#40 – On dialogic brands, better presentations, terrible ads, and influential yellow lines
Hello, hello,
happy Friday to wherever you are in the world. The eagle eyed among you might have spotted the absence of a newsletter last week. Apologies for that, the reality of being a parent of now two and a dodgy sandwich for lunch made it simply impossible to find time and energy to put together a decent issue.
This week we’re back, though, with a selection of posts, articles, and a little musical recommendation. Inspiration doesn’t just come in the shape of words, does it?
Issue #40 is about a different way of thinking about brand, better presentations, terrible ads, lots of data on the state of digital, and a humble yellow line in football that changed the way we see the world forever.
Enjoy the clicks (and the listen.)
This week’s Six Links of Inspiration:
The Dialogic Brand. It’s funny how the theories about brands sometimes collide with theories about life, particularly your parenting life. But it’s probably not a big surprise, considering how often we anthropomorphise brands. This article by John Willshire about modern brands is jumping of a premise that is central to many approaches of modern parenthood: the idea that we should converse not to convince but to connect. One is about aligning on a consensus (dialectic), the other about sharing each other’s points of view (dialogic.) John goes on arguing that brands have traditionally been built in a dialectic way – but that the age of the internet calls for dialogic brands. An interesting, tangential, example for that might be one of the more exciting brands of our time (at least in terms of marketing.) The team at Liquid Death have been quite vocal about how they think traditional brand thinking isn’t helpful: ”The brand should be more living, the world lives on social, the brand needs to fit within that world and that world is made up of real people and real interesting stuff. It's not made up of brands and it doesn't have these rigid rules. It's less of a brand and more of a character and a writers room.”
Sharpen your presentations with one simple trick. I’m a fan of Rob’s thoughtful bits of thinking and advice that he sprinkles into the internet. This is just one example of the many helpful things he shares. Particularly helpful if your job involves writing tons of presentations with not very much time at hand.
How Bad is the Average Ad? The short answer is: very. Particularly if you happen to sit in the B2B category. The slightly longer answer has been delivered by System1 and is summarised in this post by Ethan Decker: “If you're in B2B, odds are over 3 in 4 that it's a 1-star ad.” Now you could say you don’t care about accolades or star ratings. And that’s okay. But: star rating is highly correlated with in-market business results – and that is something you probably (should) care about.
Digital 2024: 5 Billion Social Media Users. We Are Social have dumped a gigantic mass of data on the current state of the global digital world into the global digital world. It’s 561 pages. It has tons of bar charts, lots of numbers, and it’ll probably contain at least one data point you can use to substantiate your next comms strategy.
A Fake Yellow Line Changed Football Forever. To all my excited European readers, this isn’t about a yellow line changing the sport you think it changed. It’s American football – and considering we’re entering Super Bowl Weekend, this is an entertaining, little read about how Fox has been pioneering “Mixed Reality” with an idea that harks back to 1994. It (superficially) debates when innovation is useful and how they often expand, collapse, or usher in something new: “The future is generally going to revolve around choice. People are almost going to be able to choose their own adventure, as far as the viewing modes go. […] Now the Vision Pro will take things a step further: It will fragment our experience of actual life.”
People Who Aren’t There Anymore. This is the musical bit of inspiration I promised. With today’s protracted release tactics, often it feels like you’ve heard all of an album by the time it actually releases – but despite the familiarity with the material on Future Islands’ latest record, there’s still something wholesomely rewarding in how it comes together as an entity. It’s made many a commute more bearable this week and it shall make your weekend better, too.
That’s it for this week. I hope you get to enjoy your weekends and that I see you here again next week (or the week after… :))
Maximilian