Live & Breathe’s Post

Good work Dana! MESH's Experience Metric Score is a brilliant way for brands within a category to compare how consumers' experiences with their brands varies, and how different communication channels contribute to an overall effect; brand by brand.

Who remembers when Taco Bell took Mexican pizza off of their menu? 🌮🍕 For those that don't recall, during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Taco Bell removed its Mexican pizza from its menu during a menu overhaul, and the internet was outraged. Users on X (formerly known as Twitter) started a Taco Bell boycott, an online petition to bring Mexican pizza back gathered over 200K signatures, and most infamously, Doja Cat started beef (no pun intended) with the brand in a series of tweets saying that "[she] will do everything in [her] power to bring back the Mexican Pizza..." Seizing this unique marketing opportunity, Taco Bell and their creative partners at Deutsch LA partnered with Doja Cat to create the "Anti-Hero" campaign, which won the inaugural 'Best Use of TikTok' award at the 2023 Ad Age A-List Awards. In the book Kellogg on Marketing, Third Edition, written by the marketing faculty at Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management, one of the key marketing trends disrupting marketing today is the shift from Customer-Centric to Customer-Driven marketing. Consumers are no longer passive observers of marketing, platforms like TikTok empower consumers to voice their opinions. "TikTok is all about co-creation." Features like stitching and duetting encourage consumers to converse with brands and vice versa. Taco Bell hired Doja Cat and "reverse engineered the idea of a spokesperson to speak on behalf of fans to the brand." While many brands would have shied away from this public discourse, Taco Bell leaned into this opportunity with a huge payoff. Mexican pizza was re-introduced to the menu last year, and the internet rejoiced. (Taco Bell made a cheeky press release announcing the return last April.) https://lnkd.in/gu6tDs59 Platforms like TikTok allow a two-way conversation between brands and consumers, which has disrupted how we have traditionally marketed toward the end user. Consumers are becoming co-creators and are "actively involved in designing, producing, and promoting a company's offering." Customer-driven marketing and consumer co-creation are integral to the new business model and the Taco Bell / Deutsch LA team have mastered the new art of audience and fan collaboration.

Well done to all.

She’s right because these are few of the headings I saw this week about Brands; 1. Hinge is trying to cure Gen-Z loneliness. 2. CMO of “X Brand” shares next year is all about “purpose”. 3. New Ad from Smirnoff is “we do we”, promoting diversity and inclusion. Even if the Ads are effective, brands are really pushing hard on new taglines. The Tags are being used as “social-proof”. That works well, but the best option is still to use the organic social proof from customers, that’s more trustable than plain statements. What do you think? P.S. Credits to Elle Cordova for her excellent video. #marketinginsights #brandmarketing #marketingmemes #brandstrategy

Is your Super Bowl ad award-worthy? Haven't you noticed? It’s #superbowl weekend AND it’s awards season. You know what that means? You need to get your awards strategy sorted, nail the (ever-growing) categories and get those stakeholders corralled to painstakingly write the entry and produce the case film. OR you could work with us at The Thought Partnership. We’ve worked in creative awards and events for 100s of years, we know those categories inside out, we’ve worked for the big one and we’ve written the trends reports. If you could do with a little bit of help sorting your strategic insight from your impact, your experiential from your immersive and your B2B from your D2C, then give us a shout. We have all the insider knowledge, insights and know-how to help you craft award-winning entries. So if this is something you think you might need, then slide into my DMs and let’s schedule an initial 15 minute call. #awardsseason

2023 by the numbers (and so on and so forth) for Mischief @ No Fixed Address: ⚡️ Adweek’s US Agency of the Year ⚡️ Campaign US #1 Agency of the Year (for the second year running) ⚡️ Effie’s Most Effective US Indy Agency ⚡️ Ad Age #3 A-List ⚡️ Fast Company’s Most Innovative Ad Agencies of the Year ⚡️ 16 new brands added without a pitch ⚡️ +250 new biz opportunities (96% decline rate) ⚡️ +50 campaigns launched (around 2,000 total assets globally) ⚡️ 100% client retention ⚡️ 98% staff retention Every year at Mischief is a blink-hard-and-rub-your-peepers kinda year. Year four is already teed up to bring even more heat, which is not hard to believe when you see the weirdly-mega talent we’re home to. ❤️

Since the surge of corporate DEI efforts in the wake of 2020, the ad industry has seen emphasis and efforts fade. AdForum tapped industry experts to share their thoughts on why conversation has slowed and give advice for picking up the momentum. GMR’s Vice President of DEI Sophie M. emphasized that, here at GMR, we haven’t taken our foot off the gas by continually assessing whether our DEI model is working and pivot when needed to keep progress alive. “Like a duck floating on water, it’s easy to believe the conversation around DEI has slowed, but for agencies who understand the needs of brands and consumers, DEI is evolving rapidly under the surface.” #DEI #DiversityEquityInclusion 

Our managing director, Kumi Croom, weighs in on the discourse around KFC’s latest OOH campaign and why a core focus on equity and inclusion can help brands and agencies avoid racial insensitivity in their work. ➡ The outcome is an example of the advertising industry’s “loosening up from where it had been a couple years ago” in regard to prioritizing cultural competency and DE&I initiatives. ➡ It’s unclear who was in the room during the conception of this campaign or how many rounds of approvals it went through prior to launch. But if there were criticisms from those in the room with different backgrounds and perspectives that could be echoed by a segment of the target audience, it’s necessary to “include them into that conversation, listen and take that perspective into account — strongly.” ➡ More than just having diverse voices on staff, “the inclusion and equity part of the conversation is so important.” An important conversation, so thanks Bailey Calfee and Campaign US for covering!

Looking forward to speaking at the Marketing Leadership #BISummit during #AdWeek in a couple of weeks. So many amazing fellow marketing leaders. Hope to see many of my existing friends there and make some new ones! We'll be talking trends, tech, and tactics powering the future of marketing. #marketing #leadership #brand #AI #ChatGPT

I love seeing the social media from brands that can break away from the run-of-the-mill, bland content that blends into the background and injects some real personality and humour into what they do. Daring to be different, like Aldi UK, for example. If you need social media management and want to break away from the vanilla, give me a shout, I could be your man. PS. This doesn't mean having to have a dig at Marks and Spencer by the way. #socialmedia #socialmediamanagement #smm #smma #marketing #creative #marketing #personality #humour #fun #communications