ELECTIONS

About All of Those ‘What Biden Means for Marketers’ Articles

How’d you spend your Sunday? I spent mine combing through about one billion articles titled with some variation of “What a Biden Win Means for Marketers.” 

As they continued to flood my inbox like Harry Potter’s admissions letters, here's what I took away from all of them.

Consumer confirmation

The U.S. broke a 120-year-old voter turnout record for this election. That level of election engagement suggests U.S. consumer identity and politics are more intertwined than ever, according to Adweek.

• Digiday’s Biden article echoed the same sentiments, arguing it may no longer be possible for brands to win across the aisle.

The other shoe just dropped: We’ve suspected that it’s important for brands to be opinionated for a while now, but this election shows that it needs to be a priority.

The great big story has come to an end

A lot of people are excited for politics to become boring again. News outlets aren’t those people. Love him or hate him, Trump’s presidency was the most consistent story to hit the news in years—covering his antics paid off for many news orgs. 

As of this writing, that story seems to be coming to an end. While that’s good news for Biden voters, it could be bad news for TV and publisher ad performance. 

The Trump slump: “If [Trump] is no longer President, this bump will fade. The post-Trump world may feel very boring, and this may impact news consumption,” independent media analyst Alex DeGroote told Adweek. The vanishing Trump bump could drive down ad inventory prices across news outlets even further.

• That said...the political tensions in this country could be enough to sustain some form of Trump bump for the next few months. 

Looking ahead: The question that still needs to be answered: Will Biden’s calls for unity water down the political environment enough that brands can become neutral parties again? 

PLATFORMS

High Hopes

No, not the Panic! At The Disco song—although you know I love them. Cannabis advertisers are probably feeling pretty dope after this election. If you missed it in the daily edition of Morning Brew last week…  

• Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota all passed legislation legalizing some form of marijuana use. 
• And Governor Andrew Cuomo said New York’s conditions will be “ripe” for legalization by next year.

Platform changes: Platforms like Twitter and Facebook that currently don’t allow paid ads for cannabis products haven’t changed their tune yet—and probably won’t until the U.S. legalizes 420 blazing it on a national scale. 

Looking ahead: November 2020’s wave of state legalizations creates a pathway for national legalization that could make cannabis advertisers’ lives much easier. Until then, cannabis marketers should work on brand building, which will pay off when supply starts to outweigh demand in the coming years. 

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OOH

No One Else Slept Last Week Either

Wearable tech company Oura Ring’s latest digital out of home (DOOH) campaign turns the market research process inside out, upside down, and spins your head right round. 

Oura Ring products keep track of many vitals…including sleep patterns. Because no one slept for a whole week while refreshing “who won the election” on Google, the wearable brand couldn’t help but wonder: Exactly how many Zs were lost watching the polls?

• Instead of crafting a campaign around that information, agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address made the data itself the campaign.  
• One of the most prominent billboards in Times Square now reads: “How did America Sleep on Election Night? America lost: 138,833,045 hours of sleep.” 

That’s it, that’s the campaign: Rather than the team behind Oura Ring’s campaign saying…

• “Okay, here’s consumer behavior data…How can that inform us about what will resonate with our target audience?”
• Oura Ring realized the data itself would resonate with the viewer by making them feel less alone. 

How’d they know that? The numbers tell the story. We all lost an average of 25.2 minutes of sleep on Tuesday, so there’s a solid chance the viewer can relate. 

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Snap launched “Snap Connect,” an educational resource teaching marketers how to create the best direct response campaigns on the platform. 
• The Trade Desk set record earnings as data-driven marketing continues to grow in popularity during the pandemic. 
• ViacomCBS’s CMO of Entertainment and Youth Group Jacqueline Parkes will step down at the end of the year.
• TBWA’s Global CCO Chris Garbutt is leaving the agency network as well. 

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FRENCH PRESS

Marketing tips to make you fancy

Facebook: Christmas is less than two months away, so Facebook wrote up some new ad copy tips for this, uh, “special” holiday season. 

Design: Graphic design trends come and go in waves—see this infographic for how one design company expects the tides to turn in 2021. 

SEO: Just like that one Abba song from Mamma Mia, SEO knowledge keeps slipping through our fingers all the time as it changes with each passing year. That’s why I love this blog post about the seven most important things one marketer learned about SEO in 2020. 

CMO SENTIMENTS

Sign up here for Morning Brew CEO Alex Lieberman’s CMO Series on LinkedIn, in which he chats with the most important marketing leaders in the industry. Then read on for three questions that’ll help you get to know these marketing leaders a little better.

Vimeo CMO Harris Beber chatted with Alex last week about the importance of data in strategy, the best parts about being a marketing leader at a high-growth tech company, and also these things:   

Alex Lieberman: Favorite book that you’ve read since the beginning of the year? 

Harris Beber: I reread Linchpin by Seth Godin—it’s just so relevant to how I operated throughout my career path.  

AL: Least favorite marketing word?

HB: Flywheel.

AL: How do you take your coffee?

HB: Oat milk and no sugar.

The CMO of Vimeo and I take our coffee the same way (!!). See the full interview here. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Marketing Brew stories from the last few editions.

• In a post-Gap hoodie world, your brand needs to have an opinion
• The Calm Key Race Alert partnership wasn’t a one-off
• What marketers need to know about Prop 24