Magical value, delicious purpose, and some tough #realtalk

Vimeo's Outside the Frame newsletter is a regular dose of ideas, insights, and inspiration to help marketers think differently. Let’s go!

1. How marketers think people behave

This got a lot of love on marketing LinkedIn – a sure sign that it made many of us squirm with recognition. Creative sociologist 💥 Amy Kean 💥 lampoons how we imagine our clever marketing ploys will be received in the real world. Its central provocation is to take a beat next time we’re in a meeting, and a group of marketers are agreeing excitedly that “people are going to love this.”

2. Simplify your decision-making

If you struggle to quieten the noise and clarify your thinking when it comes to making big decisions, Sahil Bloom is here to help. In a recent issue of his excellent Curiosity Chronicle newsletter, he presented a list of helpful “razors” – simple frameworks to guide your thinking.  Some of our favorites: 

The Feynman Razor – If you can’t explain it to a 5-year-old, you don’t really understand it.

The Young & Old Test – Make decisions that your 80-year old self and 10-year-old self would be proud of.

The Smart Friends Razor – If your smartest friends are all interested in something, it’s worth paying attention to. If that something seems crazy, it's worth paying a lot of attention to.

3. Turn attention into action

Unhelpfully for marketers, human attention is scarce, fickle and unpredictable (stupid humans). So we partnered with Marketing Week to present our Attention Grab webinar series, to explore how we navigate this complex problem. The next event takes place on September 6 and it’s all about conversion – how we take that hard-won attention and turn it into action. Sign up here to join the debate.

4. What the Uber map tells us about marketing

When you order an Uber, you’re able to track the car to see where it is and when it will arrive. The existence of this map doesn’t make the cab come any quicker. But it does create a huge amount of perceived value, by giving us the illusion of control and reducing stress. (Where is the cab? Will it be able to find the house?)

Perceived value – according to the maverick ad genius Rory Sutherland – is our secret weapon as marketers. And the good news is that it’s often quick, cheap, and easy to produce as opposed to objective value (flooding every city with cabs so that they really do arrive more quickly). 

This recent interview with Steven Bartlett is a long listen, but it will change the way you think about our work, our world, and the connection between the two.

5. Why Tony's leads the way on purpose

The recent news that Ben & Jerry's is partnering with Tony's Chocolonely felt like the wise old master anointing the rising star in the world of purpose-driven brands. 

There’s a great talk from Tony’s marketing chief Nicola Matthews over on Marketing Week which is really worth 20 minutes of your time. She tells the brand’s fascinating origin story, deftly demonstrates why its claim to be “an impact company that makes chocolate” is no idle boast, and reflects on its super-minimal paid marketing spend:

“If you have got a story worth telling, then you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”

Nicola Matthews

6. Our latest interactive video magazine

A great spec ad following the day-in-the-life of a banknote, a beautiful surf film, and a collection of stories about sidekicks – welcome to the wonderful world of Video Matters. Every month we round up some of the best videos on the internet for our interactive magazine – check it out below or peruse all the issues here.

7. How brands can embrace TikTok

Here’s a rare sentence – “Wow, this sponsored content is genuinely useful and interesting.” But that is the case for this helpful piece over on Creative Review about brand authenticity on TikTok, featuring Burberry, Rimmel and Duolingo.

Much of the advice may be geared more towards the novice TikTok brand, but there are insights that many businesses could do with remembering: “The critical part of any TikTok collaboration is giving the creator an opportunity to interpret the brief…They know their channel and they know what works, so you need to let go of certain elements.”

8. A perfect example of…

Building on your social media collateral. All across TikTok, Arc’teryx customers like to show off the apparel brand’s durability by subjecting it to some enjoyably lo-fi tests. Director Ezra Ewen ran with that idea (literally) when making the brand’s new spot. Its tongue-in-cheek humor draws a neat contrast with similar brands, whose ads tend to take themselves very seriously.

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