Recapping: Most Contagious 2020
What were the five themes that stood out?
Last week, Contagious hosted its annual Most Contagious event which distills a year of marketing insights and innovation into a focused half-day event designed to inspire creative business leaders to go bravely into the future.
At the Altman Building in New York City, over 500 creatives, strategists, and technologists bumped elbows as they squeezed into tiny, black folding chairs to hear about the vital trends, strategies, and executions underpinning last year’s world-class campaigns. Below, we summarized five themes that stood out in the gathering.
1. Do more with less.
It’s not just Greta Thunberg — consumers are also trying to combat the climate catastrophe and they’re doing it through their purchasing behavior. Contagious opened its event by stressing how brands need to embrace where culture is moving, which is away from throwaway culture. People are reusing more and owning less, and they are seeking out brands that align themselves with sustainability. Lead Strategist at Contagious North America, Chris Barth, quoted findings from Deutsche Bank that the shares of companies practicing sustainability consistently outpace the shares of companies not doing so. Already, this is being reflected in the practices of many companies like LUSH, which has launched “naked” versions of its shower gels, body lotions, and body conditioners that come without packaging.
Dutch airline KLM is encouraging people to “Fly Responsibly” by calling attention to the toll that our extensive traveling can have on the environment. Bite Toothpaste is a company that has created chewable toothpaste tablets, which can be refilled, thus eliminating some of the waste created by almost one billion plastic toothpaste tubes thrown out annually.
Loop was announced at last year’s World Economic Forum as a more sustainable way to shop, offering about 300 items — detergent, shampoo, ice cream, mouthwash etc. — in reusable packaging. After using the products, customers put the empty containers in a Loop tote on their doorstep; the containers then get picked up, cleaned, refilled, and shipped back out to consumers again.
A few speakers throughout the day mentioned the credit card being launched by Doconomy in partnership with the UN Climate Change Secretariat and Mastercard. Doconomy is hoping to address the fact that more than 60 percent of carbon emissions are linked to consumption. One version of the card would track your carbon footprint as you spend, and the other would actually impose a carbon limit on your spending. Monetary funds are no longer the only thing you need to figure into your budget.
2. The truth will set you free — or at least, keep you employed.
In the current cultural, social, political moment we find ourselves in, there is a serious trust deficit in the world’s institutions. People crave transparency. Ignorance is no longer bliss. Kenneth Parks, CMO, Hero Digital, took the stage in the afternoon to give a talk on the “Truth and Beauty” economy we’re currently living in. One example he mentioned centered on Chime, a mobile-only, FDIC-insured bank with no monthly fees and no minimum deposit, targeted toward millennials. In October of last year, the app went dark for all its users, leaving them unable to use their debit cards or pay their bills. Brand sentiment went down 70 percent in the wake of the app failure, but the CEO responded quickly and transparently with immediacy, personally writing a letter to all of the app’s users, asking for feedback and explaining that the failure came about from a database malfunction. Sentiment bounced back in a positive direction and by the end of the year, it had processed more than $30 billion in transactions, up from $10 billion in 2018. During his talk, Parks announced the formation of The Truth and Beauty Network which will operate as a sort of think tank for brands to earn this displaced trust of consumers by better serving them and creating experiences to match what they crave. Inaugural members so far include Contagious and Adobe.
The truth was also central to the talk given by The New York Times and Droga5, when sharing their case study. Amy Weisenbach, SVP, marketing and media, The New York Times, was faced with the problem of trying to persuade an entire generation that has no shortage of free sources from which to get their news that the Times’ journalism is worth paying for. “Most don’t know what it takes to publish quality journalism, or what is invested in it,” Weisenbach said. Thus, the campaign “The truth is worth it.” was born, with the intent to show viewers just how much time, resources, and often, personal risk is invested in the stories that the Times is asking readers to pay for.
The campaign launched toward the end of 2018 and just a few months later, the paper saw subscriptions hit a 13-year-high. Who can say to what extent the campaign drove that number, but Weisenbach claimed in her talk that the campaign accomplished at least one seemingly impossible task: warming reporters to the marketing department. More and more, journalists are pitching their stories to become future subjects of the ad campaign.
3. The death of creativity has been greatly exaggerated.
When Toni Petersson, Oatly’s CEO, first called up his friend John Schoolcraft (now Oatly’s Global CCO) to ask him for help marketing the company, Schoolcraft initially said no. When he realized Petersson would let him scrap the traditional idea of what we know to be a marketing department, he got on board. At the center of Oatly is creativity — there are no briefs. The lack of them is overcome by employees being knowledgeable about all aspects of the company’s business. Creatives can attend any meeting or work inside any department they’d like. It’s an approach that’s resulted in the kind of idiosyncratic branding that feels authentically original, like people made it up without having to go through any approval process — because really, they didn’t have to. Adweek’s Robert Klara covers the Oatly story more in-depth than we will here, but suffice it to say that Schoolcraft’s unorthodox methods have more than paid off.
Creativity, according to many of the event’s speakers, can arise from figuring out new ways to use old technology. When it came to Burger King’s “Whopper Detour” stunt which used geofencing technology to drive downloads of the company’s mobile order app, its success came from a simple idea. So many of Burger King’s fast food competitors took the get-a-free-meal-when-you-download route that Global CMO Fernando Machado felt it was played out. “People aren’t going to break routine just because of a free sandwich,” he told the Most Contagious audience. But apparently, they will break routine to participate in a trolling campaign. Free sandwiches only unlocked for drivers when they were 600 feet from a McDonald’s. The nine-day promotion ended with Burger King’s app shooting to the number one slot in the app store on iOS and android and resulted in the highest foot traffic BK had seen in almost five years. “The tech wasn’t new,” Machado said. “What made it new and contagious was the idea.”
4. The superiority of digital might have been exaggerated.
Contagious Editor-at-Large Katrina Stirton Dodd delivered what may have felt like a rude awakening to some and a cause for celebration to others in her “Digital Reboot” talk, which showed that the marketing industry has been investing a lot of time and money into a technology that we can’t really prove works in the best case scenario. And in the worst case? It’s harmed our society, creating an environment hospitable to the spread of fake news and invading users’ privacy without legitimately having their consent. According to researchers from Carnegie Mellon, it would take the average person on the internet 76 work days to actually read all the privacy policies they encounter in a year.
Dodd touched on the fact that marketers at brands like Adidas discovered a lot of the leads they thought were being driven by digital weren’t actually being driven by it at all. And ironically, four of the top 10 OOH advertisers are tech brands — Apple, Netflix, Google, and Amazon. Facebook comes in at number 11.
But the takeaway wasn’t to forgo digital entirely. It just may be time to think about its role differently. “Ideas and programmatic need to come together, and they need to like each other,” Dodd said. This theme came back at the end of the event, when Chris Barth introduced something called the Contrarichuk spectrum, where on one extreme end was the phrase “all digital is snake oil” and on the other, Gary Vaynerchuk’s controversial claim that “traditional advertising is dead.” According to Contagious, the sweet spot marketers should strive for is in the middle of that spectrum.
5. There’s no such thing as being fearless, and there shouldn’t be.
Turning a xenophobic insult often hurled by faceless users on Twitter and Facebook into an empowering campaign slogan was an idea that was almost calling out to be cancelled. Black & Abroad co-founder Eric Martin and FCB/Six’s CCO, Ian Mackenzie, were aware of this when they came up with “Go Back to Africa,” a campaign meant to promote tourism to the continent.
“We’re a young company,” Martin said, “and cancel culture is prevalent in everything we do.” He was told by his PR team that under no circumstance should they run the campaign. But they did anyway because Martin felt that to achieve truly brave work, you need to find the all in point, then go all in.
That doesn’t mean going all in without having done your homework, and it doesn’t mean thinking you’ve nailed it at the first go. “Iteration, iteration, iteration,” said Mackenzie, when speaking to how the campaign eventually ended up on its final concept. The right idea will rarely be the first one, and this was a sentiment echoed by many other speakers all day.
“We’re not fearless at all,” Fernando Machado said during his talk. “We’re scared shitless all the time. That’s what happens when you pursue ideas out of your comfort zone.”
Being brave and being fearless are not the same thing. Fear can often a motivating factor to dig deeper, do better. According to the speakers at Most Contagious 2020, it’s also an indicator that you may just be approaching something that has the potential to be great.
