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Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. TikTok is fighting for its life in the U.S. over concerns about its parent companys relationship to the government of China. But TikTok has also just enjoyed one of the best branding weeks ever, as its potential demise has been treated as a national emergency. That sounds like hyperbole, but as youve no doubt heard, the president of the United States has literally intervened to pluck the popular video platform from its deathbedfor now, at least. Protecting this vital component of the internets attention-suck and dubious-trend infrastructure might not seem like a top government, or even societal, priority. But in the days leading up to a possible TikTok ban, Americans dependence on this virality machine went massively viral. Content creators and influencers said goodbye and posted teary videos. Fans shared serious and jokey goodbyes of their own. Brands and ad agencies lamented the loss; as one marketer moaned, Theres no substitute. The platforms wide-ranging cultural impacts were enumerated in the past tense. The New York Times asserted that TikTok had changed the way we cook, and publishers warned of an impending vacuum for bookselling. The frantic search for a replacement made an unlikely hit of a Mandarin-language app called RedNote. Rivals YouTube and Instagram angled to capitalize on the platforms demise. Even Kevin OLearythe Shark Tank guymanaged to drum up attention for claiming he might buy TikTok. Concerns about espionage were waved away with sarcastic Goodbye to my Chinese spy memes. More than a collective obituary, the outpouring amounted to an endless series of advance eulogies in honor of an entity that we, apparently, could never truly replace. It was, in short, a PR bonanza for TikTok. This has been quite a turnabout. While clearly popular, with 170 million users, TikTok owner ByteDance has long been painted by detractors as a potential tool of the Chinese government, for collecting data on or even influencing its audience. During his first term as president, Donald Trump called for banning TikTok unless it found a U.S. buyer. The Biden administration later voiced similar concerns, and backed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed by Congress with wide bipartisan support. The upshot was that ByteDance had to find a buyer by January 19, or it would become illegal for key service providers including Apple, Google, and Oracle to distribute or support the app, effectively killing it in the U.S. The platform fought this all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the act, seeming to seal TikToks fate. But as the pro-TikTok outcry swelled, the political appetite for actually shutting it down seemed to wobble, and the company took full advantage. Two days before the shutdown deadline, it blamed the Biden White House for failing to offer clarity and assurance to TikTok service providers to buy more time to find a solution, declaring that unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called this a stunt, insisting there was no reason for action before the second Trump administration took office: TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them. That night, TikTok video feeds stopped working, replaced with a pop-up message blaming a law banning the app but adding: President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok. And indeed the next morning, Trumpwho, let’s not forget, had set the whole TikTok ban idea in motion in 2020promised to stall the new laws enforcement to work out a deal. The platform was operating again within hours. (Apple and Google have yet to make it available again in their app stores, however.) According to Similarweb, by the end of the day, it hit a record 106.8 million active daily users, well above its pre-ban average. The legality of this maneuver is murky at best, and the Wall Street Journal has called it an illegal amnesty. Nevertheless, its safe to say that the narrative around TikTok has changed decisively. Trump now professes a warm spot in my heart for the platform, which he says helped him win over younger voters. And in a somewhat surprising and oddly timed chain of events, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago, later received an invitation to his inauguration, and was seated front and center next to America’s Big Tech CEOs. Still, the details of whatever Trump has in mind beyond the 75-day extension are vague, and the app could die again; foreign policy hawks are complaining about placating China, and some TikTok creators may not want to be part of a platform too-associated with Trump. In what sounds like a negotiating feint, the president is now suggesting the United States government itself should own like half of TikTok, which he says could be worth hundreds of billions, but would have no value without its U.S. audience. (Again, the legality of such an arrangement is questionable.) Meanwhile, the TikTok faithful have been rewarded for their vocal support, the TikTok Shop sales barely missed a step, and hardly anybody seems worried about the app as an espionage toolleast of all Trump, who dismissed the importance of a geopolitical rival spying on young kids watching crazy videos. Rumors of potential buyers include MrBeast and Elon Musk. And within a day or two of its resurrection, TikTok had spawned a fresh health trend that involves pouring castor oil in your navel. Yup, back to normal.
Category:
E-Commerce
Imagine this for a pitch: a Broadway musical about the making of a fake Broadway musical based on a real TV show about the making of a fake Broadway musical. If that made you dizzy, you might not have what it takes to work alongside Drew Hodges and Callie Goff, the creative team that was tasked with creating the ad campaign for Smash, a new musical comedy based on a short-lived NBC series from more than a decade ago. The musical is set to begin preview performances in March at Broadways Imperial Theatre. Like the series, it pokes fun at the backstage intrigue and inflated egos that drive the madcap world of New York theater, all while charting the wayward creation of a fictional musical about Marilyn Monroe. Chaos, drama, and plenty of hijinks ensue in anticipation of one unforgettable moment, the kind that Hodges says is uniquely Broadway: a pulsating, blissful, adrenaline-filled opening night. Thats the moment he sought to recreate for the campaign. Its a really specific American piece of iconography, Hodges tells Fast Company. Youre a hit, and people drink too much, and they jump on top of a table and read a review. When youre in the middle of an opening night like that, its kind of funny because its this classic idea of what a Broadway opening night isbut it actually still happens. Hodges should know. He has worked in the business for well over three decades, helping to create the visual identity for musical hits from Rent to Avenue Q to Hamilton. He founded New Yorks SpotCo advertising agency in the 1990s and now works as an independent creative and designer. For Smash, he collaborated with Goff, SpotCos managing director and chief creative officer, along with noted portrait photographer Jason Bell. “We wanted it to be real” The team captured the impromptu emotional purity of an opening night with an elaborate red-carpet photoshoot that included the entire cast, members of the Broadway press, and plenty of easter eggs for theater lovers. The result is a splashy campaign thats as meta as the musical itself, one you can stare at for hours and still find something new. Look closely beyond the red-carpet barricades and you’ll spot theater-industry stalwarts such as NY1s Frank DiLella, Broadway.coms Paul Wontorek, SiriusXM’s Julie James, and Tony-recognized theater publicist Irene Gandy, along with theater-press newcomers, including teen journalist Joel Crump. Hodges calls it a Broadway Wheres Waldo? or maybe a Sergeant Peppers thing. And its not an overly Photoshopped composite. Everyone in the photo is actually there in real time. We wanted it to be real, he says. Thats the fun of working on Broadway. You get to have these pinch-me moments. We wanted to bring everyone else into that. The shoot took place at Pier59 Studios on Manhattans West Side and made use of a curved, high-definition screen that stretched some 70 feet wide, projecting the Imperials exterior. A 3D title treatment was added once the image was set. (Hodges says his original plan to shoot in front of an actual venue proved logistically impossible given that most Broadway theaters are filled with audiences and people running the shows.) Outfits had to be built specifically for the photoshoot because costumes for the final production werent finished yet. Goff, who has worked at SpotCo since the beginning of her career, admitted to feeling some trepidation early in the process for Smash when it came time to enlist real-life industry types for the shoot. We werent sure what was going to happen when we started reaching out to them, Goff says. The exciting moment was when we started getting positive responses. For me, that was the moment when I was like, Oh, this could come together. The community is rallying behind this.'” Plenty of Broadway shows wink and nod at their target audiences with theater references and inside jokes about the business and fandom of Broadway. What makes Smash different is that it is overtly about the business of making theater, an insider comedy for an industry where proximity is everything. Only time will tell if that premise will work for or against the show when it opens this spring, although putting prominent members of the theater press in your actual campaign is not a bad way to hedge against negative reviews. If it stumbles, it won’t be for lack of talent: Smash features a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman; direction by Susan Stroman; and it counts Robert Greenblatt, Neil Meron, and Steven Spielberg as producers. The NBC series was created by playwright Theresa Rebeck. For Hodges and Goff, the goal was simply to create something entirely new. If Smash doesnt look like other Broadway campaigns that came before it, well at least it made you lookprobably more than once. I mean, you could just make a mask logo and call it a day, but Im a more-is-more kind of person, Hodges says. Correction: Julie James’s affiliation is SiriusXM, not Broadway.com as an earlier version of this story stated.
Category:
E-Commerce
I’ve been searching for the words to describe my feelings towards the current state of adtech. Terms like “stale,” “stagnant,” and “boring” are among the pejoratives that come to mind. But, if I had to be even more descriptive, I’d have to say that adtech is like a grocery storeand not in a good way. Just like a grocery store will sell multiple versions of the same product, adtech too is a cacophony of competing firms each effectively doing the same thing. Break down adtech into its constituent taskslike A/B testing, attribution, analytics, or whateverand you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds of companies all touting the merits of their products. Don’t get me wrong. Some of these companies might actually have good products, or they’re competitive on price. But are they innovative? Are they doing anything wildly new, or tackling an existing problem in an imaginative and helpful way? The answer is, almost always, no. Adtech’s Getting Old To be clear, this isn’t inherently a bad thing. Innovation for the sake of innovation is a recipe for products with no market fit, or with no obvious utility. We see this every time there’s a hype cycle. When crypto was at its most ludicrous towards the late 2010s, there were no shortage of companies that reimagined existing technologies, but on the blockchain. We’re seeing it again with generative AI. Going back to the supermarket analogy, we’re at a point where adtech products are a bit like common household staples. Realistically, there’s only room for a few brands of tomato soup. And there’s no line of VCs desperate to back the next disruptive player in the tomato soup industry. It’s here where I start to get worried. When there are no more frontiers to march towards, no more boundaries to cross, you end up with consolidation among existing players. I believe we’re in the early stages of this process, as demonstrated by the near-total collapse of VC investment into adtech startups over the past decade. In 2015, investors ploughed almost $5 billion into the sector, according to Crunchbase Data, spread across nearly 400 rounds. In the first eight months of 2024, that lofty figure had shrunk to a mere $360 million. The lion’s share of that cash went to existing companies, rather than those in the seed stage. Consolidation (and its sibling, saturation) is, obviously, a factor in this malaise. Adtech is a (relatively) mature industry, and over the past couple of decades, a handful of players have emerged as the dominant forces in their specific niche. These companies are now multi-billion dollar entities, and it’s hard to imagine a successful challenger emerging at this late stage. For an investor, the prospect of a rival to, say, Hubspot or Salesforce, that exists to steal the percentage of customers that are unhappy with their service, and aren’t too locked-in to move, isn’t an enticing proposition. And that’s without mentioning the other factors that have likely complicated matterslike the E.U.’s stringent privacy regulations, the dominance of Google and Facebook in digital advertising, and the general post-pandemic slump in VC spending. A Mirror of Tech I’ve started to realize that what I’ve described isn’t unique to adtech. In the 2000s and 2010s, Silicon Valley set out to build the digital world. Now, it’s largely been built, and the companies that executed best during that period are now leaders in their segments. Most product categories exist. There’s very rarely anything new. Even generative AI, arguably the most “new” thing we’ve seen in recent years, feels somewhat tired. Most commercial implementations are effectively papering on a new technology onto an old ideaand often with questionable, or negligible, outcomes. But as the tech industry writ large treads ever-stagnant water, it’s worth remembering thatat least, when it comes to marketingwe have other options. Stagnancy is a choice, and it’s one that I hope we avoid. The biggest problem with adtech is that it was more “tech” than “ad.” Advertising is, by its very nature, a fundamentally human pursuit. Every successful marketing campaign throughout history has been centered on creative content that spoke to someone, either through imagery, writing, or music. To be successful, you need to think about your audience. You need to understand them, and to think carefully about what things will resonate with them. Tech is, far too often, not particularly human. And that’s especially true for adtech. Think of all the websites that are literally bursting with adtech productsanalytics, ad networks, and so onthat fundamentally degrade the user experience. These products answer one question (“how do we do this one particular task faster, or smarter, or with full automation?”), but leave one unanswered: how will people respond to this? The fact that so many people are “opting out” of advertising, either through ad-blockers or by paying for ad-free subscriptions, because they perceive digital advertising as hostile and intrusive should be cause for alarm within the adtech industry. At a very least, it should provoke some soul-searching. Something which, I’m sad to say, hasn’t happened. Worse, the dominance of the “tech” in “adtech” is actively clouding the judgement of marketers. Far too many marketers are glued to dashboards, obsessing over the numbers generated by their chosen analytics platform. We trust that these platforms are accurate, even though there’s no such thing as “perfect attribution.” Or, rather, not without being able to read the audience’s mind. And so, we’ve forgotten the human aspect of marketing. It’s time to go back to basics. Putting Creative First I’ve been critical of the adtech industry throughout this piece, and not without cause. That said, I do think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some tools that are very good. Everything has its place, and in moderation. The problem is that I don’t see the adtech industry solving the problems of marketers, now or into the future. It’s an industry that’s hit a brick wall, and has no new ideas. Worse, I think that our collective enthralment with adtech has blinded us to the capabilities and limitations of these products, and the fact that, as marketers, our audiences are people. To be clear, this isn’t a kind of adtech luddite manifesto, arguing for a return to a 1990’s way of doing business. For better or for worse, advertising is a digital industry now, and there’s no going back. Rather, it’s a plea for marketers to accept that the tech products they usewhether directly or indiectlyare no substitute for human creativity, and an understanding of the audience. While the adtech industry has made some things better, we need to acknowledge that there’s nothing new around the corner. There’s no new game-changing product category that will make our jobs easier, or our campaigns more successful. We need to start relying on ourselves more. To understand that every conversion starts with a great piece of creative, and work back from there.
Category:
E-Commerce
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