Nutter Butters & North Korean Vitamin Supplements [Is a bad subject line]

Also, the reason you might want to work 100-hour weeks

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? I’m currently on a short work trip, and sometimes a short work trip is all you need to make you feel better about where you live.

In today’s newsletter…

• 2 campaigns that made me ask “WTF?”

• A not terrible reason a CEO gives for working 100 hours a week

• A marketing lesson from the Netflix show Nobody Wants This

If you’re new to Gobbledy - welcome. In addition to writing this, I work with software companies on their messaging. If you need help with that, I’m at jared@sagelett.com - I’m happy to share how our 2-day workshop will transform your messaging.

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This week in WTF?

One of the themes of this newsletter is that there are lots of ways to sell products. How many ways? So many. So many ways.

Like even when I think to myself, “I feel like we’ve seen all the ways you can sell something,” I’ll find a marketing campaign and I’ll be surprised.

Or, in the case of this week, I found two campaigns that I needed to share.

WTF Campaign 1:

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are a seller of probably-but-not-definitely sketchy vitamin supplements. Congrats!

One way to sell your wares is to take about 9 minutes and build a Shopify website, start running social media ads, and you’re off and running. Congrats again!

But, hm…those social media ads cost a bunch of money. And you can’t really control the cost of them, since that’s set by Meta and TikTok. That’s a bummer. That’s going to make it tricky to grow this way.

Even so, there was some success getting the word out on social media. Maybe you can just set up an affiliate program where OTHER people can post about your probably-but-not-definitely sketchy vitamin supplements. And you’ll just pay them when those posts actually lead to a sale.

Bam! Best of both worlds - you get the social media presence and you only fork out for campaigns that work. Congrats yet again.

So now you’ve successfully passed the buck on to what we call an “affiliate publisher,” where THEY will create the ads and try to get people to buy your product. They think they understand the market and can do a better job acquiring traffic than you can. Maybe so!

But how? Your offer to pay people to sell your sketchy-but-not-definitely sketchy supplements is a public offer, so lots of people will try to create ads and posts that will drive traffic to you.

Except, really, how many ways are there to say, “you should buy these supplements because they’ll make things that were smaller bigger, or things that were bigger smaller” or whatever.

Plus, that’s what everyone else will do — there’ll be the usual assortment of #ad influencers and testimonials, so you’re going to have to zag while everyone else zigs.

So here’s what you’ll do…

You’ll create TikTok slideshows of pro-North Korean propaganda. Just picture after picture of the good life in Pyongyang, culminating with an ad for probably-but-not-definitely-sketchy vitamin supplements:

Lesson? If you escape North Korea, they’ll let you back as long as you change your name. Also, not all fatal mistakes lead to your death.

Does this work? I have no idea - though the fact that these ads exist sorta suggests that they do work. Sometimes weird works, as long as you commit to it.

(Thanks to the really great website 404 for uncovering those campaigns.)

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A quick palate cleanser before campaign 2…

We’ve spoken here about how PR and having your CEO do press are often missed opportunities to communicate your marketing messages out to the public. An interview with a CEO is not just a chance for the CEO to blather on about whatever they think - it’s a way to tell a story about the company to investors, potential employees and others.

Obviously, each of those potential audiences require a somewhat different angle on your story. But I wanted to share one example of how a CEO uses press to speak to potential employees:

Peter Orszag, the CEO of financial firm Lazard, was recently interviewed and during the conversation he was asked about why junior bank employees should be OK with 80+ (100+?) hour weeks at the firm. His answer:

“There are many, many people who would rather work whatever number of hours per week on interesting, important things rather than fewer hours on things that are not that interesting,” he said. “And that’s what we’re looking for. That’s the trade-off…”

“It’s not just make-work,” Orszag said. Still, “there are many professions where you can’t get around the effort part of it.”

I’m obviously not the target of those remarks. Also, the hours that 23 year olds work are insane and the whole new “we’ll limit junior banker hours to 80 a week” is actually bullshit…BUT, if you need to hire 23 year olds who are willing to work infinity hours, and you’re competing with other firms for those 23 year olds, you’ll need to position yourself in that market so you’re uniquely appealing.

And what would appeal to people who are willing to put in those hours? Having actually interesting work. “It’s not just make-work” is pretty good messaging. God knows if it’s true. And frankly, anyone working there is probably too exhausted to notice whether it’s true. But this is why CEOs should speak to the press - to get succinct messages out to the market.

Verdict: Sadly, 4 stars.

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WTF Campaign 2:

Back in the 1970s, this is how the folks at Nabisco sold Nutter Butters:

I can’t quite put my finger on why that terrifies me - probably the organ music - but Nutter Butter Man is a little creepy.

So that was the 1970s.

I’m not sure I can even remember Nutter Butter having a consumer marketing budget in the years since then, but maybe they did. Doesn’t really matter because I never noticed it.

Until now.

The Nutter Butter marketing team has taken the Nutter Butter Man, created a world around him, taken a boatload of mushrooms, then, when they were done with those mushrooms, ate more mushrooms, then unleashed the whole thing on TikTok. A representative post:

@officialnutterbutternow

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Yeah. I don’t know. But apparently it’s working - according to the NY Times “the 10 videos posted to Nutter Butter’s TikTok page in September have more than 87 million views, and the account has more than a million followers.”

Here’s an explainer, if that helps at all to understand what’s going on with Aidan, and the murder house, and the peanut butter, etc in the videos (it won’t.)

The Times has a good interview with the creative team that’s worth a read here (gift article).

This was the most interesting insight:

[Social media manager] It all starts at this phrase that we say: Commit to the bit.

[Marketing strategist] It’s very with the gut. There’s not a lot of planning. That’s where we get the best result. There’s not white pages of concepts and story boards and going frame by frame. Because then you lose the lure and the magic that sparked that idea to begin with.

1. Believe in your strategy

2. Commit to the story.

I’m not pretending that enterprise software companies can forgo planning and still write the white papers that gets everyone so excited (that was sarcasm), but the thing I hear more than anything else from marketers in this space is that they are constantly having to convince other people that what they’re proposing will work.

Here’s the bad news - if you’re asking how to convince other people in your company that you know how to do marketing, you’re working at the wrong company.

Great marketing is rooted in belief and commitment. Trying something because some other team suggested it - but you don’t believe in it - will never work. Because at the first opportunity you’ll drop it. And the opposite is true - if you believe in something and the rest of the company doesn’t have faith in you, it will be dropped at the first opportunity.

Belief. Commitment.

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This week in brand apologies…

I really never planned on making Gobbledy a compendium (nice word!) of brands apologizing for marketing materials that appear to have unfortunate undertones. If you’re new to the publication (welcome!), then you missed two half-assed apologies from Heinz last week for ads that resonated in an uncomfortable way with some viewers.

I received some feedback on this from readers, and I wanted to share what reader TP wrote:

“What in the hell are they thinking? I was outraged by just viewing them before even reading what they said. It just shows once again that no people of color work for these brands.”

I’ve known TP for ages, and I’ve long appreciated her point of view on things. When I wrote about the Heinz ads last week, I was mostly concerned with the “we’re-only-pretending-to-give-a-shit” response. It didn’t really hit me that people of color would view the ads differently than I would (because sometimes I’m a dipshit.)

I used to work with someone who told me that there’s never anything in an ad that isn’t there on purpose, because just so many people were involved with the ideation, creation, review and publishing of the ads (thanks, Rudy!). His point was that nothing would ever just “slip by” unnoticed.

Unless, of course, nobody works at the agency and company who would even notice that something is awry. I have no idea whether TP’s point that this issue boils down to a lack of people of color working with the brands is the culprit.

But I DO know something about this Bath & Body Works Candle:

I’m not the only person who thinks that snowflake looks like KKK hoods.

Annnnnnnnnd here’s the apology:

“At Bath & Body Works, we are committed to listening to our teams and customers, and committed to fixing any mistakes we make — even those that are unintentional like this one. We apologize to anyone we’ve offended and are swiftly working to have this item removed and evaluating our process going forward.”

For anyone paying attention at home, they mentioned listening “to our teams” which may suggest that it wasn’t a handful of random Internet people who noticed the similarity.

I don’t really know if the two Heinz examples and the KKKandles are a sign of a larger issue around who works in marketing at large companies, and whether the mix of people working at those companies leads to blind spots.

But I was watching the Netflix series Nobody Wants This (Rabbi falls for woman who isn’t Jewish), and I spent half this time cringing. Not because anything was anti-semitic, but because it was just off. Like all the Jewish stuff in it felt 1/3 of a step too forced, which made all the Jews come across as caricatures - not so much so that I’d expect everyone watching it to notice, but enough that I’d expect many Jews to watch it and think, “It’s a little weird that that that rabbi said - in front of the woman who isn’t Jewish - ‘it’s nice to have a gentile here,’ which, ew, no. Please don’t.”

All of which is to say - we all have blind spots, and when you have blind spots you don’t even realize when what you’re saying may sound a little off to others. Which I know, sounds like drivel you’ve heard elsewhere. But something about Nobody Wants This drove the point home for me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on before. And even if all of this makes your stomach have feelings that aren’t pleasant, it’s good to remember that we’re all capitalists here (except for a couple of our readers), and that repelling customers is generally bad business.

And, because as the old saying goes, when you get two Jews in a room you’ll get three opinions, I should also note that I actually really enjoyed Nobody Wants This. The world is complicated. Except for those candles. I mean, that was easily fixable.

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As always, thanks for reading to the end. Like I mention each week, I get so much out of chatting with readers about marketing stuff. If you’d like to spend 25 minutes in marketing therapy (or whatever), here’s my Calendly link. I had a great conversation with a product marketer this week about how they describe their key benefits on their homepage - that’s a great use of the time if you needed an idea for what we can talk about…