Volume 22: Sneaking one in before the weekend.

1. The coloring-in department leading the charge on innovation?

Tl;dr: Board level expectations of marketing greater than you think.

Mark Ritson; brand journalist, hawker of online courses and promoter of Byron Sharp’s ideas, once disparagingly described marketing as the “coloring in department.” He wasn’t entirely wrong, as marketing has increasingly lost charge of the marketing mix, often retaining responsibility only for the promotional P and sometimes not even that. As a result, many have lamented the widespread dumbing down of the field as businesses fetishize their programmatic tech-stacks, first party data, personalization, vanity metrics like CAC, and agile approaches to performance marketing that combine to create nothing better than those terrible ads that follow you around the internet offering discounts on things you’ve already bought. So, it was with great interest that I stumbled on a report from Google and Deloitte seeking to articulate what company boards are looking for from the CMO. While appallingly over-designed and verbose, the best bits are quite interesting: They want CMO’s to be strategic magic workers, catalyzing innovation, connecting executive leadership teams around the needs of the customer, and owning the overall narrative of the brand. It strikes me that now is the perfect time for CMO’s to take and run with this charge. Coloring-in budgets are either down or on hold completely, and there’s clearly a need to innovate and find new ways to add value for the customer.

2. Human ingenuity on full display in the heart of the crisis.

Tl;dr: People are doing some wonderful things.

With innovation in mind, it’s been fascinating to see the ingenious ways in which people have responded to the current crisis. Whether Paperless Post offering invites for virtual parties, the Greek Peak Resort delivering pizza in blow-up dinosaur suits (kind of a cheaper and more accessible version of a HazMat suit), or entire swathes of companies figuring out how to run call-centers on the fly from people’s homes, develop curbside pickup for retail that never previously existed, or simply local restaurants creating family meals for pickup.

And while necessity may be the mother of invention, my favorite so far has been the virtual prom held by actor John Krasinski on his “some good news” channel. So insightful to the desires of kids to do something as simple as go to their prom, and so much bad dad dancing on display on social media. It made me smile.

What’s most impressive about all of these activities is the contrast with brands telling us that we’re in it together and offering little more than shallow platitudes. Instead, they’re actually doing something. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum…

3. Please just stop. Don’t show me another crying nurse you don’t really care about. Or a haunted sky.

Tl;dr: Will advertising agencies ever have a genuine creative thought?

From the moment digital advertising began, advertising agencies fought change by claiming creativity as the highest alter of their craft. As a result, you’d be forgiven for expecting COVID-19 focused ads to be creatively inspired, differentiated, and uniquely engaging. But nope, rather than the display of human ingenuity demonstrated above, the people expressly paid to be creative give us nothing but a blancmange of maudlin, haunted, anonymous and formulaic rubbish, likely inspired by this handy instructional video.

The irony is that if the existential threat to advertising agencies is that algorithms will take humans out of the mix altogether, then creating the same bad ads an algorithm would’ve made, and then doing it over and over and over again, means you’re not exactly doing yourself any favors. I’m very curious to see whether any of the purveyors are even self-aware enough to notice. In my professional career, advertising creative directors come second only to investment bankers in the “sociopaths without a hint of self-awareness of how banal their ideas really are” stakes.

More importantly, there’s now some fascinating research that suggests this isn’t even what people want. At the same time ad-agencies are churning out 100+ page trend decks (how can it be a trend, when we’re only a month in?) what consumers are basically saying is “please connect with me emotionally, act like things are pretty much normal (even though I know they aren’t) and stop being oh-so terribly serious about everything.”

I, for one, can relate. I desperately hope we can quickly get past the boring, haunted, worthy stage of faux brand grieving, so we can return to brands trying to sell us fantasies again. I want to pretend I’m on a beach somewhere sipping mai-tais, jammed up close to other people, and to have traveled there on a plane, in the middle seat. Actually, no. Maybe not the middle seat.

4. Expedia & Booking to drop Google revenue by $10bn, world’s largest advertiser to spend more.

Tl;dr: Asymmetric impact of CV-19 comes to the fore.

It’s estimated that Google’s advertising revenue will drop for the first time ever due to COVID-19, with analysts estimating a $44bn drop in combined ad revenue to Google and Facebook this year. It could be much higher as small businesses, retailers and the entire travel sector slash their advertising budgets.

Expedia and Booking.com, the two biggest travel advertisers out there have a combined $10bn in advertising spend with Google that looks likely to evaporate entirely. Which might not ultimately be a bad thing.

During the financial crisis, brands slashed advertising in traditional channels, pushing into cheaper digital instead, and then didn’t return when they found they hadn’t actually lost that much. The same will probably happen here. In particular, search advertising has been accused for years of being way over-valued by poor attribution models. (Although in travel, Google is essentially running a protection racket, which might change things).

P&G on the other hand are spending more. Which makes perfect sense for three reasons. First, unlike the travel industry, their home-focused products are very much in demand. Second, the COVID-19 impact is likely to accelerate the failure of hundreds, perhaps thousands of venture backed DTC startups that have cluttered their markets and nibbled away at them. And third, with low competition for advertising inventory and increased media consumption, their spend will go a lot further in driving their goal of greater market share.