10 More Things// Ketchup, Fortnite, Pika
In this edition: why the mustard revolution won't come for ketchup, Fortnite advertises a building complex and a new shiny AI tool
Now with added pictures for your enjoyment.
Business & Brands
I Guess Ketchup is Ketchup. For some reason that article I shared about a predicted mustard resurgence has had the biggest response of anything I’ve shared in the year I’ve been sending this newsletter… in response Jon Hildrew shared this excellent Malcom Gladwell article capturing why the revolution is probably not coming for ketchup. Three interesting things stand out in this article:
How Grey Poupon popularised Dijon mustard to America. They made it look very French, despite the brand being made in the US with Canadian mustard seeds. Print ads ran in upscale food magazines. Distribution included sachets in airline meals. They hammed up the poshness with this ad, showing a Rolls Royce pull up to another Rolls Royce, asking the passenger if he has any Grey Poupon, with the gag being he doesn’t want to share it. Simple but devastatingly effective, sales jumped 40-50% anywhere airtime was bought.
The profile of Howard Moskowitz includes the best use-case for segmentation I’ve read. Moskowitz was contracted by Campbell’s Soup Company to find the perfect spaghetti sauce recipe. He devised 45 varieties to test that differed in every conceivable way. He found preferences could be categorised into 3 buckets: plain, spicy and extra-chunky. This piqued Cambell’s interest as the market was only served by plain and spicy. No one was doing extra-chunky. “So in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful.”
Moskowitz’s rule is looking for the distribution behind the average, as Jon himself often says. The philosophy of trying to make the perfect food or drink pleases no one but creating a few varieties can please everyone by letting them find what they prefer. There’s one exception: ketchup. It’s perfect as it is. It’s salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami in equal measures. Making a fancy ketchup will bring this out of wack and make for an overall worse experience. The mustard revolution will not be followed by a ketchup revolution.
Bonus thing: it include this Yiddish proverb which I will now use in every conversation going forward: “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish!”
How Victoria's Secret Lost Its Way. A great interview with Lauren Sherman & Chantal Fernandez to promote their new book ‘Selling Sexy’. The one thing the authors pinpoint in the decline of Victoria’s Secret is not the misogyny, the bloated model contracts or the close association of the CEO and Jeffrey Epstein but instead the rejection of the bralette: “what it comes down to is they were not selling the one item of intimates that people were actually buying, because they didn’t think it went with the brand”.
Victoria Secret’s lost their cache but are rebuilding it in a smart way, thanks to new CEO Hillary Super, former CEO of Savage x Fenty. They’re bringing back the fashion show for the 1st time in 6 years, streaming on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and social and have hired the formed editor of French Vogue to style the show.
Professor Felipe Thomaz takes on Bryon Sharp. I like how someone is willing to challenge Sharp’s orthodoxy but the conclusions are basically ‘do media planning the way we're doing it anyway with a less obsessive focus on reach'. 2 things that stand out for me:
How Brands Grow is useful for big brands trying to stay good not small brands wanting to grow. Chances are if you’re reading this you’re working with big brands so don’t throw your copy out yet.
Reach will get you 80% of the way there but for the best results you need to flex the plan based on the business and marketing contexts. Which. we. do. anyway. Conclusion: do the same? Dunno.
Don’t blow your 2025 media budget on retail-media “rent”. The cost of onsite retail-media ‘rent’ is increasing. Back in 2015, 8% of revenue went back into onsite retail media. Now it’s 14%. On Amazon, sellers typically put back 50% of their revenue straight back into the platform. Some of this is unavoidable. The mistake is doing this at the expense of brand advertising. If you find your brand diminishes you’ll find yourself plunging more and more money into this to make up for the fact people aren’t thinking of your brand. That’s not a good place to be.
Great work
Real Estate Fortnite. What better way to advertise a new building complex than build it in Fortnite. “Minutocorp's sales staff are on hand to answer questions and even take people's details to close a deal”.
Streams of (Un)Consciousness x British Heart Foundation. Nice follow on from ‘Stopping The Nation’s Biggest Heart’. This time BHF disrupted Twitch’s ‘be right back’ screen by pretending the Twitch stream had flat-lined before revealing it was an ad for BHF.
A Celebration of Dorito’s ‘Crash the Super Bowl’. I vaguely remembered they ran this but forgot how good the ads were. Maybe the funniest ad of all time? Anyway, they’re bringing it back. This time the prize is (in my best Dr Evil voice) one million dollars.
Pick n Mix
Pika. Another mind-blowing AI tool. Plug in images with an instruction and watch the image transform in front of your eyes. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this.
Play.ht. Another AI tool to have fun with. Plug in a voice, could be your own, and have it read out some written text. Perfect for if you’re a narcissist and will only listen to an audio book in you’re reading it.
TimeGuessr. Excellent game provided by Joe Capildeo. So far the score to beat is Geoff de Burca’s: 45,042/ 50,000.
Peace out ✌️
Alex