Alex Murrell: Edition #007
Welcome
Welcome to Edition #007 of Strategy Made Simple.
This newsletter captures the best of what I’ve written, recorded and read since the last issue came out in October 2022.
Enjoy.
Articles
The Age of Average, published in March 2023, covers the homogenisation of our visual culture across six fields. Here's a quick intro from my website:
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a collaboration with the people of a different country and culture. But it didn’t quite go to plan. Every picture looked the same. 30 years after the “People’s Choice” series, it seems the landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live. From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. Welcome to the age of average. Let’s dive in..
A few people have pointed out that ‘music’ was a missing theme in my article. In the first draft I wrote a chapter about how the streaming services have made popular music shorter, less melodically diverse and more repetitive. However, I ended up cutting it for brevity. I’m now working on writing this up as a follow-up article. It should be ready in the next month or so.
Past articles
The Age of Average has now become my most read article, with over half a million reads to date. For the newcomers, here are my three next most popular pieces:
The Errors of Efficiency argues that the waste in advertising is actually the part that works.
The Forecasting Fallacy argues that our ability to make predictions across five fields is pretty poor.
Magpie Marketing argues that the pace of change is not accelerating as fast as marketers would like you to believe.
Summaries
Since publishing the last edition of the newsletter I’ve summarised five books:
In total, you can now find 20 book summaries on my website, each of them no more than a two minute read.
Keep an eye on Twitter or LinkedIn for the next summary.
Links
Here’s five of the best things I’ve read over the last few months.
Different video channels sit at different ends of the predictability spectrum
We’re very used to media planners talking about reach, frequency and, more recently, attention. But, as Rich Kirk says, there’s a whole host of other metrics to consider. New research from Thinkbox offers a good primer on “Variance”, which describes how much return on investment varies across different ads within the same channel. A high variance (E.g. +/- 80%) indicates that a channel is low in predictability and thus high in risk. A low variance (E.g. +/- 10%) indicates the exact opposite.
CEOs and brand reputation are connected
BrandFinance published data showing a correlation between the reputation of CEOs and that of the companies they lead. The research claimed that “outspoken CEOs can have a positive or negative impact on brand reputation”. I think this is a leap. I’d argue the relationship is more likely to work in reverse. When a firm is perceived by the public to have a good reputation, some of that positive perception will rub off on the CEO. Interesting none the less.
85% of ads fall beneath the attention-memory threshold
A study conducted by Amplified Intelligence analysed 130,000 ad views from 1,150 different brands and found that 85% garnered less that 2.5 seconds of attention. This duration is important as Professor Karen Nelson-Field claims this is the minimum amount of attention required for a consumer to commit the ad to memory. Scary.
Premium brands: Are they really different?
Europanel shared data that showed that the distribution of buyers across income levels was broadly the same for economy, mass, upper mass, premium and super premium shampoos in China. The researchers claim this data dispels the idea that the rich buy premium FMCG/CPG products whilst the less fortunate do the opposite. Interesting data, for sure. But I’d love to see whether the finding holds across other categories and countries before jumping to conclusions.
Puncturing the paradox: group cohesion and the generational myth
Researchers at ad agency BBH analysed 419 lifestyle statements using TGI data. The data was then cut by different audience segments to arrive at a “group cohesion score”. The higher the score, the more likely a member of that audience is to give the same answer. As you can see from the chart below, “people who floss” or “crossword fans” are far more cohesive groups than the generational cohorts. As I wrote in my 2018 article The Millennial Myth, “We must start segmenting by attitude and not by age.”
Talks
My article The Age of Average started life as a pecha kucha talk (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide) that I gave at the West of England Design Forum and I’ve now been invited to turn it into a longer presentation for the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA). The conference will be on the 28th September in London and tickets can be purchased here.
Archive
If you’d like to go back and read previous editions of this newsletter, the first six can be found below:
Over and out
Thank you again for subscribing to this newsletter. If you enjoyed the edition, feel free to share it with anyone who may find it valuable. You can also follow me on social to get more frequent updates. All the links can be found on my website.
As always, please do let me know if you have any feedback. I always love to hear from you.
Until next time,
Alex