
The head of luxury at Facebook and Instagram - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/fashion/facebook-instagram-luxury-brands.html
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spectramax
When I was growing up, my father used to say "Why do you want to pay for a
shirt and then have them turn you into a billboard with the logo on the chest
pocket?" It was silly at the time, but I always recall it when I see people
buying luxury goods from Dior, LV, Chanel, etc. Luxury goods to my father was
his collection bespoke suits from his favorite tailor to whom he was a
customer but also a good friend. This wasn't on Savile Row or some haute
fashion boutique in New York, but in a small town where I grew up. There was a
direct... human connection between the consumer and the buyer. There is
something to be said about craftsmanship-based luxury goods and services
without the pretense of big-corp brand names, analytics, extravagant showrooms
and marketing campaigns.

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hnhg
Yeah but a large and valid function of luxury goods is wealth signalling. You
might find this lamentable but it has practical social utility.

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warp_factor
yes, everything is signaling. If you get a brandless tshirt, you are also
signaling that you are too smart to buy the luxury brand.

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selune
Everyone above some margin of income indulges in a consumption of luxury
goods. I don't see how wearing a cheap t-shirt but driving a good car or
playing Playstation sitting on a comfy expensive couch is _smarter_ than
buying a pair of expensive sneakers.

It's just signalling to _your_ crowd.

~~~
function_seven
Form and Function.

If I can find clothing that functions just as well as logo'd versions, but for
less money, then that makes sense.

With cars, gaming consoles, etc., there's a valid reason to want to spend more
money if you're looking for function. PlayStation has games that you can't
find on other consoles, or maybe you just like the controller better.

The car I drive is more expensive than I need, but I didn't spend the money to
signal anything to anyone. I bought it because it has features the alternative
doesn't.

If those expensive sneakers do their job better, then great. But if you're
dropping $500 on a limited edition, just for the design, then it's a different
calculation. (I am NOT saying it's stupid to do this, just differentiating it
from buying features vs. design)

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chrisan
> I bought it because it has features the alternative doesn't.

How do we know that you aren't signaling you want that brand? You are just
some dude in a Ford, who for all we know is signaling you want a Ford over a
Chevy

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function_seven
I guess you just have to trust me. And, trust me, this car if anything signals
that I’m boring as shit. The color is bland and styling is okay. I spent the
money for the power seats and the extra room in the back.

Funny enough, it is a Ford, though I’ve also owned Chevys in the past.

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duado
Yikes! Bad day for the PR flack who pitched this story. She probably didn’t
think the headline would end up “she takes what you’ve told Facebook and sells
it to luxury brands.” Goes to show how once you’ve gotten on the wrong side of
the narrative it’s very hard to come back.

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iliketosleep
Yes this is obviously the case. Feels like the NY times is trying to fit a
square peg in a round hole. The work she describes is nothing surprising and
is quite benign compared to various facebook scandals we've seen. More than
anything, what the article highlights is modus operandi of mainstream media:
rather than reporting news objectively, they package stories into narratives
popular with their target market. Great for creating politcal polarization..

~~~
chillacy
That is the end result but I doubt it's intentional, probably in an effort to
try to get clicks (and therefore ad impressions) they write stories people are
interested in reading, and people are interested in things that fit the
narrative.

But then again there are some fun Hearst quotes about being able to spin
anything he wanted so who knows.

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yboris
There's a marvelous book _The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in
Everyday Life Hardcover_ by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson which argues
convincingly that we are often pushed by motives we don't recognize, and do
things for reasons other than what we proclaim: much of what we do is
motivated by signalling, even if we are not consciously aware of it. Highly
recommend this book!

~~~
mud_dauber
Thanks for the recommendation! I was about to start a search for books on
signaling.

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cm2012
I've worked as a marketer for 10 years, but don't like working on marketing
luxury products. It has entirely different rules and goals then your usual
direct to consumer stuff.

~~~
jmheinkle
Elaborate?

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cm2012
With luxury goods, the brand is the product and the value is from the brand,
so you can't easily iterate with one off sales.

If I'm selling a new type of toothbrush, or a software that helps teachers
grade homework with AI, I can make some ads, see how close they get to the
needed ROI and tweak it. I can test marketing different aspects or selling
points of the product and getting results iteratively.

If I'm selling a new luxury handbag, I will never, ever sell it at a
reasonable ROI from just a set of ads. You have to build the whole eco system
at once (kind of a chicken and egg problem). People have to see influencers
using it, celebrities having them, the right kind of feeling in the ads, the
right news articles, being sold in the right stores, etc. My first marketing
job was at a start-up denim brand trying to become big and I observed and
researched a lot there about how it works.

~~~
shostack
As a marketer who came up on the performance side, I feel your pain.

What would you say the state of analytics is on that side of things? Is
attribution sufficiently advanced to get some read on the impact of various
influences, celeb and PR hits, product placement, etc?

Even as a senior marketer confident in my skills, so much of the luxury space
seems very much like an exercise of needing to put all your eggs in the one
basket of a big launch. None of the steady burn of some more performance-
driven plays with the usual iteration on ads and funnel metrics and such.

~~~
cosmie
Attribution is as sufficiently advanced as needed to get approval to give BBDO
another blank check for another hairbrained scheme that'll fund yet another
award for BBDO. While concurrently being undermined and considered not
reliable or advanced enough if the numbers it provides do not lead to another
blank check for the creative agency.

I come from the performance side, but currently work with a bunch of CPG
clients with products that run the gamut between commodity to luxury.

I specifically work on creating analytics and attribution frameworks, because
these companies are fine with fuzzy hand-wavy "lift studies" for tv
commercials and stupid in store display stunts. But they hold a double
standard and anything digital has to be concretely measured to defend its
budget.

It's actually pretty easy to create robust analytics and attribution in the
space. But it's mainly a process thing, to be able to sprinkle around enough
unique traits or identifiers along the way to measure at an aggregate level
what the impact was. It tends to rarely be done though, due to a lack of that
level of operational discipline for brand marketers and agencies, or due to
the desire to deliberately sabatage the numbers because they don't paint a
particularly flattering picture. So more often than not you end up with a
botched execution on the small details that were required for proper
attribution, then the resulting numbers being full of enough holes to spin the
data however is convenient. Or someone slapping on some poorly integrated
software that spits out a number that's taken as the holy grail, "cuz AI said
so".

... which leads to a terrible cycle of distrust in analytics and attribution
on the brand side, leading to fewer initiatives that prioritize it.

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shostack
Interesting. We share a lot of frustrations and challenges.

What sort of spend levels and data volumes do you typically need to see for
the lift studies you do with TV and CTV? Do you typically isolate to specific
markets for that?

~~~
cosmie
It really just depends. In the case of one retail client, we have carte
blanche access to all of their data, from marketing systems to POS data to app
location data. It makes it incredibly easy to "lazy load" a lift study after
the fact, by looking for anomalies in behavior that are correlated with the
creative. Rather than a standard test and control, we can essentially tailor
the model to a per-store or per-region level and rollup lift from there. It's
less about the spend level and data volume, and more about the data
completeness.

For CPG clients, it's more of a pain. Those usually involve really complex
interagency relationships, with discontinuity in both processes and data
access. And in a lot of cases, they may have access to a retail partners POS
or loyalty data, but can't share it directly with us as a third party agency,
and there's a game of telephone where we have to coach them on what to ask for
and provide to us (in whatever form they're allowed), while being blind to the
data and data/system structures. So a lot gets lost in translation, with the
spend level having to be large enough to compensate for however dysfunction
that process is for that program and client.

That said, I'm lucky enough to be a passive observe to that most of the time.
Another manager under my boss is responsible for those more traditional lift
studies. I have an unusual background in that I've done a lot of process
development work, web analytics, and data engineering/management. So I'm only
brought into those projects when we have more technically sophisticated needs.

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eitland
> Ms. Oluwole’s staff creates profiles — compiled from user information, like
> date of birth, ZIP code, education and work history, favorite music, pages
> followed — to pinpoint ad targets for brands. For several years, Facebook
> and Instagram also incorporated information from third-party brokers like
> Acxiom but such data compilation was banned when the General Data Protection
> Regulation went into effect in the European Union in May.

> ... Ms. Oluwole said: “We no longer get information from external sources.
> We can’t see what kind of car someone bought, because we don’t work with
> that data provider anymore.”

Two observations:

1.) Yep. My comments the other day were right in how far Facebook goes when
they can. (Yes, there is more juicy stuff there.)

2.) While I view cookie banners as a sign that a number of companies really
really don't "get" GDPR it seems it is already slowly changing behaviour
behind the scenes.

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jeffrallen
She seems like a smart, resourceful person. It is too bad she's harming her
personal brand by allowing Facebook to use her like this.

