Happy Dumpfront Week to those that celebrate! In the grand scheme of the advertising landscape, the upfronts feel like little kids trading baseball cards while their parents (the platforms’ massive biddable ad business) let them throw around a little cash. Anyway, I don’t have much to say about this year’s announcements, so let’s move on to something new.
As a strategist at heart, I love the organization and visualization of ideas, and so can really appreciate the majesty of a great framework.
So I’m going to start periodically doing Framework Roundups (maybe once a season), where I share random framework visuals that I’ve stumbled on that I think are interesting and maybe inspirational. (Note: That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with the theses, observations, or insights, as you’ll see below.)
The Idea Impact Matrix, Jay Acunzo
I like this matrix a lot because it emphasizes the distinction between insight and information (reminder: a single statistic is almost never an “insight,” no matter how surprising it might be) and also puts value to personal contribution to ideas. Ideas that are born out of someone’s personal POV will aways be more powerful.
The State of Culture, 2024 by Ted Gioia
I’ve shared this essay before, and generally agree that culture is evolving from Slow to Fast to Dopamine-driven. But I don’t think the examples that populate the framework are consistent enough for this to be useful. Comparing the universal expectation of courtship/marriage to “albums,” for example, doesn’t make sense since albums arrived in culture just about the same time society’s started to embrace sexual freedom.
The examples also betray Ted Gioia’s bias, which is that he’s a snob.
Spiderweb by Alex Morris of Stratscraps
This one I absolutely love, because it visualizes both how postmodern marketing plans and culture/art should be structured. For marketing, there’s no longer a single idea that’s distributed, but instead a core concept that’s iterated and built upon. For artistic storytelling, in a world of immediate access to much of the history of culture, we can no longer pretend that it’s not “all connected.” We might think of Marvel movies of adaptations of Marvel comics, which they are, but their also descendants of Paul Bunyun, and Quasimodo, and the Greek gods, and pick your popular mythology all the way back to the beginning of storytelling itself.
Surface Area of Luck by Jason Roberts
A framework for getting stuff done and creating serendipity, which is a nice counterpart to the Idea Impact Matrix above. The idea being that the more passionate you are about what you’re doing and the more effectively you communicate it, the more luck you unlock.
The Planning Cycle from the JWT Planning Guide
Probably the source code for every marketing strategy of the last 50 years, this is pulled from a scanned PDF of the original JWT Planning Guide, which is just as useful in 2024, despite the infinite complication of the world we live, as it was in 1974.
This Week’s Whimsies
You’ve probably never listened closely to the lyrics of the Pina Colada song, but you should.
This piece makes a compelling case for why 50+ consumers are a massive missed opportunity for marketers who get obsessed with the youngest generations. So much so, that I might have to scrap my own plans to make the same argument.
An Archive of Fictional Brands. This is going to make me blow through my monthly T-shirt budget.
This ESPN story about one quirky bet is a great exploration of the expansion of the sports betting economy.