Ideas

Edition #460

The power of ideas, Olympics are over 🙁 and Emilys piece.

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One of my fav things to do with clients, is put together a deck of ideas, things we could do to solve their business problems. From lightweight to complex, from safe to risky (although how risky does analytics get?!). But it’s just good practice & exercise and it always yields rich feedback and opportunities. The exercise incentivizes creative thinking, distilling of thoughts and fresh ideas. But most of all, they’re grounded in the problems clients are facing.

When was the last time you did something like that? Took the time to really put together some fresh ideas. The strategists reading, that’s their day to day (you hope!) but if you haven’t in a while, dust off the moleskine, visit your fav cafe and spend some time. Bliss.

This week we were faced with the fact the games were over. I thoroughly enjoyed them and from a US perspective, Peacock really delivered on a great streaming experience. Lots of channels, multi-view, and then easy replays. It actually meant we watched more Olympics than normal! Kudos to them.

(And it makes me wonder what was going on in previous years?!)

We saw that Olympic ad sales in the US broke new ground, with ad sales exceeding $1.2b, $500m from new advertisers. The amount from new advertisers stood out to me as well, even well run events like the Olympics have churn. Solitude for any of the sales folk reading the newsletter.

Somewhat related, more in the creativity bucket, but I loved this photography from Hector Vivas, who combined multiple pictures to show the whole field of athletes in Olympic sports at once.

But off the Olympics, infamous Emily from FeedMe has a great piece this week on the machine in the garden, pull up a coffee and give it a read, take your time.

In a world of homogeneous content, what do you do to stand out?

Notable stories this week

• BuzzFeed sees small advertising gain amid push toward AI.
• AI search makes earned media even more important.
• The friendliest social network you’ve never heard of.
• Harris campaign’s Google ads rewrite news headlines.
• Publishers are redoubling their presence on Reddit as the platform rises in search visibility.
• TikTok wants to win all the screens not just your smartphone.
• TikTok allowed alcohol advertisers, but the platform still feels dry.
• Sir Martin Sorrell on the $9bn valuation wipeout of this new world holdco S4Capital.
• X calls for ad industry reset.
• Mile launches revenue analytics solution for web publishers.
• Why Apple is the big tech dark horse of adland
• X makes its Premium+ subscription fully ad-free, but there is (again) a catch.
• Paris Olympics: there’s people on the pitch, court, mat and track – in pictures.
• [Smart take] The machine in the garden.

Deals/M&A

• Experian acquires behavioral analytics pioneer NeuroID.

Campaign of the week 

• PoloBear bids au revoir.

View all 2024 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “I think this this is an issue of content creation that we’re seeing on all these platforms — people see others making so much money off of their “unedited” selves and everyone is like “omg this is me too which means that I can do this too and I can show my ‘real, authentic life’ too” leaving the audiences inundated with unoriginal and unnecessary content carbon copies that are exceedingly shallow and elementary and the result is.. you either eat this shit up (which clearly so many people do) or you’re exhausted from seeing the sheer lack of quality and skill becoming the norm…it’s harsh but sometimes I truly think not everyone can do everything and everyone shouldn’t try… Or, more positively, everyone can do anything but should strive to do so at a quality that is additive.” –Feedme.

Datapoints of note

• Adelaide Attentiveness Measurement: $1,000 Of AM/FM Radio Ads Require $2,635 Worth Of Facebook Ads To Achieve The Same Level Of Attention.
• ^ This sort of analysis is always interesting, as we all have our own preconceived notions of what each is worth. Whether we voclalise it or not.

Events

• Attention Happy Hour, next one coming up in September. .

View all 2024 datapoints of note.

That’s it for this week.