essentially media became a service. So the service was you
could go to Amazon Prime and we were obviously feeding
(23:20):
through the data the people that we thought were most
likely to want to test drive and Atlantra and they
could actually test drive it when they wanted, where they
wanted and how they wanted it if they scheduled it.
So we did that. It was an absolute blast success.
I think you're playing fast and loose with my definition
of the feed. I'm just saying no, but there's no
skip button there. But that's the point is there's no
(23:41):
skip button. That's the future. I think of a lot
of digital communications. You talked about utilities and service. To me,
the best form of service in this consumer driven world
is fantastic service. I mean, a fantastic service is the
proofpoint of the brand was we're going to do it
better so you don't have to go to the dealership
if you don't want to go to a dealership. Now,
if we could do more of that in a Facebook environment,
(24:03):
if we could do more of that in a snapshot environment,
that's what I would welcome. And that's what I'm striving
to do. How we can improve service and utility and
other aspects of the business. You can think of us
as just consumers is just ducks being force fed, right.
That's sort of like one way to look at it,
and the other way to look at it is like
(24:24):
the ducks that have sort of broken out and are like,
I'm going to go figure out my own life and
I'm going to make a life for myself that I choose.
You know, maybe I'm going to be vegan or who
knows what I think. There's also this idea that people
want to be able to have choice, they want to
be able to opt into something. And I think the
(24:45):
problem with the feed, and maybe the reason why none
of us are necessarily coming up with great examples for
the feed and we're pointing to other things, is because
there's this element of the feed you can't choose, right like,
if you want to be on social media, then you
sort of have to bow down to the feed, and
then that means that along with it comes all the advertising.
What we're seeing with the advent of choice is that
(25:05):
people are choosing selectively to engage with brands they really
care about. So to me, the opportunity for a brand
is potentially to extricate themselves out of the feed and
come back into a person's life in a different way,
to sort of unexpected way. That's kind of a very
reassuring sort of social thought. However, my general experience and
(25:26):
advertisers is that they spend money when they see a
return on the money, and there is no doubt that Facebook,
in particular within the feed space with Instagram and now
with Messenger also is like the Dyson vacuum of money.
It must be being effective. And the only way that
(25:46):
the advertisers the seeing effectiveness is this they're getting a
return of some description on another. And so there is
a kind of a bit of a paradox because if
it was that unwelcome when people have made the Faustian
bargain that they want to be on Facebook yet had
to deal with the advertising, that would just reject the advertising,
and then advertisers would reject Facebook. But that doesn't seem
(26:07):
to have happened. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we
live in a consumer driven culture, right, that's all about consuming.
The other night I was watching a film called Minimalism,
a documentary. I don't know if anyone's seen it, but
it makes a really it actually should be shorter. I
would agree with that, good joke. It's interesting. It makes
(26:27):
the point that we should be much more judicious in
terms of the brands we led into our lives, in
terms of the people we lend into our lives, in
terms of everything, right, And I think that as a culture,
I actually think that that's a really big underground movement
that's happening. And and so, while you're absolutely right, of course,
Facebook and Google and others meant money. But I think
that there is inevitably often a backlash. Let's let's just
(26:50):
say the ads don't work. I know I'm very specific
about what ads I'll engage with, right, And it comes
back to what I said before. It's like, the brand
has to offer some value to my life. It has
to be creative in some way. If it is, then
I don't even see it as an ad. I actually
see it as like content that I want to know about.
So you think about yourself when you think about minimalism,
and I imagine that we have some shared values to
(27:12):
people in this room, and there are other people who
would say, well, you may be a little bit on
the coastal elite to side of the equation. And we've
had an incredible prominence for feed based environments in the
last six months of our collective lives and how they've
(27:33):
influenced some very very big decisions and some very big
moves and opinion in our society and in our country.
And I'm curious how smart are the people that are
creating the influence politically, and how are they using the
(27:53):
feeds to such extraordinary effect. By most people's estimation, but
having gone to cool in Washington, d C. With an
eye towards like having a political career, I could tell
you I chose the less nasty of the professions. If
you want to look at where there's less friction, I mean,
at least an advertising fortune tends to favor the friction list.
(28:13):
Buying process, politics, the fortune tens to favor that the
friction list like believing process and so bad news travels
very fast. Fake news travels even faster. When you tell
people what they want to hear, they're not only going
to share it, but they're going to opt into it.
And I think that's why you see the ratings that
you know, a partisan news channel would have. When someone
sees something that justifies the belief that they have, regardless
(28:36):
of whether it's fact or fiction, they're going to share
it because it validates again a belief that they have
and doesn't make them feel lonely anymore. That dynamic doesn't
really advertising, because that's a very transactional place. Someone said
to me this morning, Actually a group of people didn't
say to me. They said, the confirmation and affirmation are
much easier to deal with than information. We're in a
place where information doesn't necessarily have to be fact, and
(28:56):
most information is noise, and whatever we choose to be
signals what we pull out of it. Right. Yeah, I
love that the alliteration also delegation because I think in
a lot of social feeds, people delegate the important to
the ephemeral, and I think there's enough psychology relegate, delegate
and relegate. They're relegating, delegating to alliteration. This is important too.
(29:22):
I think understand the psychology of a lot of people
go to feeds to lesson stress, to kind of fill
in gaps. I mean, there's a lot of psychology around that,
and maybe to not do what they should be doing.
And I think that's absolutely universal across every demographic. I
wanted to build on your alliteration ask you a question.
(29:42):
Do you think that advertisers are insufficiently manipulative if they
actually took some of the lessons from the way some
of the political dialogue is driven, which clearly works, you
would think, And you go back to vance Packard and
the history of advertising and hidden persuaders and so forth,
do you think some of that's been lost and maybe
needs to come back. There are a lot of emotional
(30:02):
strings that get pulled in service of a brand campaign
that speak more to a movement or emotion than actually
the product that it's meant to sell. And you can
make arguments that maybe none of those really actually sold
the products they were meant to sell. They just actually
made the brand get credit for a particular kind of message,
and maybe there's like a long strategy. Are you saying
(30:23):
that purpose driven marketing is somehow manipulative. I think it
often is manipulative, and so not somehow just is the
advertising is gonna have a budget, to your point, unless
that budget is meant to give some kind of return.
We all want to believe that companies are out there
spending money and that consumers want to engage with brands
and companies that are doing things that are good for society.
(30:46):
But I think most of the time, very large corporations
are doing things I'm so dated in advertising that are
good for society is because that's what the research says
the consumers want. I think purpose driven marketing, if it
really is a fundamental part of the behavior, that's fine,
and I think whether will be phenomenal that almost everything
they do socially, how they link digital to physical I
(31:08):
think a lot of their activations. In many of that
is good and when they actually lean you know, they
don't overtly have to lean into their an underlying part
of their business model because it was baked in right
at the beginning. But I agree with you. I think
everyone is now trying to adopt these new behaviors, and
I think they're struggling between now it being a social
cause and actually being a brand behavior at the fundamental level. Yeah,
(31:31):
I think it's also just important to step back and
think about even what the pain point is for these
brands that's causing them to go to the feed. Nike
came to us and they said, okay, so millennials and
gen z kids aren't going to our dot com as much, right,
and they obviously don't open up email, and they're in
messaging what's been called dark social. So how to rereach
(31:52):
them that has to be sort of like what an
agency and a creative shop really looks at when they
think about this is not just sort of doing the
exact same thing and mapping it on. And I think
when brands and their agency partners take a step back
and really think about what this new medium is that's
driven around visual communication, when I think of the feed,
if I have to define the feed, I think it
(32:13):
would be like a real time visual heartbeat of the
creative collective consciousness. Right, that's that's that's the thing of
beauty from you. Someone just checked that that is characters
or less. Because if it isn't, it's the greatest lost
tweet of our generation. Um like heart. It can be calm,
(32:34):
it could be fast, absolutely, it could be it could
be many things, but that's the that's my point. Rhythm,
it could be a rhythmic. But like when I check
my feed, I do. I see it as this combination
of brands I care about and people I care about
and what's happening in that given moment in the world.
So that's super interesting. So you actually see your feed
(32:56):
in a way it's a kind of meta and extended you. Yes, completely,
that's very interesting. I like that. I'm intrigued by I
feel like it's so like Sacri sanc. That's why I
got so upset before with the like duck analogy is
just because I feel like brands can't just shove anything
into that feed, Like if it's an extension of me,
then I don't want it. And again to be fair.
(33:18):
I think we're all maybe older than the audience, who's
necessarily the person spending more time in their feed but
not our aging listeners. Well correct, you know I'm also
forty one, so that doesn't you know, so taxon service. No,
But I really do think the way I look at
my feed is the way my friends look at their feed,
(33:39):
which is it's a virtual version of me. And so
as such, I wanted to feel decluttered of anything that
I don't actually believe in. What's exciting about where the
feed is going. If we think about the chat bot space,
so like the ecosystem of chatbots built on top of
Facebook Messenger is unlike traditional advertising, chatbots are all opt in.
So in the feed, you can't opt out of advertising,
(34:02):
right if you want to be on Facebook or Instagram
or Snapchat, you have to assume I'm going to look
at some amount of brand new content. Now, what I
try to do is curate that, so I'm really seeing
content that inspires me or provokes me or does something exciting.
I think with chatbots it goes even one step further,
which is you have to opt in. A chat bot
can't just come along and say like hi, Rob, like
(34:22):
I'm going to start talking to you. That's not how
some of my best friends of chat bots. So no.
But in that case, obviously, if you're going to opt
into this thing, it's better damn be good. It's got
to make some utility. So yesterday, for Marriott Hotels, we
launched a booking bot so you can give it intention,
which is an LP is it to understand your intentions.
(34:43):
So my intention is to go to Denver h and
stay there for three days. Show me a hotel that
I'd like. That's providing a real utility. Yesterday, for Nike,
we launched a bot that lets you take a photo
of any particular So you see your an art exhibit,
you see an amazing installation, you take a photo, you're
really inspired by it. It will auto generate a pair
of airmax that are the colors that you saw on
(35:05):
the installation, and you can buy it there. I did
it today, took less than two minutes. I ended up
spending a hundred and thirty dollars. There's ways to do this.
There's ways to advertise that provides value and is interesting
and compelling, and that it's easier to appeal too, maybe
more natural to appeal to kind of the bottom of
Meslow's hierarchy of needs, which is like a utility situation
(35:27):
like that, then trying to appeal to somebody to your
point in a more feed based environment where they're consuming
as much as they're creating, or vice versa, right where
they feel the need to have that representation of themselves
and every engagement that they have might or might not
be rebroadcast to somebody else. By definition, though advertising is
in eruptive, the best advertising, the most effective advertising, I
(35:50):
should say, has always been interruptive, right. Rather it's been
a page in a magazine, or if it's a television
commercial or a trailer before a movie. You've got a
captive audience that to see something else, and that's your
opportunity to I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
So with sort of conversational technology, right, which is where
it's all moving. I wake up in the morning, maybe
(36:12):
I ask Alexa for a recommendation for something. There's an
opportunity obviously for a meaningful brand connection. So it's like
give me a breakfast recipe, and it's like, oh, here's
this thing and these eggs brought to you by so
and so brand and then I'm in an uber and
I get another recommendation through a chatbot, and then I
get to work, and then there's something that's related to
(36:35):
the other two interactions I just had. And I think
that idea of moving from conversation to actually typing back
to conversation is where it's all going. And so thinking
about how does that weave in a valuable way, I
think it's Black Mirror season one, episode two, totally. It
totally is I know. So we know that Vivian wants
(36:56):
to wake up in the morning to find in her
feed or her ai environment a recommendation for a breakfast recipe. So, Paul,
when you wake up in the morning and our age
that in and of itself is good news. Thank god?
Was it Lords Shawsbury who said, I wake up in
the morning, I opened a coffee of the time as
I read the obituary columns, and if I'm not in there,
(37:16):
I go back to bed. And so when you get
up in the morning, actually which feed you look at first?
That's Twitter, guy, Facebook, guy, Instagram, Instagram. It was kind
of a great morning Instagram moment. No, it would be
someone like you who's probably got up three hours before me.
He's crossing Williamsburg Bridge heading to JFK and it's the
(37:39):
so you want that kind of inspirational this is my
town and uplifting kind of moments. And if you're here,
first feed of the day is my notification screen on
my phone curated to the point where my most optimized.
So give me a sense of what's in the compleatly
breaking news and notifications? Right, Trump, right, important emails, senior client,
(38:01):
something that I'm tagged in, saved from my wife to
make sure that I heard it. Like it something you're
tagged in by your work, So Cheryl tags you, right,
So Cheryl taggs you. You have a notification to tell
you to like something your wife into someone else's social media.
I'm optimized. My life horrible. It makes my life much
(38:24):
much easier. No, I mean, it's the food of love
in your face. It is. I that's incredible. That's one
of the all time great podcast admissions. I mean, I
don't know how many podcasts admissions there have been. That's
an absolute beauty. That's great. Should I tell you mine?
I saw my Twitter in a rather Lord shast Be
kind of way, because if I haven't got any notifications
(38:46):
in Twitter, as in a mention or a retweet, I
seriously question the possibility of my own existence at that moment.
I'm a perfect narcissist, and it's the only way I
know I've existed. And I think we get crucial moment
on tageline when the question is what's what's my tagline? Yeah?
That's good? Is your tagline? Actually a tagline? Is your tagline?
(39:09):
And emoji? Fair enough? Yes? I do like emoji is
quite a bit, but no, I actually have a tagline.
It sounds morbid, but it's not. Tagline is hashtag Conversations
from the Grave, which is the title of a book
I started writing, which is about how we converse with
people who are no longer physically here otherwise died, but
(39:30):
they live on through AI and machine learning and deep learning. Right,
and so I think that six ft deep learning, Yes exactly.
It was the idea I had of what would it
be like if we could listen to the conversation between
Elon Musk and Albert Einstein or J. J. Abrahams and
Walt Disney, or Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. I
want to listen to those conversations, right, so that I thought, well, Okay,
(39:51):
that's going to happen in the near future in our lifetime.
Stuff beautiful. I'm loving, absolutely pitched the story. Have you
pitched the tag have and see? I've just been writing it.
I've got a slight fear of peaking early on the
subject of taglines, and Paul, what's your tagline? It would
be hashtag make yourself uncomfortable. I got to that tagline
(40:12):
after Actually I've never been I will go to my
grave not being happy. I mean, I'm a happy person,
but actually thinking there's something around the corner that I
should be doing. So obviously it means that I've actually
done lots of things. Even in my career. I probably
never been in a job more than about eight years.
And it's also I think very relevant to what we've
(40:34):
been Make yourself uncomfortable means every single day, whether it's
having a cold shower occasionally in the morning, that it
immediately makes me do that every moe every morning because
it makes me uncomfortable totally that I love that. And
then actually make yourself uncomfortable brilliant, literally sitting down with
people who I have no idea what they're talking about,
(40:54):
but I have to be uncomfortable with people around me.
These brilliant misfits who work at Canvas, and they make
me uncomfortable every day because you know what, that's part
of just learning. If you just sit there in your
comfort zone, we're all going to just die. Okay, before
you to go get a room. And what's your tagline?
I'm gonna steal an album title? Is that all right?
(41:17):
Of the most recent album from a tribe called Quest.
It's rooted in the notion that I enjoy watching the
status quo die like a disgusting, ugly death, and industrial
complex is kind of not realize what's happening to them.
So I'm gonna go with we got it from here.
Thank you for your service. So my tagline is one
(41:38):
over today's datas and the words best before I'd like
to thank and Schaeffer, Paul Willington, Visen Rosenthal. This has
been tagline. Thank you for being here. Thanks and thank
you Bullet Bourbon, our trustee and loyal and motivating sponsor Palmer.
(42:08):
You've been listening to tagline presented by our friends at
Bullet Frontier Whiskey at the Bullet Distilling Company, Louisville, Kentucky.
Please drink responsibly. We want to hear what you thought.
Join the discussion on Twitter now by using the hashtag tagline.
Check out our next episode as Droga five founder David
droga In, Cindy Gallup, founder of If We Ran the World,
(42:30):
and Make Love Not Porn. Join I Heart Media CMO
Gail Troberman for a brash conversation about the value of creativity.
Catch all of our episodes at i heart radio dot com,
slash tagline in the I heart Radio app, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Audition
Okay, it's the greatest lost tweet of our generation. You
can think of us as just ducks being force fed. Right.
If you just sit in your comfort zone, we're all
going to just die. Welcome to Tagline. Pour a cocktail
(00:24):
and join us for inspired conversations with the best storytellers,
culture makers, and creators, presented by our friends at Bullet
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you sleep well if you're either good or you're stupid.
He said, what about you? I said, I don't sleep well.
Tagline is produced by I Heart Radio and partnership with
Advertising Age. Hi. I'm welcome to Tagline. I'm Rope Norman.
(00:50):
I'm the chairman of Group. H'm North America and it's
great to be back. I have wonderful guests today, the
renaissance man and media entrepreneur Warmington, the CEO of Canvas
Worldwide more about which in a second, and Vivian Rosenthal,
the founder of Snaps, a media entrepreneur, one of the
original Google entrepreneurs. In residents and in a little while,
(01:16):
we're going to be joined by Mr met himself In Shaefer,
the founder and CEO Deep Focus, who we believe to
be held up for fifteen minutes in spring training before
opening day. Here at tagline and hello both of you. Hello, Hello, Robbie.
That's so good Robbie. You see, that's what comes from
(01:36):
being close. I am the godfather of Paul's son, and
here's the godfather of my dog, which is unusual but true.
Today we're going to talk about an interesting topic. We're
gonna talk about creativity and the feed. And when we
talk about the feed, we talk about the place where
people are spending more and more of their time in
the Instagram world and the Facebook world, and the Snapchat world,
(02:00):
in the Twitter world, and an area that presents kind
of huge opportunities for advertisers and brands and huge challenges
for creative people. And I'm hoping that this group of
people are going to be able to help all of
us understand feed a bit better and understand what makes
for outstanding content and great user as well as advertiser experiences. Now,
(02:26):
I'd like to start with you, Vivian, because you do
something that very few other people do well. You're maybe
alluding to the fact that we're building chatbots to allow
people to talk to brands, which is even going one
step beyond the feed actually, so we might be jumping ahead,
but you're also probably referring to the fact that we're
(02:47):
creating branded emojis and stickers, which we're doing in droves.
When we think about like how the ad unit has evolved,
it's clearly an opportunity to see it evolved in social
but also now in the message space. If we think
about the feed, the feed is going to be something
that started off pretty narrow, both literally and sort of metaphysically,
(03:08):
and it's going to be something that is actually very
all encompassing, right. I think there's many pros and many
cons to that. So that's something I want to dig
into for sure. Okay, Paul, So you are responsible for,
among other things, the Hyundai and Ka brands that canvas worldwide.
The automotive industry if it's been famous for one thing,
(03:31):
it's been famous for long television spots and huge print
ads and huge billboards. How do you think about this
much sort of narrower canvas in the context of the
brands you work with. Let me try and level set
a bit of the context. We whether it's the auto industry,
(03:53):
almost every other industry has a lot of muscle memory.
And I think Vivian said ad unit, and I think
what we were doing was we always chasing trying to
change consumer behavior, because we're still in that mindset as
it was ten years ago that two thirds of communication
was controllable and therefore ad units the way that you
did it, whereas actually, if you look at today, two
(04:15):
thirds of people's consumption is the opposite. It's actually much
more organic. It's not controlled. Help me help me that
a second. Yeah, I mean that's one of those kind
of great statements. It used to be two thirds like this,
and now it's two thirds like that. Come on to
the day. But so the data thing, I think all
I was going to say is that we've got to
change brand behavior rather than changing consumer behavior. The net
(04:38):
output was let's try and change consumer behavior through communications.
But now I think we have to think about how
brands behave in these environments. So even when we talk
about standardizing AD units, what we're trying to do is
invade feeds and invade spaces with as you said, repurposed
television ads as opposed to thinking about the feed and
(04:59):
a of other communication channels and much more inventive. So
in the In the much beloved and iconic first episode
of Tagline, which I think is now collectible in certain quarters,
Wendy Clark, who is iconically the first guest, said that
we have to be invited into pupil's homes and into
(05:20):
people's lives and permission to do that. Do we need
to be invited into people's feeds? And I mean, I'm
thankful to see consumer behavior changing it. I think they're
really judicious and what they want to see. And I
only want to see a brand in my feed if
it's providing some value to me, right, and that value
(05:41):
you could ascribe many different features to it, So it
could be some type of learning or education, it could
be some type of utility, it could be some type
of commerce opportunity, or it could be entertainment. But to me,
if it doesn't fall in one of those three categories
of value, I'm not particularly interested, right. And I think
this is true particular you with a younger audience that
are more interested in the brands that have some value
(06:04):
that is a creative to their life. Part of it
is that the types of brands that we're going to
see in our feed are going to be more curated
by sort of their values. But the interesting thing is
that the most majority of marketing will crash a feed.
But I think the beauty of crashing it is it's
just like that nerd who crashes a party, gets very drunk,
(06:25):
but still is incredibly funny. So that's what you want
to be as opposed to the sad person who crushes
the party not invited and spoils it. But I think
the truth of the matter is, although I agree with
Wendy and I agree with with Vivian, at the end
of the day, there's the great unwashed there who are
crashing every feed and crushing every social how do you
(06:45):
stand out and touched on it that it's like, if
you crash a party, better damn be funny, right, But
the problem is not every brand's DNA is to be funny.
So it begs the question, Okay, well, if you're not funny,
then what are you provide some other kind of value?
You will well come in a stranger if they're valuable
to the party, right. So I think a brand has
to think about and their agency of record, who they're
(07:06):
working with. How am I going to be valuable? Right?
So if you talk to some of the big operators
of feeds like Facebook, they will tell you that the
key to the puzzle is relevance and that their job,
which they do with machine learning and super computer power,
(07:28):
is to make trillions and many trillions of decisions every
day that matches ads with people's feeds, and that the
key signal that they're looking for is relevance to connect
the user or the consumer of the feed with the AD.
(07:50):
And they would argue interestingly that what will happen is
that the most relevant ads will be the ones that
are fast most frequently. And so, when you're thinking about
it creatively, how do you think about the concept of
relevance that helps that algorithm that's driving that match of
(08:13):
feed and add to surface your clients have. So we
actually coined a term for this um at my company.
We call it intelligent messaging. But it's delivering the right
company is Snap Society, not Snap Singular. No, that would
be even better. But that would be better, but no,
that would be maybe future lifetime. So we call it
(08:35):
intelligent messaging, which is delivering the right piece of content
to the right person at the right time, at the
right place. Right reinvented I am I remember, I am Yes?
If something doesn't have contextual relevance, you're really missing the boat.
If you had the ven diagram, it's like, you know,
something that's contextually relevant cross with something that adds value
to me is the sweet spot. You know, that's the opportunity.
(08:58):
I think both with the feeds and even if we
look at what we're doing now in chat bots as
just another feed, right, So these are chatbots that sit
on top of Facebook Messenger. It's in essence, another feed,
another space for a brand. I think that people will
respond to things if they're pertinent, right. So as an example,
we did a chat bought for bud Light and they
(09:18):
were sponsoring the NFL, and so it would ask me, viv,
where do you live? Who's your favorite team? Just two
pieces of information. So if I say the New York
Giants New York, it goes away, becomes invisible. But then
two hours before game time, it will send me a
text notification saying like are you stocked up on bud Light?
And by the way, don't forget to tune in and
watch the Giants in two hours. So I'd say like, no,
(09:39):
I need bud Light. It kicks me out too many
bar drizzly and I get beer delivered to my door
within kickoff time. I mean, that's a very contextually based
experience that was very successful, and there was very very
high completion rate of like clicking through that funnel because
it was providing value. Okay, so that's a version of relevance, pauls,
(09:59):
so I can kind of get bud and the circumstantial
nature of a football game. For some reason, I don't
know why, but it seemed to me the advertisers worked
out quite a long time ago that men like football
like beer. QE. Ed advertised beer in football games, which
is kind of a prescience notion that still holds up
(10:19):
quite well. But as you know, Mark Pritchett and his
noted speeches at the io B in the a NA
said not long ago that advertisers actually in the era
of digital and oversupply and massive consumption of media, have
fallen into the crap trap that too many people are
producing too much rubbish. And so in your world, and
(10:42):
particularly with your range of clients, where rubbish is not
a good idea, how do you think about that kind
of quality and relevance when you don't have that the
immediate contextual opportunity of men beer football. Yeah. But one
thing I think it's important to remember whether or not
we fall into the crap trap. There was always a
crap trap of all tv ads, as voted by consumers,
(11:08):
and probably most credive directors would be deemed crap. And
it's a crap trap and you've been caught the boom
turn raps. Yeah, absolutely, Well that's the that's the beauty.
The first thing I think is that early adopters, whether
you're crap or not, get this violent reaction against in
(11:29):
a new platform. But also you get huge engagement just
because you're early to it. And then there seems to
be this cycle of adoption and I be a standardization
and then what that does is it exponentially increases crap
because you standardize everything in order to scale it, but
(11:50):
to scale the crap. So let me So that's interesting.
So what you're saying is that when a new platform emerges,
the instant reaction of its users is to reject a
must be very engaged in it. But they're very engaged,
and arguably it can be quite effective. At which point
a well meaning industry body normally multilaterally from the supply side,
(12:11):
the buy side, the technology side, then determine standards to
operate in that platform. But actually what standards do is
allow for the exponential multiplication of crap. Is that what
you're saying. I am, and I think the banner ad
would be the prime example of that in its form
today and its whole history that keeps popping up, and
it keeps popping up. Yeah, yeah, but no, coming back
(12:32):
to the question, by the way, I'm very excited about
what's about to happen here on tagline, very so carry on,
just excited. I think the idea of contextually relevant agree with.
I think you can take it to to literal a form,
and I think some people take it to an extreme,
and that's where I think the human creative power of
(12:57):
then an AI it has to be in there because
sometimes there's serendipity that you do and that's an art
form still, so it's the balance of the art and
the science of anything. Otherwise you know, the machine would
run it. I don't want to bring back one of
my favorite sport piece of content that was for social
was for Heineken, and funny enough, they have been leaning
(13:18):
more into sport and it just so happens that you
keyed me up okay, and we're going to be back
just in one second, because in the on deck circle
playing first base and betting number three for tagline, we
have Ian Schaeffer, the founder of Deep Focus, joining Paul
Warmington's from Canvas Worldwide and Ian Rosenthale from Snaps. Hello. Ian, Hello, Sorry,
(13:45):
we're purposely made entrance were a little bit. We're super
happy to have you, very happy. We're talking about creativity
in the feed. Sorry, Paul, so kindly kind of sports.
So it was just I couldn't resist. You teed it
up Heineken. They obviously sponsor a lot of sports, Champions
(14:09):
League being a particularly big event around the world, everywhere
apart the United States, and they just created some wonderful content.
And there was a particular Italian agency created a beautiful
piece of long form content and I can't think sat
in the feed. I even got it and it was retranslated.
(14:32):
It was a spoof on a guy who watches a
football match with his friends. He then gets an invite
to go to the game, but he doesn't tell his friends.
He goes to the game, and of course they broadcast
it in the stadium with his buddies saying, what the
hell are you doing? You know? But it was a
wonderful just one of many that they're doing, and it's
long form that was very relevant too, I think passions
of fans and things like that. It took all my fancy,
(14:54):
but I think it's another great example of a market
here being adept to understanding they have to change their
brand behavior, be a bit braver and in some ways
be invited into the conversation rather than try and push
a message. It's scary though, when they have to compete
against the likes of Fox Sports and ESPN to produce
relevant sports content for the sports fan. And no, by
the way, they also have to sell beer. Yeah. Does
(15:16):
anyone remember bud TV by the way, Yes, But that's
because no one wants to go anywhere for it, right.
The content is the finer, and I think that's the
complexity of creativity. And the feed is filled with stuff
we've opted in to see. And then yet how does
an advertiser survive in that river? Which is interesting because
the notion of the advertiser content channel, and there have
(15:38):
been many and bud TV is one, and the Coca
Curtla company has been engaged in that kind of area,
and there have been a few others. Do you think
we've finally seen the end of that particular notion that
brand as publisher to that degree as a sustainable idea. No,
because I think that there are some brands out there
(16:00):
that are going to believe that they're diminishing returns in
their core product and that they're such great lifestyle marketers
that they're going to be able to actually compete in
the content businesses. Production costs come down by selling even
maybe like direct subscriptions via some kind of like over
the top. Yeah, and we've seen that done well by
some brands, right, And it's like Burbery to a phenomenal
(16:22):
job Burbery World. And if you talk about music, people
go to the site to watch acoustic sets and we'll
stay twenty seven minutes on the Barbary world side listening
to music, watching music videos. But it's a totally integral
part of their brand, their brand, and it's content, and
I think they do particularly a fantastic job. That's a
(16:43):
good illustration. Yeah. Similarly, I was thinking of go Pro
and I fly Virgin. I actually often find myself choosing
the go Pro channel over other channels, which is the
Virgin Yeah. Um, because it's like phenomenally shot action sports content, right,
but yeah, that's a more immersive experience. Time to take
a break with our friends from Bullet Frontier Whiskey. Please
(17:06):
drink responsibly. As some of you know, our sponsor here
at tagline is none other than Bullet Whiskey. And this
is theater of the mind we're talking about. Here. We
have our guest mixologist who joins us during tagline. He's
actually the world champion mixologists from two thousand and thirteen.
(17:29):
He's been a judge kind of since then. So he
sort of went the other side and he said to
say hi, introduced himself and maybe mix a drink. Yeah,
I'm Jeff Bell. So today we're partnered up with the
Bullet Bourbon to serve you guys to use your Palmer.
Uh it is spring according to the calendar, but not
the weather outside. So we're a little ambitious with the
(17:49):
drink inspired by the Arnold Palmer lemonated nice Tea. We
use a sweet tea sirrup made by some friends of
mine in Charleston, South Carolina, with some fresh yuzu juice
Bullet whiskey, and so it's fair to say this is
the first year that people have been able to serve
Arnold Palmer's went. Arnold Palmer wasn't still alive, and I
think we should take a moment for Arnold on that.
(18:10):
But I see this is a fitting tribute, a tribute good.
What do we think? It's delicious? It's delicious, you see, Jeff,
you're the guy you always were. Well, I appreciate it. Now.
I can sleep well tonight. I'm sure you will. My
boss tells me that you sleep well if you're either
good or you're stupid. And he said, what about you?
I said, I don't sleep well, which happens to be
(18:31):
true because I didn't want to commit either way. Will
you be back later? I'll be back whenever you need me. Fantastic.
My kind of mixologist. You don't just make these cocktails
kind of randomly. You're a kind of subject matter mixologist, right, Yeah,
I think there's a there's a time and place for
every cocktail. You know. When I come on to do
tag on with you guys, I try to come up
(18:52):
with something new that's that's relevant to what your right
minds are speaking about. So the subject today being the feed,
I wanted to bring something that was really like aesthetically pleasing,
and it's really easy for me to say that on
radio because no one can see that and prove me wrong.
It's garnished with fresh mints, super green, none the leaves
or wilt or anything like that. And the feed for
me is that we're kind of subjected to the consumers.
(19:16):
We get between a hundred and fifty and two hundred
people a day, which means that h people a day
could take a picture of a cocktail. That cocktail then
shows up in their feed and their friends feed, and
if their influencers like, it goes on exponentially. This is
kind of like a grassroots marketing for a small business,
is you know, making sure that if you serve a
cocktail in a dimly lit space on a soiled cocktail
(19:37):
napkin with lines that were cut yesterday, you're gonna be
doing a disservice to your bar and you're slowly gonna
plummet down and that's gonna be a reflection of the
product you serve. But if you you know, you source
your ingredients, use everything fresh, prepare things all a minute,
that kind of thing you creates photo moments for people.
I guess I mainly talking about Instagram, but it's a
little detail that takes a lot of extra work. So
(19:58):
you're talking about what we would will return on experience.
So if you give people a great experience, they're going
to share it and come back. Right. Yeah, we are
held accountable by social media. Is almost an extension of
Yelp or Google reviews or anything like that, which we
like to read. But with social media it's whether they
have good words or bad words to say. If the
photos awful, the drink looks awful, and then it has
(20:19):
this kind of sour experience of the bar. So the
goal is to make everything as attractive as possible for
photo moments. And you know, moving forward with designing new
restaurants and bars, you take into account the way the
light comes in from the windows, the kind of lights
to use over the bar. You almost need to idiot
proof the photography set for your consumers. The story that
you just told is actually quite interesting because the same
way that you're thinking about making sure that your environment
(20:40):
looks good in other people's photos, those other people are
making sure that they're going to environment that looks good
in their photos. So every person, literally to a person,
it seems like these days are thinking about themselves in
some ways as a small business, and they may not
actually be selling things, although many of them are. UM,
they're trying to build their social capital, they're net worth.
(21:01):
They're projecting a version of themselves that they want people
to believe they are. By the way, it's like everybody's client,
every brand that's out there, human or otherwise, is projecting
an image of who they want to be perceived as.
And we want to believe that social media is lifting
the veil of transparency in front of everything, but I
think it's actually clouded. I think it's added to the
lack of transparency that exists out there, because you've got
(21:24):
a lot of people again behaving a certain way to
be perceived a certain way as opposed to for who
they really are. And that's really deep. And I apologize
for Thank you, and a big chest to Jeff and
to Bullet for looking after Jeff. You can see you
next time. Thank you, Thank you, Bullet. Don't you go
changing your story. I would Bullet Frontier whiskey, please drink responsibly.
(22:16):
So I habitually quote Jefferson and Churchill car marks from
time to time, um and and and of Corsi and Schaeffer,
And my favorite in Schaefer quote was I've never seen
a skip button on that that I didn't love. And so, Paul,
when you're thinking about the automobile market, and how do
(22:37):
you prevent people in the way you think about it
not using the skip button or not exing out of
their feed because I don't want this at anymore? What
kind of processes do you go through with their client
and your creative partners to get the great question. I'll
give you an illustration. So I view someone like Amazon
(22:57):
as a feed. It's not a formal feed, but it's
something that's digitally enabled. It sits there, it's an application
and I go to it. We did a partnership so
Hyundai we were the first and we have exclusive in
category and we are offering Prime now Drive Now. So
essentially media became a service. So the service was you
could go to Amazon Prime and we were obviously feeding
(23:20):
through the data the people that we thought were most
likely to want to test drive and Atlantra and they
could actually test drive it when they wanted, where they
wanted and how they wanted it if they scheduled it.
So we did that. It was an absolute blast success.
I think you're playing fast and loose with my definition
of the feed. I'm just saying no, but there's no
skip button there. But that's the point is there's no
(23:41):
skip button. That's the future. I think of a lot
of digital communications. You talked about utilities and service. To me,
the best form of service in this consumer driven world
is fantastic service. I mean, a fantastic service is the
proofpoint of the brand was we're going to do it
better so you don't have to go to the dealership
if you don't want to go to a dealership. Now,
if we could do more of that in a Facebook environment,
(24:03):
if we could do more of that in a snapshot environment,
that's what I would welcome. And that's what I'm striving
to do. How we can improve service and utility and
other aspects of the business. You can think of us
as just consumers is just ducks being force fed, right.
That's sort of like one way to look at it,
and the other way to look at it is like
(24:24):
the ducks that have sort of broken out and are like,
I'm going to go figure out my own life and
I'm going to make a life for myself that I choose.
You know, maybe I'm going to be vegan or who
knows what I think. There's also this idea that people
want to be able to have choice, they want to
be able to opt into something. And I think the
(24:45):
problem with the feed, and maybe the reason why none
of us are necessarily coming up with great examples for
the feed and we're pointing to other things, is because
there's this element of the feed you can't choose, right like,
if you want to be on social media, then you
sort of have to bow down to the feed, and
then that means that along with it comes all the advertising.
What we're seeing with the advent of choice is that
(25:05):
people are choosing selectively to engage with brands they really
care about. So to me, the opportunity for a brand
is potentially to extricate themselves out of the feed and
come back into a person's life in a different way,
to sort of unexpected way. That's kind of a very
reassuring sort of social thought. However, my general experience and
(25:26):
advertisers is that they spend money when they see a
return on the money, and there is no doubt that Facebook,
in particular within the feed space with Instagram and now
with Messenger also is like the Dyson vacuum of money.
It must be being effective. And the only way that
(25:46):
the advertisers the seeing effectiveness is this they're getting a
return of some description on another. And so there is
a kind of a bit of a paradox because if
it was that unwelcome when people have made the Faustian
bargain that they want to be on Facebook yet had
to deal with the advertising, that would just reject the advertising,
and then advertisers would reject Facebook. But that doesn't seem
(26:07):
to have happened. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we
live in a consumer driven culture, right, that's all about consuming.
The other night I was watching a film called Minimalism,
a documentary. I don't know if anyone's seen it, but
it makes a really it actually should be shorter. I
would agree with that, good joke. It's interesting. It makes
(26:27):
the point that we should be much more judicious in
terms of the brands we led into our lives, in
terms of the people we lend into our lives, in
terms of everything, right, And I think that as a culture,
I actually think that that's a really big underground movement
that's happening. And and so, while you're absolutely right, of course,
Facebook and Google and others meant money. But I think
that there is inevitably often a backlash. Let's let's just
(26:50):
say the ads don't work. I know I'm very specific
about what ads I'll engage with, right, And it comes
back to what I said before. It's like, the brand
has to offer some value to my life. It has
to be creative in some way. If it is, then
I don't even see it as an ad. I actually
see it as like content that I want to know about.
So you think about yourself when you think about minimalism,
and I imagine that we have some shared values to
(27:12):
people in this room, and there are other people who
would say, well, you may be a little bit on
the coastal elite to side of the equation. And we've
had an incredible prominence for feed based environments in the
last six months of our collective lives and how they've
(27:33):
influenced some very very big decisions and some very big
moves and opinion in our society and in our country.
And I'm curious how smart are the people that are
creating the influence politically, and how are they using the
(27:53):
feeds to such extraordinary effect. By most people's estimation, but
having gone to cool in Washington, d C. With an
eye towards like having a political career, I could tell
you I chose the less nasty of the professions. If
you want to look at where there's less friction, I mean,
at least an advertising fortune tends to favor the friction list.
(28:13):
Buying process, politics, the fortune tens to favor that the
friction list like believing process and so bad news travels
very fast. Fake news travels even faster. When you tell
people what they want to hear, they're not only going
to share it, but they're going to opt into it.
And I think that's why you see the ratings that
you know, a partisan news channel would have. When someone
sees something that justifies the belief that they have, regardless
(28:36):
of whether it's fact or fiction, they're going to share
it because it validates again a belief that they have
and doesn't make them feel lonely anymore. That dynamic doesn't
really advertising, because that's a very transactional place. Someone said
to me this morning, Actually a group of people didn't
say to me. They said, the confirmation and affirmation are
much easier to deal with than information. We're in a
place where information doesn't necessarily have to be fact, and
(28:56):
most information is noise, and whatever we choose to be
signals what we pull out of it. Right. Yeah, I
love that the alliteration also delegation because I think in
a lot of social feeds, people delegate the important to
the ephemeral, and I think there's enough psychology relegate, delegate
and relegate. They're relegating, delegating to alliteration. This is important too.
(29:22):
I think understand the psychology of a lot of people
go to feeds to lesson stress, to kind of fill
in gaps. I mean, there's a lot of psychology around that,
and maybe to not do what they should be doing.
And I think that's absolutely universal across every demographic. I
wanted to build on your alliteration ask you a question.
(29:42):
Do you think that advertisers are insufficiently manipulative if they
actually took some of the lessons from the way some
of the political dialogue is driven, which clearly works, you
would think, And you go back to vance Packard and
the history of advertising and hidden persuaders and so forth,
do you think some of that's been lost and maybe
needs to come back. There are a lot of emotional
(30:02):
strings that get pulled in service of a brand campaign
that speak more to a movement or emotion than actually
the product that it's meant to sell. And you can
make arguments that maybe none of those really actually sold
the products they were meant to sell. They just actually
made the brand get credit for a particular kind of message,
and maybe there's like a long strategy. Are you saying
(30:23):
that purpose driven marketing is somehow manipulative. I think it
often is manipulative, and so not somehow just is the
advertising is gonna have a budget, to your point, unless
that budget is meant to give some kind of return.
We all want to believe that companies are out there
spending money and that consumers want to engage with brands
and companies that are doing things that are good for society.
(30:46):
But I think most of the time, very large corporations
are doing things I'm so dated in advertising that are
good for society is because that's what the research says
the consumers want. I think purpose driven marketing, if it
really is a fundamental part of the behavior, that's fine,
and I think whether will be phenomenal that almost everything
they do socially, how they link digital to physical I
(31:08):
think a lot of their activations. In many of that
is good and when they actually lean you know, they
don't overtly have to lean into their an underlying part
of their business model because it was baked in right
at the beginning. But I agree with you. I think
everyone is now trying to adopt these new behaviors, and
I think they're struggling between now it being a social
cause and actually being a brand behavior at the fundamental level. Yeah,
(31:31):
I think it's also just important to step back and
think about even what the pain point is for these
brands that's causing them to go to the feed. Nike
came to us and they said, okay, so millennials and
gen z kids aren't going to our dot com as much, right,
and they obviously don't open up email, and they're in
messaging what's been called dark social. So how to rereach
(31:52):
them that has to be sort of like what an
agency and a creative shop really looks at when they
think about this is not just sort of doing the
exact same thing and mapping it on. And I think
when brands and their agency partners take a step back
and really think about what this new medium is that's
driven around visual communication, when I think of the feed,
if I have to define the feed, I think it
(32:13):
would be like a real time visual heartbeat of the
creative collective consciousness. Right, that's that's that's the thing of
beauty from you. Someone just checked that that is characters
or less. Because if it isn't, it's the greatest lost
tweet of our generation. Um like heart. It can be calm,
(32:34):
it could be fast, absolutely, it could be it could
be many things, but that's the that's my point. Rhythm,
it could be a rhythmic. But like when I check
my feed, I do. I see it as this combination
of brands I care about and people I care about
and what's happening in that given moment in the world.
So that's super interesting. So you actually see your feed
(32:56):
in a way it's a kind of meta and extended you. Yes, completely,
that's very interesting. I like that. I'm intrigued by I
feel like it's so like Sacri sanc. That's why I
got so upset before with the like duck analogy is
just because I feel like brands can't just shove anything
into that feed, Like if it's an extension of me,
then I don't want it. And again to be fair.
(33:18):
I think we're all maybe older than the audience, who's
necessarily the person spending more time in their feed but
not our aging listeners. Well correct, you know I'm also
forty one, so that doesn't you know, so taxon service. No,
But I really do think the way I look at
my feed is the way my friends look at their feed,
(33:39):
which is it's a virtual version of me. And so
as such, I wanted to feel decluttered of anything that
I don't actually believe in. What's exciting about where the
feed is going. If we think about the chat bot space,
so like the ecosystem of chatbots built on top of
Facebook Messenger is unlike traditional advertising, chatbots are all opt in.
So in the feed, you can't opt out of advertising,
(34:02):
right if you want to be on Facebook or Instagram
or Snapchat, you have to assume I'm going to look
at some amount of brand new content. Now, what I
try to do is curate that, so I'm really seeing
content that inspires me or provokes me or does something exciting.
I think with chatbots it goes even one step further,
which is you have to opt in. A chat bot
can't just come along and say like hi, Rob, like
(34:22):
I'm going to start talking to you. That's not how
some of my best friends of chat bots. So no.
But in that case, obviously, if you're going to opt
into this thing, it's better damn be good. It's got
to make some utility. So yesterday, for Marriott Hotels, we
launched a booking bot so you can give it intention,
which is an LP is it to understand your intentions.
(34:43):
So my intention is to go to Denver h and
stay there for three days. Show me a hotel that
I'd like. That's providing a real utility. Yesterday, for Nike,
we launched a bot that lets you take a photo
of any particular So you see your an art exhibit,
you see an amazing installation, you take a photo, you're
really inspired by it. It will auto generate a pair
of airmax that are the colors that you saw on
(35:05):
the installation, and you can buy it there. I did
it today, took less than two minutes. I ended up
spending a hundred and thirty dollars. There's ways to do this.
There's ways to advertise that provides value and is interesting
and compelling, and that it's easier to appeal too, maybe
more natural to appeal to kind of the bottom of
Meslow's hierarchy of needs, which is like a utility situation
(35:27):
like that, then trying to appeal to somebody to your
point in a more feed based environment where they're consuming
as much as they're creating, or vice versa, right where
they feel the need to have that representation of themselves
and every engagement that they have might or might not
be rebroadcast to somebody else. By definition, though advertising is
in eruptive, the best advertising, the most effective advertising, I
(35:50):
should say, has always been interruptive, right. Rather it's been
a page in a magazine, or if it's a television
commercial or a trailer before a movie. You've got a
captive audience that to see something else, and that's your
opportunity to I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
So with sort of conversational technology, right, which is where
it's all moving. I wake up in the morning, maybe
(36:12):
I ask Alexa for a recommendation for something. There's an
opportunity obviously for a meaningful brand connection. So it's like
give me a breakfast recipe, and it's like, oh, here's
this thing and these eggs brought to you by so
and so brand and then I'm in an uber and
I get another recommendation through a chatbot, and then I
get to work, and then there's something that's related to
(36:35):
the other two interactions I just had. And I think
that idea of moving from conversation to actually typing back
to conversation is where it's all going. And so thinking
about how does that weave in a valuable way, I
think it's Black Mirror season one, episode two, totally. It
totally is I know. So we know that Vivian wants
(36:56):
to wake up in the morning to find in her
feed or her ai environment a recommendation for a breakfast recipe. So, Paul,
when you wake up in the morning and our age
that in and of itself is good news. Thank god?
Was it Lords Shawsbury who said, I wake up in
the morning, I opened a coffee of the time as
I read the obituary columns, and if I'm not in there,
(37:16):
I go back to bed. And so when you get
up in the morning, actually which feed you look at first?
That's Twitter, guy, Facebook, guy, Instagram, Instagram. It was kind
of a great morning Instagram moment. No, it would be
someone like you who's probably got up three hours before me.
He's crossing Williamsburg Bridge heading to JFK and it's the
(37:39):
so you want that kind of inspirational this is my
town and uplifting kind of moments. And if you're here,
first feed of the day is my notification screen on
my phone curated to the point where my most optimized.
So give me a sense of what's in the compleatly
breaking news and notifications? Right, Trump, right, important emails, senior client,
(38:01):
something that I'm tagged in, saved from my wife to
make sure that I heard it. Like it something you're
tagged in by your work, So Cheryl tags you, right,
So Cheryl taggs you. You have a notification to tell
you to like something your wife into someone else's social media.
I'm optimized. My life horrible. It makes my life much
(38:24):
much easier. No, I mean, it's the food of love
in your face. It is. I that's incredible. That's one
of the all time great podcast admissions. I mean, I
don't know how many podcasts admissions there have been. That's
an absolute beauty. That's great. Should I tell you mine?
I saw my Twitter in a rather Lord shast Be
kind of way, because if I haven't got any notifications
(38:46):
in Twitter, as in a mention or a retweet, I
seriously question the possibility of my own existence at that moment.
I'm a perfect narcissist, and it's the only way I
know I've existed. And I think we get crucial moment
on tageline when the question is what's what's my tagline? Yeah?
That's good? Is your tagline? Actually a tagline? Is your tagline?
(39:09):
And emoji? Fair enough? Yes? I do like emoji is
quite a bit, but no, I actually have a tagline.
It sounds morbid, but it's not. Tagline is hashtag Conversations
from the Grave, which is the title of a book
I started writing, which is about how we converse with
people who are no longer physically here otherwise died, but
(39:30):
they live on through AI and machine learning and deep learning. Right,
and so I think that six ft deep learning, Yes exactly.
It was the idea I had of what would it
be like if we could listen to the conversation between
Elon Musk and Albert Einstein or J. J. Abrahams and
Walt Disney, or Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. I
want to listen to those conversations, right, so that I thought, well, Okay,
(39:51):
that's going to happen in the near future in our lifetime.
Stuff beautiful. I'm loving, absolutely pitched the story. Have you
pitched the tag have and see? I've just been writing it.
I've got a slight fear of peaking early on the
subject of taglines, and Paul, what's your tagline? It would
be hashtag make yourself uncomfortable. I got to that tagline
(40:12):
after Actually I've never been I will go to my
grave not being happy. I mean, I'm a happy person,
but actually thinking there's something around the corner that I
should be doing. So obviously it means that I've actually
done lots of things. Even in my career. I probably
never been in a job more than about eight years.
And it's also I think very relevant to what we've
(40:34):
been Make yourself uncomfortable means every single day, whether it's
having a cold shower occasionally in the morning, that it
immediately makes me do that every moe every morning because
it makes me uncomfortable totally that I love that. And
then actually make yourself uncomfortable brilliant, literally sitting down with
people who I have no idea what they're talking about,
(40:54):
but I have to be uncomfortable with people around me.
These brilliant misfits who work at Canvas, and they make
me uncomfortable every day because you know what, that's part
of just learning. If you just sit there in your
comfort zone, we're all going to just die. Okay, before
you to go get a room. And what's your tagline?
I'm gonna steal an album title? Is that all right?
(41:17):
Of the most recent album from a tribe called Quest.
It's rooted in the notion that I enjoy watching the
status quo die like a disgusting, ugly death, and industrial
complex is kind of not realize what's happening to them.
So I'm gonna go with we got it from here.
Thank you for your service. So my tagline is one
(41:38):
over today's datas and the words best before I'd like
to thank and Schaeffer, Paul Willington, Visen Rosenthal. This has
been tagline. Thank you for being here. Thanks and thank
you Bullet Bourbon, our trustee and loyal and motivating sponsor Palmer.
(42:08):
You've been listening to tagline presented by our friends at
Bullet Frontier Whiskey at the Bullet Distilling Company, Louisville, Kentucky.
Please drink responsibly. We want to hear what you thought.
Join the discussion on Twitter now by using the hashtag tagline.
Check out our next episode as Droga five founder David
droga In, Cindy Gallup, founder of If We Ran the World,
(42:30):
and Make Love Not Porn. Join I Heart Media CMO
Gail Troberman for a brash conversation about the value of creativity.
Catch all of our episodes at i heart radio dot com,
slash tagline in the I heart Radio app, or wherever
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