Out of Scope Issue 25: Too much tuna for Subway?
Out of Scope Issue 25: Too much tuna for Subway?
This week’s non-required thinking on reputation, business, and culture
This week, we explore Oreo packaging, Lil Nas X’s jail sentence, and Olympic anti-sex beds.
📡 ON OUR RADAR
As the world opens back up, brands are adjusting to a market that values loyalty more than anything. But what’s the best marketing and advertising to revenue ratio? Varying examples from Peloton to Casper Sleep prove it shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach.
Taking it back to basics - Merriam Webster has an explainer on the pronunciation of the word “the.”
Apparently, ‘sales’ needs a rebrand, as today’s workforce just isn’t buying it.
As Olympians arrive in Tokyo, one particular part of their trip seems to have struck a chord. Photos of modular cardboard bed frames and plastic mattresses flooded social media, claiming they were “anti-sex”. The beds, which are made by the Japanese company Airweave, are recyclable and made almost entirely out of renewable materials. The plan to build the renewable beds was set in motion long before the pandemic, but as we all know, the first story that gets out has the loudest voice.
Social media platforms are in the midst of a heated battle as they fight for who can attract the best creator talent. After Snapchat and TikTok increased pay to its creators, Facebook announced it’s investing more than $1 billion globally in creators through the end of 2022. “Now they really need to answer the question: Why would a creator come to my platform and what are we offering them?,” says Mae Karwowski, CEO of influencer marketing platform Obviously.
Need nurture campaign tips? Look no further! Lil Nas X posted a new video this week telling fans he had a court hearing over his controversial “Satan Shoes,” and could be heading to jail, but the announcement turned out to be an elaborate promotion of his new single, INDUSTRY BABY. At just 22, the singer is single-handedly running the social media campaign game with his presence on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.
Always trying to hide your snacks and sweets from your kids? In a genius effort to tap into their adult audience, Oreo teamed up with several other brands to disguise their Oreo Thins packaging as Hanes t-shirts or Ford truck manuals, among others. Can we get this for double stuffed packaging too?
We’ve got a rebrand alert! Move over girlboss - it’s time for “that girl” to shine. Being “that girl” means living to maintain a theme, a specific look, based on mainstream notions of wellness. How do we achieve this elite aesthetic? Wake up way too early, work out, eat an instagrammable - er, we mean, healthy - breakfast, and then...uh… just exist in that filter? Admittedly, we think we’re okay without “that”, but live your life “girl”.
In other news that shouldn’t surprise anyone: The TikTok algorithm is watching you. The FYP, or For You Page, is an endless feed of videos from creators that the viewer hasn’t yet followed, helping users find new content. At the end of the day, the amount of time you linger over a piece of content, every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you. Check out the Wall Street Journal’s investigative journey through the algorithm!
🏆 REPUTATION WIN/FAIL OF THE WEEK: Subway Tuna
Dost thou protest too much? Subway released SubwayTunaFacts.com this week, as a way to double down on the validity of its now-infamous “tuna” sandwich.
“SUBWAY TUNA IS REAL TUNA” shouts the site’s headline. “Okay, okay, we get it”, mumble readers as they reel from the absolute insistence of the sandwich chain. The website goes on to explain that AFT (Applied Food Technologies, Inc.) has conducted more than 50 individual tests on 150 pounds of Subway’s tuna, all showing 100% tuna DNA.
While we might smirk at this “shout it from the rooftops” approach, in all honesty, it was the right thing to do. The HL team really tried to pick this one apart, but once we tried to figure out what we would have done in this situation, we couldn’t come up with a better solution.
So, bravo, Subway - way to stick to your messaging. We may not be ordering the tuna sandwich any time soon, but we respect you.
💡ON OUR MINDS:
Jeffrey Bezos first flight to space lands in a Twitter shit storm
ICYMI: Jeff Bezos went to space!
The billionaire, infamous for his usual radio silence, granted press conferences with NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, and it's obvious that even a trip to outer space can’t pop those tone-deaf ears…
Blue Origin might have been able to better shape the message if they had offered up a face for the brand other than Bezos, maybe someone who could have made the truly outstanding scientific achievement more relatable.
This just goes to show that if you don’t have a solid handle on your narrative, someone else will do it for you.
The Olympics win a gold medal in Being Unprepared for Literally Everything
The 20201 Olympics start today and the organization is already stuck in a communications whirlwind.
Becca Meyers, a deaf-blind Paralympic swimmer, has decided to leave the games due to the fact that she wasn’t allowed to bring her aide (who also happens to be her mother) with her to Tokyo. Her mother has acted as her Personal Care Assistant (PCA) at all her international meets since 2017, but due to Covid-19 restrictions, the USOPC refused to allow her mother to serve in that capacity. Meyers also wrote that the USOPC is providing just one PCA to assist the 33 American Paralympic swimmers, including nine who are visually impaired.
The Olympics' COVID Problem Is Growing and on Monday, the Toyota Motor Corp. said that it wouldn’t run Olympic-themed advertisements in Japan during the Tokyo Games, citing concerns around the spread of Covid-19.
Athletes kneeling as a sign of protest has generally been an American activity, but all Olympians this year are allowed to show their signs of protest. After the football (soccer, sorry) teams knelt during the anthem, fans were surprised to see that the official Olympics social media accounts hadn’t posted anything about it. Originally, the Olympic social media team was banned from posting photos of kneeling athletes, but after an online backlash, that rule was changed.
At the end of the day, we really just wonder what the Olympics committee was doing during their extra year of Olympics prep...
We’ll see you here next week! 👋
HL
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