I click through to the message. She has sent me a video of an incredibly ball-shaped cat, discovering to its dismay that gravity is both existent and a massive pain in the ass to deal with when all your owner wants to do is put you in silly outfits. 

I type back: me, christmas party 2022, and get a string of laughing emojis in return. She sends me another three videos in succession: a cat called Juice holding onto a hunk of meat for dear life, two cats on a wheel failing to maintain equilibrium and falling tail over ears, and a cat who has somehow found a new home on top of a showerhead. 

In response, I send her a video of ferrets covered in packing peanuts, a cat watching television with the gravitas of a BBC newscaster, and a reel of Tika the Iggy, who I know for a fact is one of her favourite accounts. 

Lisa and I have not been friends forever. 

But Switch’s office culture tends to bind you to your people quickly. 

It’s not quite office culture…

Calling it office culture is a misnomer, really. 

Our office is no longer in use. Our office is everywhere. Our office is Whatsapp and Google Meet. 

Our office is used on Thursdays, though with the worsening traffic conditions and the earlier falling night, we don’t see each other at work as often as we did before.

That’s fine. As it turns out, office culture for us isn’t tied to a place; it’s tied to the people we work with, and the in-jokes that develop almost instantaneously when you’ve seen through the worst of the worst and come out on the other side. 

What do you do in your spare time?

Here’s a list of the chats I have with my coworkers: 

• Notes on a book in progress that a coworker and I have been planning since we joined the company; they exist in between updates on our favourite videogames, anecdotes about our pets, life lived out in the margins. 

• One of my coworkers just received her new Steam Deck and SD card, and is keeping me updated on her progress through getting to game. She’s recently graduated with a Masters in Design, and started her own business. Her messages are brief and colourful, and every so often, I get a picture of a cat (we have a lot of cats at the office). 

• A long-winded chat consisting only of memes, primarily Star Wars. I have a deep and unabiding hatred for Baby Yoda, a fact that Luke finds hilarious and insists on spamming me with at every opportunity. 

• On Instagram, if I see a naked cat, I send it to our traveller-at-heart, Ernesta. She finds them strange-looking; I find her emojis hilarious whenever I send her a cat more chicken-breast than cat. 

• There is a voice message from Brazil. Maria, who moved back home, keeps me updated on her life, her boys, and her husband. I listen to it before work, and miss her dearly, and also love how happy she sounds. There are children in the background, laughing. It is a noise that suits her well. 

• Good posts from around the internet; things that tell a story. Ed has an eye for a good narrative, and he wants to push us both. Whenever he sees a story, I see it too, in a Whatsapp message or a quick poke on Google Chat. 

• A volley of rabbit posts. Nella, one of our designers, sends me a rabbit in sunglasses. I send her a rabbit in a little shopping trolley. We commiserate over how much it looks like her own pet, a bunny named Nunu who rules Kappara with an iron cottontail. 

Sounds like it’s just you.

It’s not just me. Technically, we do have a group whatsapp, called Bacon, and while it’s used mostly to update on who’ll be in the office when, you see little glimpses of what it’s like between the others. 

Here’s what I know. 

Lisa, who worked in hospitality, has an ongoing conversation with Ganna over coffee: quality, best brewing technique, which coffee shop in Malta gives you the most excellent espresso. The last I heard, they’re setting up a small-batch roast-and-taste day (waiting for my invite, guys!)

Our newest hire has never watched Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, and this has to be rectified at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, Luke makes sure to remind him of his youth, and Luca makes sure to call us out when we make a technical gaff (mostly this is directed at Rik and Ed). 

If you need to know where to go for a nice date or a good dinner, Ed has an eidetic memory of every place worth eating at in Malta. Friday night sets the group chat alight, and it reminds me that we’ve yet to try eating African together (our last lunch date was Doma, where I discovered I very much dislike kimchi, but made up for it by handling my spice pretty well). 

Every so often, Melissa, who is out on maternity leave, sends us pictures of her baby. It’s a bright little moment in the Whatsapp group, and you can always tell – people all respond at once. 

Birthdays. Anniversaries. Switchiversaries. 

We might not be in the office anymore, but we’re locked into each other regardless. I know Thomas is taking his own business to a newer level, working on a shop and a place in Valletta. I know Kim is happier in Finland than she ever was in Malta, though she complains frequently about polar night, and also reminds us to get up and get moving. Rik is a running fanatic who keeps us updated on where he’s running.  

Fanny sends us pictures of her life in a French bakery, and we debate blocking her until we get a king’s ransom of baguettes and croissants (we won’t. But the point stands). 

Andrea shows us the figurines he paints in his spare time. Over the lockdown, we watched his office go from Fallout bunker to cosy little nook. His Warhammer figurines are detailed down to the last little fragment, and they shine freshly-painted on every Google Meet. 

Office culture, redux

It’s not office culture if all that holds you together is the place you’re in. 

And no, you don’t need to like your coworkers. 

But it really helps if you’re friends with the people you work with. If your culture fits together like jigsaw pieces. If you know you can send a message to a chat with over twenty people, and get an answer back, or get a joke to make you smile, or get a private message asking if you’re okay. It helps if you know your office has your back. 

I know I am lucky. The place I work in changes every day: from the sun-speckled apartment to a coffee shop crowded with brew smells to a dark little corner of a restaurant on a quick lunch break. 

What doesn’t change is how it still feels like I’m in the office. 

The post Company Culture, or how to make friends and stay productive appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

And you’ve missed out on watching a company written off for insolvency has started to climb its way up from rock bottom. 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s same old, same-old on hellsite high, and that’s what’s bringing money in. 

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence. 

Tumblr: A History

2007: Founded by David Karp as a microblogging/social networking site with a focus on short-form blogs. 

2012: Tumblr launches its first major brand campaign.  

2013: Tumblr bought by Yahoo. 

2014: Tumblr reaches peak popularity at over 100 million blog posts per day. 

2016: Yahoo writes off $712 million of Tumblr’s value. 

2017: David Karp leaves Tumblr. 

2019: Tumblr bans adult content and sees 30% user traffic loss. 

2019: Tumblr sold to Automattic, operator of WordPress.com, for less than an estimated $3 million.

The best way to explain Tumblr is through a meme. 

Tumblr – and tumblr users by extension – have weathered a lot. People who were on the site in the early days of its rise definitely remember it as a kind of ‘positive’ 4chan, a place on the internet where community was the bottom-line – before ads made it onto the internet, before we even had the idea of what a social network was capable of, there was Tumblr and the 

idea that you could be anyone you wanted on the internet, and nobody would be able to track it back to you. 

When David Karp launched the site, Tumblr quickly became a go-to for people who wanted a niche community where they didn’t need to put their best foot forward. The earliest reiteration of Tumblr has always been a place you can make home regardless of your interests, and for an entire generation of tweens and teens left unattended on their family’s computer, it was the best of what the internet had to offer. 

As it grew, and became a powerhouse for fanworks, other companies and outside advertisers wanted a cut of that. At the height of its heyday, Tumblr could see up to 91.7 million posts created per day: what advertiser wouldn’t want to have that kind of audience?

However, innovation has never lain easy with the people that brought Tumblr’s fame: the users who used, curated, and embedded themselves into the Tumblrverse.

What Tumblr Cannot Do

Tumblr’s entire website has been host to some pretty interesting controversies.

The Tumblr user who stole human bones is the most famous but dig a little deeper than that, and you’ll find others: the ongoing fandom wars and drama in virtually every popular media content, the 4Chan vs Tumblr spam battles, and DashCon are some of the events that are passed around like campfire cautionary tales: the tale of the little social media network that could, and probably shouldn’t have. 

What we take away from nearly 20 years of Tumblr in operation is that it’s an absolutely awful social media website for virtually anything that isn’t community-based – and it’s not great at building something community based outside of the thin scope of reality that Tumblr already deals with. When you bring in outside influences such as advertisers and marketing agencies, Tumblr’s netizens – already pretty hostile to change – turn outright malicious. 

Up until 2022, that was the understanding that the three prior owners of Tumblr had. David Karp got out early enough that he didn’t see the downswing of Tumblr becoming what Kotaku called ‘a black hole of joylessness’. Yahoo’s efforts to make Tumblr profitable are the stuff of legends: from trying to build Tumblr as their main advertising platform at all costs to the porn ban that wiped 30% of traffic out over the following few months, Yahoo’s cultural misalignment with what made Tumblr so profitable has become the posterboard for not rocking the boat so much that you capsize – which is what happened with Yahoo! and why they ended up selling Yahoo to Automattic for less than a portion of what they paid for it. 

Automattic took the reins in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic was already a blip on the radar, and for the most part, Tumblr had entered into a kind of overgrown post-apocalyptic dormancy. 

It wouldn’t last long. 

What Tumblr Can Do

Tumblr can serve as an excellent way to build your brand. 

But don’t expect to see megamillions in sales and engagement coming from it.

The same ungovernable quality that makes ads on Reddit such a thorny prospect is doubled on Tumblr, the last place on the internet where you can be anonymous, unpalatable, and insane on main. Even Twitter, with its text-based slant, is more of a social media network than Tumblr, where writing your blog is still better built than the image and video capabilities and your worst nightmare is having a post go viral. 

But there’s a benefit to using Tumblr for brand: you get to pick the way your brand comes across to its audience. And, at the end of the day, you can get people talking about you – even if the conversation can be a double-edged sword. 

Tumblr is a community-builder. It’s a place for conversation. It’s where the userbase is fiercely dedicated and also reactionary. You can learn a lot about building relationships with your community, and tempering innovation with patience, just by watching old users on Tumblr interact with each other. 

After four years of chaos, that’s the trick to working with Tumblr that Automattic has discovered – and it’s giving Tumblr a new lease on life. Add in the Y2K revival and how users on the internet are looking for different corners of the web to make their own, and Tumblr’s resurgence isn’t really a surprise: it’s what’s always been at the end of this road. 

Web 3.0 is happening. A lot of people are unhappy about it and trying to find their way back to the old internet where most of the people you’re speaking to spent their formative years. 

Tumblr is that old guard. The internet at the early days of the social media rise still offers opportunities for brands to capitalise on, but they won’t bring in the big dollars immediately, and you need to put effort into them to see a payoff. 

That said, look at the alternative: Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok won’t be as powerful as they are now forever. We’ve seen it working within those three already: Facebook’s advertising strength giving way to Instagram giving way to Tiktok. It might take more for them to come out of fashion but investing in a new social media platform now gets you in on the ground floor before you change.

And Tumblr – with its Hellsite High guide and the renewed effort to make a profit out of the site by catering to, instead of against, their userbase – gives you the perfect platform to try it out. 

Tips Taken from Tumblr’s Takeovers

1. Crowdsource

Tumblr is one of the best case studies for working with, and not against, your users – its entire decline is because the companies in charge didn’t take into account who Tumblr’s primary audience was before they made decisions that fundamentally changed the way it worked. Once they brought in measures that were palatable for Tumblr users to engage in, interest in the site went up. 

Tumblr’s BLAZE is – at its core – a pointless service when you take into account what Tumblr’s core user-base is. Tumblr Blaze allows you to boost a post of yours so that it shows up on everyone’s timeline, something that could work great for advertising if there were advertisements on the platform and if it allowed you even a tiny slice of control or insight into how your post is doing. 

Instead, the thing it’s used the most for is to project Tumblr’s users to a series of shitposts and pictures of their animals. You can’t control who sees your post, only the amount of impressions you get, which makes it useless for advertising – but just what the Doctor (Who) ordered for Tumblr. 

2. Connect

Tumblr staff has made a real effort to reach out and speak to their users, something that hadn’t been touched upon in previous years. Mayer’s takeover only spread as far as moving Tumblr staff to headquarters, and Tumblr users had a far more benevolent but hands-off relationship with creator Karp. 

Automattic wanted it to be different. Take a look at their staff blog on Tumblr, and you’ll see a complete turnaround in how the staff chooses to communicate with and interact with their users.

Here’s a post from January 2013 where staff mostly reblogged popular posts: 

Here’s a post from January 2016, where efforts to engage with the users started changing by tapping into fandom – although still on the level of just reblogging popular posts: 

Here’s the final reiteration of Tumblr staff, in 2022: 

You’ll see that there’s still some element of reblogs, but the depth and breadth of content is much more refined. Tumblr staff had nothing to lose by engaging with its users on the same level: removing that last layer is likely what led to tumblr users talking positively about the staff rather than as a nuisance to overcome. 

And it’s made the site better – for its core users, anyway.

Everyone in the world wants to connect with someone, or to feel that they’re understood. When we talk about company culture and brand values, we’re talking about them because they’re fundamentally what makes you connect with an audience. 

Tumblr staff has realised it’s better to join them then try to beat them. The benefits speak for themselves. 

For example: In 2022, they wanted to increase their clicks. They designated April as their month for a click-a-thon. If they approached Tumblr users directly, tumblr users would resist the idea. 

So they made up a character called Brick Whartley, a businessman with a brick for a head. 

He has a LinkedIn profile. He engages with users. 

He wants your interactions. 

Under the guise of Brick Whartley and a ‘we-help-you,you-help-us’, Tumblr staff coded in a mode for the site that allowed users to see tiny little widgets on their dashboard which they could click on and change. 

It looks like this at peak Tumblr: 

The aim was to increase engagement. 

It worked.

3. Convenience

Tumblr is archaic, and finding your way around isn’t easy. For new users streaming to the site as part of the early-internet-nostalgia resurgence, this is a clear and distinct barrier: you need to know how to use Tumblr to benefit from Tumblr, and knowing how to use Tumblr isn’t something you can stumble upon. 

Well, not until Tumblr launched their Hellsite High microsite. 

It’s an ingenious strategy: fold in a new series of potential clients by guiding them through the process to potentially make it big on your platform – or at least, have fun. By embracing and building on the idea of Tumblr as a kind of fundamentally void social media, Tumblr staff has managed not to alienate old users, not to chase off new users, and put themselves on the inside of the joke: amazing, considering that Tumblr was written off as a dying social media not less than a few months ago, and even more amazing considering that Tumblr is a true vestige of the old internet: its updates, tagging systems, and the way users work the platform are all obsolete forms when you consider newer social media such as Tiktok and Instagram. 

Tumblr is not a bastion of the old internet without good measure. Its early history is still rife with the same controversies that other social media networks have: bots, racism, doxxing. 

The difference, however, is that Tumblr is looking forward. Where other social medias are stumbling in a bid to elevate their platform to the best and the biggest, Tumblr is content in being the platform that feels like home – and it’s reaping the benefits. 

The post The Unmarketable Tumblr Hellsite: Lessons in User Management appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Cannes 2022 is made up of those ads. 

Ad agencies from around the world compete to land a prize at Cannes Lions, hoping to take home one of the bronze, silver, or gold lions. These companies put their heart and soul into their work, and during Cannes Lions, they get to see that effort pay off. 

And, hey, even if they don’t land a lion, getting shortlisted is an incredible achievement in its own right. 

We’ve been following Cannes for years. This year’s offerings are something special. 

Here are nine of our top favourites, whether or not they landed a Lion – in no particular order. 

1. Ogilvy Asia – Spotify

Sound Tour (Japan)

Sound creates memories. After two years of pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, Ogilvy Asia wanted to bring back the memory of travelling in Japan – and they wanted to make sure that they used the best platform to do it with. Working with local artisans and Japan-based musician Matt Cab, Ogilvy constructed three larger-than-life Spotify codes that linked travellers in the location to the sound of that region. 

Truly, one of the most creative uses of squid at Cannes we’ve seen so far. And you can still listen to the songs on Spotify without having to scan the code. Here’s our personal favourite.

Melissa says, “What a brilliant and creative way to bridge an experience with their app. Not only did they create a playlist per location to enhance people’s experience while visiting, they made it incredibly easy to access it (the codes), by merging it with the culture (the lanterns, the flowers) – it honestly blew my mind how they collaborated with local artisans to create the codes, instead of opting for a printed banner that will look cheap and out of place, they managed to make the Spotify experience part of the landscape in the most subtle, yet visible way. Bloody brilliant. I bow to the team that managed to create both an aesthetically pleasing and functional jurney that enhances a person’s experience – a wonderful example of brand love.“

2. Wunderman-Thompson – Sherwin-Williams

Speaking in Colour

Colours can be deceptive; what you see on a screen or picture in your mind might not actually look the way you want it to in real life, and while it’s not the biggest problem in the world, Sherwin-Williams wanted to make sure that the colour you had in mind is the colour you wound up with. 

With Wunderman-Thompson’s help, they brought to life an AI-powered colour system that works with voice search. They ask you, ‘describe your dream colour’, and once you do, the AI trawls the internet’s images to create a custom colour palette. Besides helping people find the best colour for their walls, just the way they pictured it, it’s also helping to build one of the biggest known databases for colour attribution in the world – and lending a lot of insight into which colours are popular where and why. 

This one is great for a number of reasons; it’s innovative without being overwrought, and it leverages AI and voice search in a way that’s fun to play around with. Watching the AI generate a colour palette from a single word is effortlessly entertaining, which is one of the highest accolades tech in 2022 can achieve

. 

3. DAVID São Paulo – Burger King

Burger Glitch

We’ve all had at least one experience where something online doesn’t quite render the right way, and the results are one part horrifying to two parts funny. Burger King decided to capitalise on it by seeding glitches and easter eggs into their app, leaving them up to curious fans to come across them – and to incentivise the hunt for easter eggs, people who post their glitches to social media stand to win a discount coupon on top of the up-to-40% off that you get for finding one of those glitches regardless.

Our Head of Studio, Andrea, is especially fond of this one: “Most of us have come across these weirdly hilarious glitches in games, or have seen videos of these, so we can easily make the connection with that one hilarious moment when things didn’t go as planned. But those imperfect moments are the ones we remember and stick with us the most.”

4. Gong – Netflix

The Art of Stealing

Gong is a Polish agency. ‘Lady with an Ermine’, a Leonardo Da Vinci work, is the most expensive painting in Poland. 

To promote Netflix’s Lupin, a series where gentleman thief Assane Diop carries out elaborate heists in the style of Arsène Lupin, they worked with the Polish National Museum to use the most famous painting in Poland as guerilla marketing. They set up a painting both inside and outside of the museum of the Lady with an Ermine missing her trademark black necklace, generating quite a lot of buzz from people who happened to see the painting. 

A few days later, Gong added one more thing to the campaign: a shot lifted from Lupin, where Assane Diop holds a black necklace and says, ‘merci madame’. 

A good public billboard can do a lot, and it’s easy to overlook the impact of a billboard when we have so much more technology at our disposal – however, Gong pulled off an incredible piece of guerilla marketing using one of the oldest forms of advertising, and invigorated a field where it’s easy to get lost in the noise of other adverts: incredible, stunning work, no matter which way you look at it. 

5. BBDO Canada – Canadian Paralympic Committee

Para Expansion Pack

Lego is one of the biggest toys in the world, beloved by adults and kids alike. Their expansion packs feature everything from astronauts to figures taken right from popular culture, with more coming along the way – and thanks to BBDO Canada and the Canadian Paralympic Committee, we now have a taste of what it looks like to have Paralympic minifigures to add to Lego’s considerable back catalogue. 

Product design that’s a force for good is always worth attention. The paralympic minifigure pack showcases a subset of society that has been overlooked in toys; it’s true that not every kid or adult needs to see themselves in product offerings, but seeing yourself reflected in society always helps. 

As Andrea said, “Lego needs to make this yesterday.”

6. Grey New York – Applebee’s

Fancy Like

Tiktok virality – any virality, actually – is hard to chase after. Most ads never reach that level of international acclaim, and that doesn’t mean that they’re bad ads; it just means that it wasn’t their turn. This ad by Applebee’s never had a chance not to go viral. Combining Tiktok dances, feel-good bouncy Southern music, and everyone’s favourite topic (food), it’s the kind of thing that gets pretty good when it’s done accidentally. 

Underneath the helm of Grey New York, it’s hilarious and light and an antidote to the really heavy couple of months that we’ve been through. 

Also, the song’s really catchy. 

7. Dentsu Creative Bengaluru – VICE

The Unfiltered History Tour

We live in an entirely different world now than we did, and that occasionally means reckoning with a past that is less than beautiful. For VICE, Dentsu Creative Bengaluru wanted to make a point about colonisation. 

But instead of an outright attack, Dentsu Creative went one step further, and created an educational experience that nobody can argue against. The Unfiltered History Tour was created to elevate under-reported issues and to reach out to a younger audience so we can start changing our future, even if we can’t change our past. 

The British Museum is full of artefacts taken from countries around the world, some of which have been fighting to reclaim their treasures for years. They’re not saying anything new – this history has been raked over the coals of social media for years – but by bringing it to national attention, there’s a hope it can prompt change. 

Our copywriter likes this one in particular: “History is a thorny subject for countries in power: it’s hard to sell a national glory when your past is full of things you’d rather not reckon with, but it is a history that needs to be known. Bringing it to awareness is the only way to affect a lasting change and make sure that you end up on the right side of history – the one that understands that you had a hand in shaping the current world, and that you’re trying to make amends for it.”

8. VMLY&R Commerce – Elena’s

Fan Heartbreak Ice Cream

The pandemic pushed a lot of stores into closing their doors and taking their businesses online, and for some, they were struggling to stand out in a market that had had decades to build a reasonable presence in real life. It happened to Elena’s, a Mexican ice-cream store that needed to come up with a way to stand out on the grocery store shelves immediately. 

To do so, they released a special edition ice-cream: The Fan Heartbreak Ice-cream, a five-tiered tub where each flavour has mood-lifting properties to get you through a hard time. They also restructured the entire website to guide you through the flavours themselves, and give you tips on how to boost your mood. 

Shortly after, they released limited edition packaging to poke fun at Mexico losing the Gold Cup finale, which further boosted the narrative of ice-cream as intrinsically tied to making you feel better. 

It’s a clean, beautifully shot campaign that turns a traditional story on its head, and really makes you think about why ice-cream has such a connection to heartbreak – and best of all, it made people laugh at a time when people really struggled to find something to laugh about. A great campaign all around. 

9. Performance Art – Black&Abroad

The Black Elevation Map

Data has blindspots: things that you miss out on if you’re not looking, and it isn’t a big stretch to understand that the data that most normally has those blindspots come from minority groups. Black travellers who want to trace out the impact Black Americans have had on the culture of the United States have few resources, and Black&Abroad wanted to change that and give travellers something to help. The Black Elevation Map charters a route through America where the influence of Black creators is taken into consideration: from restaurants that fuelled the Civil Rights movements to the accolades won by startup tech companies, the Black Elevation Map is designed to be easy to read, easy to parse, and easy to use. 

It’s an excellent use of data for something that can truly bring forward a better understanding of the Black American experience. 

10. Bonus! ReThink’s Multiple Entries

Fellow ICOM partner Rethink has had multiple entries win awards at Cannes, and they’ve been voted the third best independent agency network overall – so we can’t end this list without leaving at least one mention of Rethink’s work. From their ‘draw ketchup’ campaign for Heinz to the ‘Colours of Pride’ in support of gay rights, Rethink has had a banner year for awards, and they’re well deserved. 

The post Cannes Lions 2022 – A Retrospective appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

But it’s Pride again and Burger King Austria has brought out a campaign that has everyone with a Twitter handle burning the midnight tweets. 

Let’s talk about it. 

The Burger King Pride Ad 2022

Burger King has been bringing out Pride ads since 2014, so this isn’t exactly out of the left field for them. In fact, given Burger King’s most recent ads, this is exactly what a 2022 Pride ad for a Burger King branch is supposed to be: tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted, and kind of silly. 

The backlash against this ad goes one of two ways: either ‘burgers don’t have to be a political statement’ or ‘you didn’t consult a single queer person in making this ad’. Thinkpieces on CNN, Forbes, Gizmodo, and others have been making the rounds on social media by taking jokes about the tweet out of context under the banner of rage, and racking up a lot of views in the process. 

And – through it all – Burger King gets free publicity. 

It’s an ingenious, calculated marketing move that shows clearly that Burger King has learned from its mistakes. 

Or, it’s a mistake, but a harmless one. 

Here’s what we think.

Why Burger King Pride 2022 Works

Look: pride campaigns have a challenging road ahead of them to ‘good’. When you throw in a human cause with the express intention of drawing your audience to one side of the line in the sand, something will get mixed up along the way, and what you’ll be left with is an ad campaign that phones it in. 

There are exceptions. 

This Burger King Pride ad is one of them. 

It’s different. It stands out without taking the same route to Pride as other brands do: the rainbow packaging, the all-inclusive catch-phrase. Burger King, as a brand, is still at the forefront of this ad, something that becomes a rarity once Pride comes around and organisations try to make it very clear where they stand. 

It sticks to the brand tone of voice.

It sparked a conversation. 

It doesn’t pander. And the choice of translating it into English for international appeal can be seen as a deliberate move to get exactly this sort of reaction; to see exactly this kind of conversation play out. 

As Tom put it, “it’s just a bit funny, really, and sort of – reverse psychology, I think. It’s all we’ve been talking about, after all.”

From a quick look at Twitter, Tom seems to be right on the money. The most popular tweet about the whole saga gained 12.8k retweets and over 600k likes in just five days. 

On the other hand: Why Burger King Pride 2022 doesn’t work

The biggest thing that has been said about it online is ‘you didn’t consult anyone gay, did you?’

As a Pride ad without the Pride taken into account, it works. 

Once you look at the audience that it was intended for, you can see that it doesn’t really. Or, as our Accounts Manager Lisa Cutugno said, “it’s like they didn’t think it through.”

Top and bottom subcultures have been around for decades, so using terminology that’s thrived since the 50s is a step in the right direction. The problem lies in the fact that the terminologies used have taken on a different identity in the mainstream, and it’s partially the concept of always-online fandom culture to blame. 

Luke puts it best, “it seems like they didn’t take into account the fact that the terms ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ have entered the mainstream lexicon in the last few years and just went the equal route, as in same-sex – this might have worked better like 7 or 8 years ago when those terms were less well known, perhaps.”

Actually it’s been done before—

In 2017, McDonald’s came out with this campaign. 

It’s an identical campaign, save for a different cast and country.

What’s interesting about this campaign is that it didn’t have any backlash. 

To be fair, it also wasn’t well-known outside of the country – two things that set the Burger King Austria ad apart. Whether or not it is more successful than the McDonald’s campaign of 2017 has yet to be seen, but it is definitely far more noticeable which says a lot about the way that consumers have changed the way they feel about these conversations.

Risk or Reward?

Controversial or not, our CEO had a very valid point to make: “if you are not ready to face potential backlash, you’ll never do anything different. So I applaud their appetite for risk, even if they went awry this time around.”

Burger King has a tendency to make mistakes. All big corporations will eventually put out an ad that draws ire from someone. 

However, it seems as though the fallout from their Women’s Day tweet seems to have taught them a lesson in how to balance risk with reward, and when to go for it.

At the end of the day, this campaign is not going to be remembered in the long-run – but for a brief moment, it had the whole world talking and no lasting damage was done except to fragile right-wing pundits who get offended at everything. 

All in all, not bad for a regional campaign. 

The post Burger King Pride 2022, or When Controversy Works appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Since then, Meta’s shares have dropped by 20%, which in any other company would be a big problem, but since it’s Meta – actually, it’s a big problem for Meta too. 

20% doesn’t seem like a lot. 

For Meta, it’s $240BN. Overnight. As investors realised – and saw – what the Metaverse really looked like. 

Here’s why. 

What’s the metaverse?

Zuckerberg says the metaverse is the future. In his own words: “the metaverse is the next evolution of social connection.” It’s concerts you can attend anywhere in a virtual space. It’s avatars you can customise to look just like you. It’s a world that builds itself around giving you better experiences. 

It’s a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, and we’ve had the technology to make those since 1991, but Zuckerberg wants to go a step further. 

Zuckerberg wants it to be hyperrealistic. 

But isn’t the metaverse supposed to be really high-tech?

Meta wants to push for virtual reality. 

There’s currently a couple of problems with delivering that promise: 

1. Virtual reality tech is expensive. The cheapest one, the Oculus Go, was $249 dollars in 2019; the prices have gone up since then due to a number of factors such as the global chip shortage and manufacturing issues.  
2. Virtual reality tech is not viable for everyone. Think of the people who are going to be the primary audience for this. Now think of where they live. How many 16 – 40 years olds do you know with both the money and the space to drop on virtual reality technology that takes up half a room?
3. Virtual reality tech has to be immersive to deliver the promises. Facebook’s latest Superbowl advert showed that the avatars they could map with today’s technology are basically just floating torsos. The reason for this is that the technology hasn’t come far enough, and been made affordable enough, to map full-body movements – which kind of sets Meta’s ‘be yourself, but virtually’ goals back a few notches in immersion. 

The metaverse is high-tech. 

But it’s high-tech in ways that needs hardware the average person won’t have access to yet. 

A full-scale immersive environment that tracks your full body – similar to the way they track movements in multi-million dollar triple A games – is expensive. It’s not tech that can just become widely available overnight. 

What about their users?

Facebook’s user-base is aging, and they’re finding it hard to appeal to younger users. Tiktok has taken a chunk out of their primary users, and as Facebook continues to get a reputation for being the social media riddled with anti-vaxxers and propaganda, it’s struggling to maintain the higher numbers it used to have. 

Even if the metaverse brings in a younger audience, what Facebook offers is limited: playing games, watching VR videos, attending meetings, none of which have the refinement that you can get from companies that specialise in VR. 

So, Facebook’s metaverse is a failure?

Meta’s take on the metaverse is an idea that has yet to reach its full potential. 

But this version of the metaverse will likely not be the one that endures. 

And much of it is down to the grip that Mark Zuckerberg has on Meta. 

Zuckerberg is a visionary. The original Meta, pre-rebrand, created the term unicorn company, and drove it to higher, better heights. His idea for a social network changed the very basis of the internet into something so completely different that it defined Web 2.0. Good or bad, it wouldn’t have happened without Mark Zuckerberg. 

However, Mark Zuckerberg is banking a lot that the metaverse is something Meta’s primary audience – most of which are the older generation and the very, very young – wants. And whatever Zuckerberg identifies as his vision, Zuckerberg pushes Meta to do – whether or not it’s in line with the userbase.

This isn’t a bad thing. Part of being a visionary is learning what rules to break. 

But Meta-under-Zuckerberg is breaking those rules in a way that makes it difficult for the company to generate any goodwill. Meta’s past data scandals and reputation have earmarked it as the social media you shouldn’t trust, and its present is riddled with problems with its algorithm and the slow recognition by the world at large that it has bought most of its major competitors.

Just based on technology, the metaverse isn’t quite ready for Facebook’s vision. 

And from a business perspective, Facebook isn’t ready for the metaverse. 

But it is ready for growth. 

However, that growth could come at the cost of Mark Zuckerberg. 

As we’ve seen from Dorsey and Twitter, that’s not always the end of an era. 

Can Facebook create a successful metaverse?

Meta has the money, and the people, to create a better attempt at the metaverse than some of its other competitors, and it can still create a successful metaverse – but for it to reach, and be relatable, to a much wider group of people, it has to really think about what its metaverse needs to be. 

And it has to see how it can keep the people who are on-board for the metaverse interested as they figure out how to actually make the metaverse viable and true to its vision. 

What’s the lesson to take away from this?

If you’re creating a product that your audience isn’t going to use, you need to make sure that someone will. 

Meta is banking that there are people who are so invested in VR social media that they will shell out upwards of $250 to chat to avatars of their friends, attend concerts, play basic games, and see art shows in virtual reality, rather than doing the same thing in real life. 

As a theory, it has merit. But Meta also needs to keep in mind that the tech to make this happen is yet years away, and to keep pushing and building their primary product and addressing the concerns that its main user base has: the allegations of abuse, the problematic algorithm, and the idea that Meta is selling your data to the highest bidder. 

However: The Case for Metaverse

There’s a bright side. 

Metaverse is still very, very new, and so is the technology to make it. Hyperrealistic 3D virtual worlds might not be on the cards for next year, but it doesn’t mean they never will be – and as happens with most big corporations, Meta’s R&D investment is going to pay out. Whether it’s in the way that will benefit the metaverse or not, it’s too early to tell. 

But the metaverse is happening, and eventually, it might even be something good: a place where you experience anything. 

Its merit, and whether or not that’s enough to tide over the share dip, is still undetermined. 

It’s going to be fun watching it develop.

The post The Dystopian Metaverse appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

That’s not entirely on you. 

The Russian propaganda machine is insidious.  It’s well-tuned. It’s been notably active since the 60s. 

And it can spread a false story so fast that the truth won’t even have time to get out of the starting gate. 

Here’s how you can make sure that what you share online is what you should be sharing. 

Russian Disinformation: Tactics

• Repetitive statements designed to spread fear, for example: wouldn’t this start a nuclear war?
• Multi-channel but tailored to each channel, for example: single mother of two on Facebook who posts vague scientific reports about COVID-19 vaccines causing deaths. 

Russian trolls are online for 12 hours a day and work in shifts to ensure that the stream of misinformation is constant, pervasive, and impossible to ignore. On social media, it’s even more difficult to determine the veracity of what’s being said because it’s written by people in a way that’s very human; in a way that’s believable. 

Stopping the spread of Kremlin disinformation

You’re on social media all the time now; as an escape from reality, because you just ‘check in’ for a quick minute in between tasks, or because you’re really worried about what’s going on and want to get the unverified truth. 

You see something that a friend reposted. You trust this friend, and there’s no need to double-check what he’s written; he wouldn’t post something that isn’t real. 

So you repost it. 

The story you reposted is picked up by another person, then another person, then more. Before you know what’s happened, it’s on the news cycle. 

It isn’t true. 

Staying safe online is more than just making sure that who you’re following is who they say they are. The Kremlin is trying to control and justify this war through social media: claiming that Ukraine is bombing their own city, claiming that Russia hasn’t actually attacked civilians, claiming that this is a war to protect Russian interests. 

It’s believable. It’s justifiable. 

It’s propaganda. 

The story is far clearer than that. 

Here’s how to follow what’s really happening 

1. Follow verified social media sources. 

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram: everyone’s on one of them, and the news on those social medias travel fast. Make sure that what you’re sharing comes from people who are exactly who they say they are: government officials, consulates, journalists – people who can’t hide who they are. 

Here’s a few to start with: 

• President of Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelenskyy 
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Dmytro Kuleba
• Kyiv Independent: Facebook | Twitter 
• CNN News: Matthew Chance | Frederik Pleitgen
• EU Commission: Ursula von der Leyen
• BBC: Myroslava Petsa
• Prosecutor General of Ukraine: Iryna Venediktova
• Independent journalist, founder of Public Interest Journalism Lab: Nataliya Gumenyuk
• Director of Amnesty Ukraine: Oksana Pokalchuk
• Propaganda specialist: Paula Chertok
• Associate Professor of Russian Politics: Ben Noble
• Bot, Russian politics, and propaganda specialist: Sergey Sanovich

2. Spread Zelenskyy’s words and videos as far as you can. 

Zelenskyy wants the world to know what Ukraine is dealing with – and to reach out to the Russian population, to appeal to their sense of honour, to ask them to fight against their dictatorship. He wants to be visible in this war, leading his men. 

Keep him in the spotlight. It’s harder for Zelenskyy to disappear, and for the Kremlin to control the narrative, if what he says is amplified across the internet, the way that it’s happening now. 

It needs to keep happening.

3. Don’t be afraid. 

Russian trolls thrive off of fear. If you’re seeing a lot of news about World War III and nuclear attacks, it’s likely that you’re watching a troll in action, or at least seeing what the building hysteria on social media looks like. 

Half of what’s being said is false. The tiny kernels of truth there can be found on official sources – so take what you see online with a pinch of salt. Don’t give into your fear. Disinformation is a war tactic, not a game; it’s an effective one. 

This is why we mention the official sources. Look to those. Social media accounts that are new, or relatively new, with gibberish usernames, with the same sort of misspellings: ignore those. They’re not telling you the truth. 

4. Talk to your Russian friends. 

Over 13,000 people have been arrested for protesting the war. The Kremlin is in the process of cutting off Russia from the world. 

Get the word to your friends in Russia. Let them know what’s going on. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram might be down, but there are other ways to connect with your friends if they are living in Russia at this moment, so use those methods and get in touch. 

5. Don’t donate to random people on social media. 

You want to help, and it’s commendable.

But don’t donate to people on social media through Paypal, Venmo, Gofundme, or various crypto currencies. Donate to official causes – you can see our list here. The money will get to where it’s going quicker, and safer, and you know what it’s being used for. 

6. Study video critically.

You’ve probably already seen the video of Zelenskyy surrendering. 

That is a fake.

Video is exceptionally easy to fake, but deepfakes can be spotted if you study the video critically. Look for filters. See if the people involved are actually moving – see how, in that video, only the head is moving? Look for the way light hits: does it move the way light moves? 

If you have a doubt about the video, ignore it. Don’t reblog. Don’t let it get further. 

This is a situation amplified and echoed three times over through social media. Believing the right thing is crucial, and spreading the right message can make a difference in what’s being said online – and what people believe. 

All the social media platforms you’re using have implemented some checks to ensure that they mark Russian state-run media out, but those messages are still on the platform, and they’re designed to be believable.

Run your checks. Look at sources on the ground. Decide which side you want to believe in. 

What you do on social media now matters.

The post Spotting Russian Propaganda: What To Believe Online appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

• The customer is always right.
• You get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
• Tart words make no friends.
• Treat others as you want to be treated yourself.
• Trust no-one who doesn’t like pastizzi (okay, this one we made up, but we still stand behind it. If you don’t see the God-given glory of butter-drowned flaky pastry smothered in cheese, we need to have a nice sit down to discuss why you’re wrong).

The rest of those phrases, though, are the Customer Service battle-cries. They are monologued by bosses to their employees every time a customer looks like they’re thinking of kicking up a fuss. Customer service practices are still very 1950s; customers could do what they liked then, as cellphones weren’t a thing, and there was no-one to video a meltdown at a restaurant over a misplaced order. Back then, ‘the customer is always right’ underpinned a lot of the interactions between business owner, business worker, and business user: 

• Owners afraid of the Power of the Customer use it to keep their client base happy.
• Workers afraid of their bosses use it to keep lower workers in line.
• Users who want free stuff use it to get free stuff, hell or high water notwithstanding.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t always work, and that’s where Outrage Marketing comes in.

Outrage Marketing

You’ve seen outrage marketing before. Everyone has seen outrage marketing before. Outrage marketing is a deliberate attempt by businesses themselves to cultivate a ‘take no shit’ attitude that scorches every client who WOULD like to use that coupon that expired in 2006, thank you. It is the reverse-double-dip-mind-game manoeuvre that takes ‘the customer is always right’, and throws it off a cliff. Outrage marketing builds on the fervour that social media can ignite when a cause people feel strongly about is brought under attack. It’s a way of flipping over the table, drilling buckshot through it, and trying to attract like-minded people to also flip over tables and pump it full of buckshot, because your business keeps it real.

Used cleverly, it’s an insanely good tactic. People are always ready to ride or die for their causes, so whether you agree with them or not, getting engagement through rage can kick your numbers up so far so fast that you’ll find it hard to keep up.

(Disclaimer: we’re not condoning actual table-flipping, shotgun shooting, or berating customers because you read it somewhere on the internet. Please don’t contact us telling you took our advice literally and now you’re a ‘person of interest’).

Pics, or it didn’t happen, right? Here are some examples of the way outrage marketing has worked for the following businesses.

The White Moose Cafe

The White Moose Cafe is the ‘only 5-star restaurant on Planet Mars’, and they don’t do anything low-carb or high-protein, so if your New Year’s Resolution is to eat better, you can ___ off. Decaf coffee is banned (in this case, we agree), drinking non-alcoholic beer is punishable by death, and if you don’t like gluten you can’t be friends (with the White Moose Cafe, whose menu is built on the cornerstones of ‘gluten? I hardly know them!’). They’re housed inside the Charleville Lodge, a budget hotel provider that gives you what you pay for, i.e. a place to sleep, a place to eat, and staff which are trained in martial arts, so don’t try any ____.

Getting from the cafe to the city centre is not recommended, but if you want to go, the hotel and the cafe would like to reassure you that the town only resembles the set of the Night of the Living Dead, and therefore any reports of zombies have been greatly exaggerated.

Why are they important, beyond the silver dollar pancakes that look like this?

Well, they have pissed off everyone, and simultaneously, their popularity has ballooned. Their biggest ‘yikes’ moments have turned the tides to pull, not push, clients towards them. It helps that owner Paul V. Stenson has a hilarious, irreverent way of writing that makes it easy to understand hyperbole is the mother of a joke – however, for those ready to get offended anyway, it provides an outlet.

For the rest of the world, it provides entertainment.

The White Moose Cafe Bans Vegans

The White Moose Cafe’s reached notoriety with its ‘ban on vegans’, which snowballed with this post:

Vegans went into an uproar, leading to:

Look, nobody likes bad publicity, but when you make it work for you, it’s a powerful, powerful weapon. Paul Stenson made it work for him, and the vegan ban elevated his cafe. The Venn Diagram of people who like the White Moose Cafe, people who hate vegans, and people who appreciate a little humour is a circle.

They then posted an apology:

News sites picked it up and ran with it, and whether they were aware that it was a joke or not didn’t matter. People kept writing into the cafe, making pages, and sending abusive messages. However, people also kept reading the articles, writing on the page, and praising Paul V. Stenson’s way of Dealing With Shit.

What happened then?

Since then, the White Moose Cafe has also pissed off bloggers, after shaming an up-and-coming influencer who wanted to bargain a free stay in exchange for featuring the hotel in Youtube videos and Instagram posts, and its notoriety has grown.

Could this have gone really, really badly? Potentially, but so can getting out of bed.

The trick is realising that there will always be people to laugh at the ones who can’t take a joke. Outrage marketing is built on that tenet as much as it’s built on ‘employees first’. Outrage marketing is ‘if you can’t take a joke, you won’t like working with us’, and for the White Moose Cafe, it also worked to cull their clientele, raise their popularity, and bring like-minded people to their Instagram and Facebook page.

It’s funny, and people agree with it; no wonder it worked. Outrage marketing only works if you have a large subset of people who feel the same way about a specific subject – turn it into a joke, and all the better.

Gillette

Oh, Gillette. There’s no end to the stuff we can say about the Gillette advertisement (the message! The drama! The filming!) but let’s get right to the outrage bit: Gillette’s ad was the ad heard around the world for the first month of 2019, and all because it somehow managed to glean reactions from both side of the PC coin.

Gillette tried to tackle toxic masculinity. The underlying message is that ‘boys should be boys’ is a dangerous phrase to utter to influential young men, and that history and media is showing us that men can be better.

We get it; when brands try to take a stand on an issue while simultaneously promoting their products, it doesn’t always work out for the better. For example, LGBTQ rights groups lashed out at Disney pride-themed paraphernalia due to their lack of inclusive gay relationships in Disney works. In that case, Disney’s very much the kid who wants their cake and to eat it too – to say they’re for gay rights, while simultaneously reassuring their conservative fans that ‘but we support gay rights privately’. It’s not a position that many companies can take nowadays; you can’t please both sides of the equation, so some loss of profit is expected.

Gillette’s ad did not stick to both sides of the equation.

Self-avowed anti-snowflakes went into an uproar about the advertisement’s actual content. A lot of them took to social media to show themselves throwing out their Gillette-branded material.

Sound familiar? People did the same thing last year when Nike decided to use Colin Kaepernick for an ad. 

Brief Explanation of Nike Controversy

(Quick recap ICYMI – Prior to every match, when the national anthem of the United States of America is busy thundering through the stadium, Colin Kaepernick kneels to protest police brutality against unarmed suspects.)
Nike signed him for their ad, building it on Kaeperick’s protest.

The tagline run with it was ‘Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything. Just Do It!’ and in less than a month, Nike saw a $6 billion profit hike.  The ‘boycott’ that avid Nike fans said they’d undertake might have manifested, but it went quietly unrecorded under the thunder of the ad’s effect. (Not to mention the contribution to the profit hike made by protesters themselves who actually bought Nike shoes to burn them.)

Back to Gillette

Gillette’s looking at something similar. The ad exploded into social media. And yes, okay, some people posted pictures of them throwing their razor blade in the toilet because they don’t like when brands try to tell them how to think.
Overall, however, it has increased Gillette’s audience. 

Women, who were previously never involved with or paid attention to the brand, are listening – in return, the men in their lives are listening. Gillette’s marketing of razor blades for women has not always hit the mark, but this ad – targeted to men, inviting men to be better – definitely has.

Social issues and social media can no longer be separate. Gillette foresaw this, set the fuses, and let it blow. Despite the negative backlash, the responses have been overwhelmingly, hugely, monetarily positive.

Sotto Pizzeria

The examples we spoke about before are (largely) in larger countries, with larger populations. They’re above Malta’s brand of ‘you’re probably related to everyone on some level, or know someone who is’. The good thing about this? Yelp never really got a foothold on the Maltese islands. Tripadvisor is more a directory of where to go than whether you should go. However, outrage marketing can still work in Malta, where you can mention someone by first name only and still get a ‘oh, you know my cousin?’

Last year, Sotto Pizzeria responded to a negative review on TripAdvisor. The reviewer, who remained anonymous, complained about the bad food, and said he’d found a hair in his ‘sour’ pizza.

Sotto Pizzeria went all out. The owner not revealed the reviewer as a former worker. Furthermore, the owner also said that, in his two-day career at the pizzeria, the reviewer ate six pizzas, and four tiramisus. On top of that, Fausto even told the world at large that the reviewer tried to hit on his daughter. 

Sotto Pizzeria also updated their menu with the Maltese hit of 2018, the exorbitantly priced hairy pizza. Facebook users loved it, and the story was picked up by the national newspaper, diverting attention to the pizzeria. Plus, it resonated with people who were all for a bit of drama and gossip with their morning coffee. Fans of the pizzeria even came together to show some love for the maligned pizzeria, and invited other people to come and try their food.
(We have no idea if anyone actually took Fausto, the owner, up on his offer of hairy pizza).

What’s the takeaway?

Before you roll up your sleeves and get ready to insult your customers, you should be aware of the one correlation between these examples.

They are, roughly speaking, ‘in the right.

On paper, the Gillette ad denouncing toxic masculinity is speaking for the greater good; the White Moose Cafe facebook strikes a chord with small business owners; Sotto Pizzeria is the voice of fed-up people having to justify themselves in online forums.

Outrage marketing works, but as with any form of marketing, you need an end-message. You need a goal to align yourself on one side of history or the other.

These campaigns could have easily failed just as gone viral. It isn’t as easy as adopting a laissez-faire attitude and calling someone a bitch on Snapchat for asking for oat milk instead of regular milk.

You need to have a message, and it needs to be strong. You need to have people that agree with you.

The dissenters will come automatically, but when the lines are drawn, you need people on your side. If you’re championing social issues, then the focus needs to be on the social issue; Colin Kaepernick’s endorsement of Nike is an afterthought; there is no big ‘buy Nike’ message emblazoned in-between shots. The White Moose Cafe suffers no fools; particularly anyone who tries to fleece him or his cafe, or is rude to his staff.

White Moose Cafe gets through it with humour; Nike takes the high road; Fausto pulls up the gossip.
The numbers roll up, and up, and up.

But before you can do all that – before you can take that stand, draw those lines, pick your side of history – you need a story.

Everything else comes after.

The post On Outrage Marketing: How it Works and Why it Works appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Today, we’re talking about IAB and how their consent pop-ups are actually in breach of GDPR. 

Let’s get to it. 

What are you talking about?

We went over GDPR a week ago, but here’s the brief explainer: GDPR is your right to be forgotten, your right to have access to your personal data, your right to know what happens to that data in the interim. Any company that has access to your personal data, no matter if it’s Amazon, a shopping website, or a blog, has to protect that data from leaks and cybersecurity breaches. 

Violating GDPR means a fine on the low-end of the scale, and cessation of all trading activity on the high end. 

It’s a pretty big deal. 

GDPR is one of the main reasons  you have to consent to cookies every time you visit a new website or if you look at websites on incognito mode. GDPR is why you find out if your data is stolen. 

And GDPR is why Austria has ruled that Google Analytics is illegal in Europe. 

How?

Part of GDPR controls were you store your data and how you process that data. Any website that sends data from their website to a server in the United States runs the risk of violating GDPR – the primary protections that European countries place on data aren’t present in the United States, whose government can legally access any EU citizen data. 

What does this have to do with Europe?

Data is liquid gold. 

Non-profit organisations like noyb, Bits of Freedom, and Panoptykon Foundation know this. More importantly, they know that European law protects your data to a certain rigorous level. 

American data laws don’t have the same protections for third-party nationals. 

Since GDPR came into force in 2016, multiple organisations have filed complaints against websites that violate GDPR. One of their key arguments is that any data that’s sent to American servers is not protected by EU law, and therefore the website is in violation of GDPR. 

What’s IAB?

The International Advertising Bureau is an American business association that governs ad standards, conducts research, and supports the online advertising industry. It’s another nonprofit organisation, one that’s been around since 1996, and it’s the reason why there are advertising ‘standards’ for every ad format including video. 

There are 42 licensees in IAB, 27 of which are located in Europe. 

IAB Europe is the coalition of those 27 national IABs. 

It is also the creator of the Transparency & Consent Framework, one of the standardised pop-ups that crop up at the beginning of every new website to tailor how much data you want to provide the company, and give you a brief explanation of what that data is used for. 

International Advertising Bureau is in Europe, though. How is it illegal?

Being based in Europe isn’t enough to avoid GDPR violation. The Court of Justice takes GDPR violations extremely seriously, and it’s irrelevant where the website or server are placed. 

IAB didn’t just violate GDPR. It continuously violated GDPR by: 

• creating advertising profiles and showing them personal ads without adequately obfuscating identifying and personal information such as sexual orientation and health data. 
• making the privacy policy difficult to understand and available only in English. 
• hiding the reason they’re collecting this data. 
• not protecting the data it collects and not monitoring that websites which use IAB are compliant with GDPR. 
• not hiring a data protection officer. 

So violating GDPR is bad. What does this mean for business owners?

Google Analytics getting called out on their GDPR violations is one thing: one very big, ground-shaking thing. The story about data is still developing, and the way it’s developing is telling us a lot about the future of how businesses will work with data. 

But it’s not just GA. Everything that has been put in place to patch-job the risks of data violation is coming under scrutiny – and for a lot of reasons, it’s being found wanting. IAB is just the latest mark – and if you’re keeping up with Google’s continuing problems with data, it’s not going to be the only GDPR-related business problem we’ll see this year.  

Businesses need to take care of consumer data. They need to invest in the proper protections for that data. 

And they might need to invest in a different way of collecting and maintaining consumer data. If the bigger, better-known methods such as Google Analytics and IAB are in violation of GDPR, companies need to be prepared for the moment when those companies have to severely amend or change the way these services work. 

Any advice for businesses who had to deal with the Google Analytics ruling and IAB in the same week?

Be prepared to get more news along these lines.

Everyone panicked for a few months when GDPR went into force. Then, when no one was fined 20m for not putting up a Cookie Policy popup, we collectively swept the issue under the carpet. This is why GDPR was created, and now we’re seeing its true effects. 

Consumers aren’t stupid. They already don’t like the amount of information that organisations have on them. Add in these big rulings – rulings that even the everyman on the street will understand once the websites he uses more often have to change to maintain GDPR protocol – and this is the kind of problem that’s only going to get worse before it gets better. 

That’s a good thing. 

Nobody’s telling you you can’t collect consumer data. Nobody is going to outlaw Google Analytics and IAB tomorrow. 

But start figuring out if you need all that wide scale, top-down data to begin with, and then go from there. 

If you need help knowing how to read it, we’re here for that. Let us know. 

The post IAB and the great GDPR violation appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

In their latest released quarterly report, Meta has highlighted that there’s been a drop of one million in global daily users, taking their figures down from 1.93 to 1.929. Added to the flat net growth of new users for Instagram and WhatsApp, the figures do not paint a pretty future for Meta. 

Websites lose people all the time. Why is this such a big deal?

Facebook isn’t a website. It’s the reason social media is the way it is, and for 18 years, it’s grown continuously, with a bulletproof stock and a formidable portfolio that just subsumes all other competing websites. At the height of its power and popularity, Facebook bought Instagram; it bought WhatsApp. It could do that, unchecked, because it had market lead and power behind it, and other start-ups couldn’t compete. 

Mark Zuckerberg said it himself: “we can likely always just buy any competitive startup.”

Now, Facebook is struggling. The drop in daily users also wiped out 26% in stock value, triggered Wall Street’s worst one-day stock decline in history, and just erased $232 billion of Facebook’s worth. 

And it pulled other tech stocks with it. 

Think of it like an ecosystem. Every ecosystem, no matter how small, relies on balance. 

For the first time in 18 years, Facebook has stumbled, and the balance of the entire social media ecosystem is in flux. 

Okay, so how did this happen?

This has been four years in the making, and it happened because Facebook ignored the signs over those four years.

When Cambridge Analytica’s Christopher Wylie came out and said that Facebook had been mining personal data from a just-for-academic-use app called This Is Your Digital Life, it hit Facebook right where it mattered most: in its unchecked, overwhelming obsession over growth. In 2018, the year of Ted Cruz and Trump and Brexit, the last thing any Facebook user wanted to add to their plate was realising their personal information had been stolen to support these causes. 

What are you talking about?

This Is Your Digital Life actually paid people to complete a Facebook survey. This was only supposed to be for academic research, but Facebook allowed it to keep mining data – and that data was later used in Ted Cruz’s campaign in the United States, Donald Trump’s campaign, and the push for Brexit. 

Collected data was used to create individual profiles that would sway people into voting for these events. The full investigation concluded that Cambridge Analytica’s influence was likely negligible (except for the Ted Cruz campaign) but that didn’t really matter: Facebook had placed itself on a side of history nobody wanted to be on – as the catalyst for some of the most chaotic political events in history, pulling the strings to influence the outcome. 

But if Facebook wasn’t found guilty—

Facebook was found guilty. 

But nothing really happened except for a handful of fines. 

At its core, Cambridge Analytica is a research firm. It’s a conservative research firm, dealing with private intelligence and the military, but it’s still just a research firm. 

Facebook is a social media company with a reach of billions, the kind of reach that a research firm can’t even dream of possessing. 

And Cambridge Analytica – with Facebook – reached it. 

Without Facebook’s consent, and without Facebook’s reach, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t have managed to farm so much data from so many people to use for their tampering.

How does something that happened in 2018 lead to Facebook losing users four years later?

Facebook didn’t do anything with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There’s been no reform – except for stringent ad measures that make it impossible to use Facebook for advertising – and there’s been no transparency about whether or not they’re still collecting that data or using the data. Mark Zuckerberg is a closed box on everything to do with 2018. 

However, people don’t forget. 

And when you have one big violation of privacy and trust, it’s never just one. 

In 2021, Sophie Zhang, another whistleblower, put another nail in the ‘Facebook is negligent at best and actively harmful at worst’ coffin. As part of the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team – yes, that’s a real thing – her task was to investigate the use of likes, comments, shares, and reactions, and see if they were made by real people. 

What she found went much deeper than that. 

Authoritarian regimes, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, could artificially inflate their popularity using bots and other fake entities. 

Facebook knew about it. 

Facebook did nothing because the bottom line would suffer otherwise, and Facebook’s first priority has always been Facebook. 

Wait, but Mark Zuckerberg said Tiktok was the reason that Facebook was losing users!

He’s right. 

Partially. 

The problem with Facebook is that it spent so much time at the top of its market that other competitors it didn’t consider as competitors have started to climb in popularity. TikTok boomed in the pandemic because its format – short form, bite size videos – and relatively scandal-free background made it appealing. There’s no agenda to TikTok except giving creators the room to share their creativity, a thing that Facebook has long since dropped in the reach for greater profits. 

Tiktok is definitely a reason for Facebook’s decline in popularity, but it’s about 1% of that reason. The rest is just pure Facebook shenanigans. 

Facebook’s rebranded though! And it’s doing so well! 

It’s not. 

The rebrand to Meta came on the heels of – you guessed it, another information scandal! Gold star for you. 

This time, the whistleblower was Frances Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019 after someone she was close to was radicalised through Facebook. 

By 2021, Frances Haugen leaked ‘The Facebook Files’ to the Wall Street Journal, a collection of internal Facebook documents, online employee discussions and research reports that showed Facebook consistently, continuously ignoring the damaging effects that Facebook and Instagram had on the world. 

From influencing teenagers through Instagram to Facebook activity propping up violent insurrections like the January 6th Capitol riots, the Facebook Files didn’t just highlight that Facebook knew about its effects on people, but also that it did nothing to control it – and what it did do, such as implement an AI to detect and remove violent content, had an algorithm so poor that it only managed to act correctly less than 0.6% of the time. 

A few weeks later, Zuckerberg said that Facebook was rebranding itself as Meta, and focusing its next phase of growth on the metaverse. 

Oh, yeah! How’s that going?

The problem with putting all your eggs into the metaverse basket is that the technology that you’re working with has to be better than the technology people are used to. 

And it has to be cost effective. 

Virtual worlds where people could connect with others aren’t new: they’ve been around since the days of Runescape, World of Warcraft, and Playstation Home, and while you can make the argument that the metaverse is different from a virtual world lobby, the early analysis of Facebook’s launched virtual world are not great, considering that it’s not new tech, only tech that should be – realistically – better than a free-to-play MMO. 

So, poorly. Facebook’s metaverse push is going poorly. 

Its entire VR/AR/XR reality wing is losing money. Last year, it was $10.2 billion. Facebook’s VR headset, the Quest, has only sold around 10 million units – barely a fraction of what early VR headsets sold with less-capable tech. Zuckerberg isn’t shy about letting people know that the company is going towards more investment for VR and AR, but there’s the issue: who’s going to pay for it?

Facebook, the social media which has paid for it so far, is struggling. 

If it breaks, so does Meta. 

So… will it?

This is hard to answer, but the likelihood – given the way Facebook operates, its stringent focus on protecting itself – the chances are that things will have to change in order for Facebook to maintain itself. 

Turning a profit is another story. 

People have long memories. And Facebook hasn’t had one scandal, or two, or three: it’s had three scandals focused on how badly it mistreats and how little it cares about anything besides itself. It’s pushing for a technology that will be – at its core – out of the price range of a wide number of its users. It’s not innovating anything that users want. 

It still hasn’t addressed its algorithm problems, the AI failure, or where the data from Cambridge Analytica went. 

We talk a lot about how brands have to change to survive; how they have to adapt to consumers, not the other way around. How there’s likely, in your field and in ours, at least ten other companies offering the same product with better benefits or a cheaper price. 

This goes for big corporations as well as smaller ones. 

But in Facebook’s case, it’s had four years to address these reports. It’s had longer than that to adapt itself to a world that was always going to be this way: transparent, bare to criticism, and very competitive. 

Facebook is no longer unique. Facebook refuses to innovate. Facebook doesn’t want to put its consumers first. 

And if it doesn’t start to make changes, Facebook will struggle more. 

What do you think can save Facebook?

A time machine. 

But failing that, there’s not going to be a Facebook that thrives with Mark Zuckerberg still on its board. 

As we’ve seen with Twitter, companies have a tendency to outgrow their founders. To succeed, those founders have to step back. 

We don’t think Zuckerberg will resign – not on paper. As a PR stunt, or the result of forced governmental intervention, maybe, but not out of his own volition. 

And that’s the reality Facebook has to grapple with. 

But what does this mean for businesses?

Facebook seceding its market share means everything for businesses, especially if you advertise on Facebook or Instagram – which, if you advertise online, you kind of have to. 

To clarify: neither Facebook nor Instagram is on the brink of complete catastrophic failure. They’re still powerful, profitable businesses. And you can still use them to drive great ROI if you know what you’re doing. 

But the ground they’re standing on is getting thinner, and if it ruptures, the problems for businesses will all boil down to communications. 

How can you talk to a global audience without a platform to talk to them on?

And how can you make a profit from that?

Facebook’s business struggles impact every enterprise that uses Facebook to advertise, that puts pictures on Instagram, that sends out targeted messages with Whatsapp. This has been the status quo for 18 years. Advertising standards have been built on this pattern. 

If it falls, businesses will have to find a different way of communicating. 

The good thing is that there’s no end of ways to talk online – but you need to start figuring that out from now. Don’t wait until Facebook and Instagram become more obtuse to use, become saddled with even more add-ons, with even greater problems. 

Twitter, Tiktok, Snapchat, Youtube: there’s different social medias out there that can be just as effective. 

You just need to pick a platform and start talking.

Or, if you really want to do the right thing, be on trend and focus on first-party data. Free yourself from the shackles of other platforms and build your own audience.

So – I’m okay for now?

For now. 

But all businesses have to start looking forward ten years into the future. This doesn’t even have anything to do with Facebook: it has to do with the way the world works now. 

As we’ve seen, things can change so rapidly, so blink-of-an-eye fast, that you can spend a year grappling to hold on. 

Start thinking about the worst case scenario now. Find your different social media of choice. Expand outwards. 

It makes for better storytelling, and it makes for a future-proof communication strategy. 

Facebook won’t fail this year or the next. 

But do you really want to take that risk?

The post What Facebook Losing Users Means for You appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Here’s why. 

NetDoktor isn’t available in any language other than German. There’s a strong possibility that before today you haven’t heard of it – even if you are from Germany. It focuses on medical news and diagnoses, a little bit like a German WebMD. 

Before today it had no obvious connection with Silicon Valley. 

Now, because it uses Google Analytics, it’s become embroiled in a discussion about what big Silicon Valley companies get to do with the data they collect from European websites. 

Let’s start at the beginning. 

What’s Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the many ways Google collects data about you. 

Whenever you visit a website, a little piece of code embedded on the website transmits data about who you are and what you’re using to see that website to Google.

In the time it takes to load up a webpage, Google knows where you’re from, the language you speak, and all the pages on the website you’ve seen so far. This data gets logged underneath an identifying code, and Google can then use that information to hone its algorithm and figure out how to rank that page. 

Site owners also have access to Google Analytics, and to the data it collects. From there, they can figure out how to build a better website that works for the majority of their visitors. 

Ostensibly, Google Analytics benefits you: the business owner, the website user. In theory, every piece of data that goes through Google is only available to the person who owns that business. 

However, as Google Analytics can be integrated with Google Ads, it also benefits Google. The data that is generated from Google Analytics can then be fed back into Google Ads, which improves Google’s capacity to create personalised ads for your users, which in turn gives Google a lot of information about your users. 

Okay, and why is this a problem?

To get into that, we need to talk about everyone’s favourite European data privacy act: GDPR. 

The General Data Protection Act is only applicable to countries in Europe, and it’s trying to protect you. 

There’s been an unprecedented hike in user data ever since social media networks really took off. If you want, you can go even further back: there’s been a hike in user data ever since the technology to record data in bulk crawled its way out of Bill Gates’ mythical garage. 

What GDPR does is make sure all your identifying data – your name, your address, your location, your email – is protected. It makes sure you have access to this data. It makes sure that you can delete your entire self off the internet if you want to. 

It makes sure that if there’s something wrong, and your data is now broadcast across the internet, you know about it. 

Think about the last time you’ve visited a web-page. You know that pop-up that asks you if you’re okay with data collection?

That’s been imposed by GDPR. 

And not complying with GDPR can mean getting fined upwards of 20 million EURO.

(This is why some websites, such as Washington Post, are also difficult to access from Europe now). 

Yes, we know about GDPR. What does this have to do with Silicon Valley or NetDoktor or Google?

In December, the Austrian data regulator ruled that the way NetDoktor uses Google Analytics is in breach of GDPR and ruled that the use of Google Analytics is now illegal in Austria. 

What?! Why? If people consent to the website collecting their data, it isn’t in violation, right?

People might have consented. 

But it isn’t the consent that’s the problem; it’s the fact that all data that Google Analytics collects and stores is sent to the United States for hosting and storage. 

And US data laws might be protective over their own data for their own citizens, but their laws for people outside the United States aren’t as stringent as GDPR and don’t protect foreign citizen’s data as well as their own.

Data centres in the United States can still, theoretically, be accessed by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. By law, they can do this: it’s data that’s now on American soil, which puts it in their jurisdiction and there’s a whole court law about how the government can access these communications basically at any point in time. 

To paraphrase Brooklyn Nine Nine, Datenschutzbehörde’s opinion of that is ‘cool story, still a felony.’

It’s just one website though, right? Fine that one website and move on with it. 

It’s not. 

It’s every website that uses Google Analytics.

That means your WordPress blog. It means your favourite coffee shop’s website. 

It means this website, too. 

Every website that currently uses Google Analytics can potentially be in violation of GDPR, which means £20M fines for all or 4% of annual turnover, whichever is higher.

Repeatedly, and continually, violating GDPR puts you at the mercy of each individual member state’s data protection act, who don’t stop at penalties: they’ll order the immediate cessation of data collection, suspend trading activities until the GDPR issues are fixed, and you’ve destroyed all the collected data. If further violations occur, criminal sanctions can be brought against the company.  

Why is this something people have noticed now?

It’s actually something that people have been arguing against basically one day after GDPR was implemented. 

Previously, the US could transfer and host European data without any issues under an agreement called Privacy Shield. In 2020, two years after GDPR was turned into European law, Privacy Shield was ruled illegal and the Court of Justice of the European Union stated that any business still using Privacy Shield would be fined. 

What’s Privacy Shield?

Privacy Shield was created to allow U.S. businesses to share personal information between borders – even though the United States doesn’t protect personal information to the same equivalence as GDPR does, and therefore shouldn’t have been allowed. 

It was a replacement for Safe Harbour, a framework that Facebook used to transfer data between its company in Europe and the company in the United States, which was found to be in violation of the CJEU’s data protection guidelines. 

This is important because…?

Privacy Shield is illegal because people complained. 

Actually: let’s rephrase. 

One person complained. 

Maximilien Schrems lodged a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Authority that transferring his data from Facebook Inc, Ireland to Facebook Inc, US was a violation of GDPR and his data was not being protected. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner rejected the complaint, but it made its way to the Court of Justice of the European Union. 

The Court ultimately ruled that Privacy Shield was no longer legal – and that businesses had to find a different way of transferring their data. 

So far, they haven’t. Negotiations for data transfer are still ongoing. 

What does this have to do with me?

If you’re a citizen of an EU country, you have a right to protect your own data. 

As a European citizen, your data can and will be accessed by United States intelligence agencies. They can also collect that data. They can use that data. 

The European Protection authorities don’t want that to happen. Transfer between the United States and Europe currently doesn’t have enough safety measures in place to avoid European data falling into the hands of United States intelligence agencies. 

Or, in other words, using Google Analytics violates GDPR, and you – as a website owner, not as a user – may be entitled to a fine. 

Seriously?

This is one decision for one case. 

There are currently over 100 other cases where data transfer to the United States is being investigated. They’ve been filed based on similar complaints, so it stands to reason that the outcomes will be the same – but the results might vary. 

Some European data regulators, like Austria, can rule that Google Analytics and other similar frameworks are illegal – which means websites can no longer use those measures or face having to pay a fine. Other data regulators might just want stricter measurements in place, but that it won’t lead to a fine. 

The greater issue is what this means for websites financially. If you are in contempt of a GDPR fine because of your cloud network, then are you liable for it? 

Or is the United States?

What does this mean for businesses?

Businesses don’t need to worry yet. 

But they should start looking at different cloud-based services if they’re based in Europe. 

There is a chance that, like Privacy Shield and Safe Harbour, Google Analytics will have to go the way of the dodo. It’s better to have a back-up plan if the Court of Justice in the European Union decides data transfer – which will impact trade, small businesses, and basically everything in between – to the United States violates GDPR, and is therefore illegal.

There’s an upside to selecting an EU – and therefore GDPR-compliant – service: it removes the extensive cost of maintaining GDPR. 

Why is this important now? Data leaks have been a thing since the early internet. 

The early internet didn’t have the scale and quantity of data that there is available today. 

We’re talking about it now because people have started to understand what that means, and to be concerned about where all this data is going. We’ve spoken a little bit about it in our Marketing Trends 2022 blog, but here’s the summary: consumers don’t like it when big corporations have so much data on them. 

Unhappy consumers complain. 

Every consumer complaint to a European data protection agency is now followed by court action – no matter how long it takes. 

What does Google think about all this?

Google wants a new data protection agreement, and threw its support behind the ongoing transatlantic data discussion. It did reiterate that Google had never received a request for the kind of data that the Austrian protection agency spoke about – but that’s largely irrelevant. On paper, in European courts, Google and other cloud-based providers that transfer data to the United States are still in violation of GDPR. 

Can it just not go away?

If the United States and Europe can reach an agreement over how to protect European citizens’ data once it’s in the United States – which means, to a certain extent, removing the Congressional and governmental access to that data – then there’s no need for any business to worry. 

But don’t hold your breath on that. Everyone knows how the U.S. considers data. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Can businesses still use Google Analytics in the EU?

Yes, definitely. Only one court case in Austria has ruled Google Analytics illegal; the rest of Europe hasn’t weighed in yet. 

Is Google Analytics illegal in the EU?

No, Google Analytics is only illegal in Austria as of the time this article is published. 

That said, with an EU-US data transfer protocol still under negotiations, and more claims filed against Google Analytics throughout Europe, there’s no telling if Google Analytics will remain legal in Europe with their current practices in place.

What we anticipate will happen is that Google will create a server network in Europe to mitigate more GDPR fallout, which will semi-solve the problem.

Can anyone access Google Analytics?

Absolutely! Google Analytics is free to all users who have a Google account and want to see where their traffic is coming from. However, once you hit a certain traffic threshold, or if you want more advanced features, you have to pay a subscription fee that varies depending on the features you want.

What information does Google Analytics access?

Website activity: how long do people stay on your website, what do they do while they’re there, their general location. There’s a version available for mobile browsers as well, but it’s not on the same scale as Google Analytics for web and also doesn’t allow for users to choose to opt out of sending data to Google, which web allows for.

The post Here’s how Austria’s anti-Google Analytics ruling will affect your business appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.