December 2021 - SUNDAY

This much I know: Alex Breeden

Cows are really dangerous. That’s what my mum and dad told me every time we saw one. If we were on a country walk and there were cows in a field, we would all panic because we thought we were going to get attacked and the cows would try and eat us. I’m still wary of them now.

I’ve been at Sunday for almost a year, and time has flown by. My focus is the visual side of the digital content we produce, creating user journeys and designing/directing a huge range of digital and video content. It’s exciting to take brilliant narratives and digital journeys across channels.

Turns out I can’t live without coffee. I gave up coffee last week and then, this week, I’m straight back on it. And the best coffee? You need to head to Paris, to the Rose Bakery.

I’ve recently been lecturing about design on the Creative Advertising and Marketing degree courses at London South Bank University and University of the Creative Arts, teaching students about brand development, social media, digital marketing and digital journeys. I learned a lot doing that – students are full of great ideas.

A weird food combo I like is apple and peanut butter. Cut the apple and use the peanut butter as a dip. Basically, anything with peanut butter is good.

Three words to describe Sunday: busy; opportunity; progressive. We’re busy, there’s a lot of opportunity here on an interesting range of clients and projects, and there’s such a progressive mindset that’s rare to find.

I worked on the launch of The Guardian Weekly magazine. It was my second job out of university, but I was given such free rein on the design. I really enjoyed it and am proud that the title is still going strong.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie I never get tired of watching.

I loved art direction and set design, and I got a scholarship at a small set and costume design school in Drury Lane. The course was taught by a group of real theatre aficionados – creative directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mike Leigh. It was an amazing experience to help bring the characters worlds to life.

We recently shot a diversity and inclusivity campaign for our client ICAEW and as a team we managed to create something that has real integrity.

The exciting thing about digital design is that it’s almost infinite in scope. The potential for creativity is huge but keeping it human-centred is key. Currently, I’m fascinated by TikTok and how short-format video is changing how we consume content.

I went to see The Women in Black at the theatre a few years ago. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. The closest thing to real magic is immersive storytelling. Throughout the play they keep the air conditioning cooler in the theatre so the audience are on-edge and jumpy.

My guilty pleasure? There is no such thing! Switching off and doing absolutely nothing is the best.

The cookie crumbles

Have you used the internet at any point in the last 27 years? Yes? Then you will, by default, have used a cookie.

Cookies are small text files that are passed between your computer and the websites you visit. They were originally created back in 1994 with the goal of helping the internet remember you to give you a smoother online experience.

First-party cookies are associated with individual websites – they are the ones that recognise you when you’ve signed in. They help website owners provide personalised user experiences, give session-based functionality such as shopping carts, and measure how visitors access their sites. They’re not going anywhere.

It’s third-party cookies that are in danger – the one that advertisers use to target you as a named individual – to triple check you don’t want to book that campsite in Wales. Those cookies follow you around the web reminding you about that campsite, even though you’ve moved on and are now dreaming about The Bahamas. Third-party cookies’ days are numbered.

Apple (Safari), Microsoft (Edge) and Mozilla (Firefox) have already stamped down on third-party cookies by blocking them. But when/if – Google (Chrome) does the same it will be the most impactful, thanks to its 65% market share. It is also the most contentious: Google makes a lot of money from advertising and, until the third-party cookie issues are addressed, its users are particularly vulnerable.

“Chrome is isolated as the only major browser that has not yet acted to stop cross-site tracking,” writes Zak Doffman, a cybersecurity expert, in Forbes. “The only browser… that collects vast amounts of data, all of which link back to user identities.”

It’s uncertain what’s coming next. But a hint is Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, launched in 2020, which, it declared, was designed “to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web”. In short, this will allow marketers to continue advertising to customers but using anonymised, aggregated data which won’t compromise users’ privacy.

And as part of this, you’re likely to be hearing a lot more about FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). This is where Google looks at your browsing history and sorts you into a variety of interest groups rather than individuals – which can then be targeted with ads.

But not everyone is happy. Advertisers question the effectiveness of FLoC targeting, while regulators question that these new approaches really promote privacy. And there’s also the concern that these developments only serve to further entrench Google’s grasp over ad tech in general.

All of this – plus the vast amounts of advertising money at stake – may explain why Google has opted to postpone phasing out support for third-party cookies until late 2023 – with some industry commentators questioning whether it will even happen then.

“It’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right…” says Vinay Goel, Privacy Engineering Director at Chrome. “We need to move at a responsible pace.”

So, the cookies are crumbling, but will be with us for a little longer.

A new home for Savills Country House Department

Could you recognise a Charles Voysey-designed Arts and Crafts country house? Or a garden influenced by Victorian gardener Gertrude Jekyll? Savills Country House Department could. They’re specialists in their field and passionate about property – and they wanted a way to share this expertise with a wider audience.

Sunday’s developers, digital designers and content teams got to work, designing from the ground up a new site that was distinctly Savills, but also distinctly Country House Specialists.

Our aim was to make the site as easy as possible to navigate while showcasing people-first content. We created a clear structure that brought hierarchy to the site and gave a sophisticated and uniform identity.

The launch was very much phase one. The content will be refreshed quarterly and there is already a phase two design evolution in place for when more properties and features are added.

While this digital solution would of course feature country houses, we wanted to add personality and warmth across three content pillars:

Property: where agents showcase their knowledge with evocative descriptions of extraordinary country houses. The range of properties also demonstrates the prime country property credentials of the brand
People: a lifestyle focus that reveals the agents’ interests, personalities and expertise
Insight: demonstrates the wide reach Savills has across the market, weaving in research and data on the country house market and partner content such as the team’s work with organisations like the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society

Our longstanding relationships with many Savills agents enabled us to dig deeper to get to the root of a story and bring out some of the lighter, personal touches about their work – one agent was asked by a potential buyer for their opinion on replacing a period staircase with a slide.

Be more Coco

Coco Chanel’s influence runs deep. She was quite clear that before you leave the house, you should look in the mirror and take one thing off.

It’s not a bad lens through which to view a content-saturated world – and ask, is it all necessary?

Here are some 2021 statistics about content: 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (yes, that’s every minute!); around 7 million blog posts are published every day; 500 million tweets are sent every 24 hours. Residents of major UK cities are exposed to between 2,000 and 5,000 commercial messages a day. Ask yourself how many adverts you can spontaneously recall since breakfast. Any? No more than a handful, I bet.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Add to this the channels everyone has to be on top of – from websites and podcasts through to magazines, email, voice, film, Instagram, TikTok and so many more…

Brands are jostling with influencers, search and mainstream media to be heard. Quantity is often celebrated over quality, and whoever shouts loudest gets heard.

It might sound counter-intuitive for a content agency to cry ‘enough is enough’. But it really is.

It’s time for brands to reclaim content and go back to some simple principles to help them stand out and engage with their audiences.

Build a plan. Content shouldn’t come about by accident. A plan should be built on content pillars that set out core themes and ensure everything hangs together under one framework.
Think like an editor – audience first, not brand first.
Be brave. Good content should excite, inform and engage. If it doesn’t do any of those things – ditch it.
More is not better. No one can be bothered to wade through a labyrinthine website or hundreds of tweets to find a nugget of genius. Value not volume.
Create once and adapt many times across many channels. You can only do this if you have a plan (see point 1). A video can also be used as audio over photographs or an animation, and the interview can be written up.
Be agile and flexible. Respond to events and resurface existing content.
Be where your audience are. If video resonates more than words, then use it. If they are using TikTok, be there.
Think socially. Make content shareable from the outset.
Lean on external contributors to bring new, multi-dimensional perspectives to your brand story.
And finally, if you don’t know whether to publish something, take a step back and ask whether it’s really going to add value to your brand, or to anyone’s life. If it doesn’t, you don’t need to publish it.

Above all, be more Coco.

Month: December 2021