⏰𝓟𝓸𝓵𝓲𝓽𝓲𝓬𝓲𝓪𝓷𝓼 𝓯𝓾𝓷𝓭𝓻𝓪𝓲𝓼𝓮 𝔀𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝔀𝓮𝓲𝓻𝓭 𝓯𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓼 - The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter

+ Dark patterns + $2 fast food advertising + More!

Oct 06, 2020

So… it’s been a week, huh?

While American domestic politics and COVID-19 converge in a trashfire of hubris and stupidity, we’re in a weird in-between phase as I write this on Tuesday afternoon. The election is in a month, top military leaders are in quarantine, a COVID cluster seems to be working its way through the West Wing, the President’s health is very much in question, and there’s little sense any of us can make of it right now. Who knows what Wednesday, or even Thursday, might bring?

And we continue on our path.

Political emails. Candidates asking for money. PACs asking for donations. Why do they email you with a subject line FWD? Why are they using 【Ｔｅｘｔ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｔｈｉｓ】? Why do they keep telling you it’s URGENT and a RUSH? The TEXT IN RED and personal calls to action to join Team Joe or the Trump Army?

It’s the copywriting, dummy.

Working in the weird interzone between marketing, advertising and public relations, I’m fascinated by the Corpus of Political Emails. A team of researchers at Princeton University affiliated with the Center for Information Technology Policy put together more than 260,000 political fundraising emails. Go to the Corpus, type in the name of a politician, and see what happens.

Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan has a pretty good Twitter summary of the psychological tricks him and his team found from candidates of both parties:

Arvind Narayanan @random_walker

At Princeton CITP, we were concerned by media reports that political candidates use psychological tricks in their emails to get supporters to donate. So we collected 250,000 emails from 3,000 senders from the 2020 U.S. election cycle. Here’s what we found. electionemails2020.org

The collection is really interesting. I mean, here’s the thing:

Political fundraising gets away with manipulative dark patterns that are far less subtle than corporate brands typically use in advertising.
Dark patterns in political advertising are bipartisan. While the copywriting in emails for Democratic and Republican candidates varies considerably—and we see different target audiences and very different messaging at work—both of them use the same tactics to grab attention and open wallets. These tactics are also the same for federal, state and local politicians.
Those dark patterns are *effective* in the goal that they (depending on the recipient) hook/annoy/remind them to open their wallets and send money to the target campaign. They’re tacky and arguably dishonest, but they work.

So… what dark patterns have you seen in your inbox lately?

Moving on from political marketing to fast food marketing, I’m fascinated by the economics of Burger King’s $2 snack box. The TLDR is this: Burger King kicked off a promotion for their mobile app with $2.00 meal that includes 10 chicken nuggets, medium fries, a cheeseburger, and a small soda. Which, especially during a recession and especially if you need to stretch a dollar, is a really good offer! It predictably led to a whole lot of easy brand buzz for Burger King on Twitter:

max @kingkroll14

I asked my econ professor to explain the burger king $2 snack box and he just started shaking and crying and saying “that’s too many nugs how is that even possible” then he left the call and we haven’t seen him in a few days so I’m getting kinda worried

The Takeout’s Allison Robicelli points out that, in a marketing sense, the economics of a $2 meal are a win-win for Burger King. The meal can’t be ordered in a restaurant; it has to be ordered via mobile app. Losing a few dollars on food in exchange more customers downloading a mobile app and sharing their sweet, sweet data—and generating lots of free advertising via social media and word of mouth—makes perfect economic sense for Big Burger.

Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:

Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys and getting more data points for my belief that internal politics at Facebook and Twitter are just like a giant high school cafeteria.
Folding Ideas’ “In Search of a Flat Earth,” a documentary on flat earth conspiracy theorists.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s talk on Localism and Lebanon, which touches on lots of things like "I have a heuristic that tells me if a country is well functioning and that heuristic is how boring the front-page of their newspaper is" and is 100% worth watching.

Athletic Brewing Company’s non-alcoholic beers. I like beer, I like drinking less alcohol these days, and Athletic makes some REALLY good beers.
Vice-presidential debate bingo.

New Futures

The economy is recovering kinda-sorta, which means Amazon Prime Day is back on October 13-14. What… you thought it would just be one day?
Startup IRL creating a product that makes it easier for friends/strangers to watch live events, television and movies together. Curious to see how this turns out. See also Disney+’s group watching feature.
New Cornell University study finds President Trump’s words and actions drive nearly 38% of English-language COVID-19 disinformation.
CDC finally acknowledging COVID-19 spreads by air.
Fascinated by this deep dive into how the University of Illinois implemented a massive in-house COVID-19 testing program.

Carl T. Bergstrom @CT_Bergstrom

1. Three weeks ago, everyone was bashing the University of Illinois for having the audacity to run an in-person semester at a large state school by developing an in-house testing program test to screen 10,000 students per day.

ProPublica looks at how large companies use home-based customer service reps who have to pay for the privilege of working as CSRs.
A Nigerian court has issued the world’s first known death penalty on Zoom.
Good Chicago news = Anthony Bourdain’s beloved Old Town Ale House is reopening… with pizza.

Advertising/Marketing/PR:

Disney is selling adtech firm TrueX to Gimbal; Disney earlier acquired TrueX from 21st Century Fox.
Toyota has a terrifying brand voice faux pas on Twitter.

Joe Cutrufo @JoeCutrufo

I realize how tone can easily get lost on this website, but wow.

Big news for the small business world, which relies on both businesses heavily: Vistaprint is acquiring 99designs.
Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream is renaming the Eskimo Pie as Edy’s Pie.
Amazon as innovator: Dunkin’ Donuts and Giant Eagle experimenting with in-store checkout-free shopping.

Media:

Benedict Evans and Jason Calacanis note Substack may have a commission problem for newsletters that scale.

Benedict Evans @benedictevans

Pulling on this: Substack charges 10%, handles everything and may bring a network - but that means they have control, not you Memberful plugs into your existing site & charges 5% Ghost is a flat $80/month but you WILL need a developer And, Stripe adds ~3% to all of the above.

jason@calacanis.com @Jason

The challenge @SubstackInc will have, is that anyone who hits $25-50k in membership will quickly realize that giving 10% of your revenue (i.e. $2,500 to $5,000), is totally unnecessary... there are services like GHOST that charge $29 a month for a white-labeled solution https://t.co/K3XUImkKFs

Rick Edmonds at Poynter on financial troubles over at Meredith and “plunging print revenue for legacy brands that must keep publishing to retain longtime customers.”
Suzanne Vranica at the Wall Street Journal’s longread on how coronavirus upended the advertising industry and quick nightmare pivots during shelter-in-place.
RIP Farmville, you were too beautiful for this world.
FCC commissioner Ajit Pai’s new bulldog Ginger is now on Twitter.

Ginger the Bulldog @alotofbulldog

Preparing for a sneak attack!

Twitter building Birdwatch, a new system that will give more context on controversial tweets. It’s billed as an anti-misinformation measure and I’m excited to see how it turns out.
Downtown LA (I mean El Segundo!) Game of Thrones: Editor Norman Pearlstine is stepping down at the Los Angeles Times following months of newsroom chaos—which, importantly, had nothing to do with Pearlstine. Obligatory disclaimer: I have written op-eds for the LAT in the past.
Instagram will start labeling state-controlled media accounts and posts. Publications targeted include Redfish, In the Now and Soapbox.
Axios expanding into local news email newsletters in markets like Minneapolis and Tampa.
It’s old news by now that Disney is laying off 28,000 employees, but… holy… 28,000. Employees. 28,000.

Tech:

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong offering severance packages to employees who don't feel aligned with the company’s apolitical culture and mission. Armstrong wrote a Medium post explaining his thinking, but my take is that any company avoiding tackling “broader societal issues” (as he calls them) in 2020 is embarking on an impossible and counterproductive task. Especially for a cryptocurrency company whose service is political by nature.
Apple, trying to walk a tightrope between maximizing revenue and clashing with regulators and software developers, is suspending commissions for apps offering paid online events through 12/31. Is a 30% event commission fair when you can’t hold an IRL event without causing a public health risk?
I used to stock shelves at Pathmark back in the young, pre-media days so I really don’t know how I feel about Schnuck Markets rolling out shelf-scanning robots.

Brian Numainville @BNumainville

.@SchnuckMarkets Markets rolls out shelf-scanning robots to over half of store base | cstu.io/0204da #robots #products #supermarket #inventory

cstu.ioSchnuck Markets rolls out shelf-scanning robots to over half of store baseSimbe Robotics’ Tally to scan more than 4.2 million products daily

Fun:

Japan unveils pro wrestlers on trains.
There’s always room here for swearing parrots.

That’s it for this issue. Email me here and please don’t hesitate to contact if I can be of assistance. Thank you for taking the time to read this damned thing.

Love and coffee,

Neal

About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with advertising/PR agencies and in-house clients. He worked as a journalist in a previous life. Neal’s newsletter focuses on marketing, media and communications news.

Follow Neal on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com. You can contact him at neal@nealungerleider.com.