Somewhere in your shared drive there is a folder. Inside the folder is a PowerPoint file. Inside the file, currently unopened, is the sum total of everything the last agency learned about your brand in eighteen months of billing you for it.
It is thirty-seven slides. It was read by the incoming agency the way one reads a restaurant menu after ordering: thoroughly, too late, and with a growing awareness that the decision had already been made.
Slide three is the brand essence: a coastal walk, a woman laughing at a salad, a concrete countertop, and a sans-serif font the incoming agency will not license. Slide seven is the competitive landscape. You are positioned in the upper-right quadrant, which is where every brand is positioned in every competitive landscape ever produced by every agency in the history of this industry, including the ones that subsequently lost the account. Slide eleven is tone of voice. Your tone of voice, like 99% of other brands, is warm but authoritative, approachable yet premium, and has been these things since 2021 without anyone being able to explain what either phrase means in the context of a product description.
Slide twenty-six is entirely dedicated to fonts.
The incoming agency received the document on a Tuesday. By Thursday they had reviewed slide one, slide four, and the budget summary, and submitted their first question: what is your tone of voice?
The document is still in the folder. The woman is still laughing at the salad. She has been laughing at it for three years and will be laughing at it when the brand pivots, when the domain renews, and when the next agency delivers their own thirty-seven slides, their own coastal walk, and their own woman, standing in a field somewhere, laughing at something that is almost certainly, if we were truly honest with ourselves, not that funny.
Here is the week.
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Tweet of the Week
The Full Funnel Blueprint behind his $75M D2C brand (Harvey Carnegie Interview)
Tom Brady, the most decorated quarterback in NFL history, has released a coconut water called Good Nut. GoPuff's product description reads: "Smooth. Full-bodied. Surprisingly pliable. It's a mouthful." Most celebrity consumer products arrive trailing the faint institutional odor of a wellness retreat in which someone important felt feelings and decided to monetize them. Good Nut has instead looked at its own name, understood its own name, and committed to it with the composure of a man who has won seven Super Bowls and has nothing left to prove to anyone.
Elsewhere in this week's Snaxshot: air quality has declined sufficiently that "lung breathing device" is now a consumer product category and not a hospital ward. An Italian brand is doing spaghetti western aesthetics on beans, completing the cowboy trend's full cultural rotation from NYC dive bar to the pasta aisle of a supermarket in Milan. Matcha has entered olive oil. And Tara Bosch, having previously convinced consumers to eat better-for-you gummy bears, has returned with chips and Chad Michael Murray, whom she has apparently located and put to work.
The week in CPG, covered with appropriate seriousness by Andrea Hernandez.
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Quick Shots
@andrewjfaris How do you test landing pages for Meta Ads?
@ron_ecomm you should think deeply about if your business is generating actual positive externalities in the little world that it exists in
Dick Sanocki 31 months without a single DTC IPO.
@heyitsaxelP what is a brand that feels "ensouled", in your opinion?
Sarah Levinger 17 things you need to know before you market to millennial men (from real millennial men who I polled on LinkedIn) 😅
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
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Is media buying or creative your problem?
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Stat Attack
That is the week. Warm but authoritative, we're told. The woman, as ever, laughs on.
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