The Indicator from Planet Money - Overly Friendly Emails and other marketing pet peeves

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Brands trying to be your best bud. Generational labels. Gendered double standards. Today on the show: three advertising experts bring their three pet peeves in advertisements.Related episodes: How to make an ad memorable (Apple / Spotify) J. ScrewedThe Gender Gap Series: The Problem With The Pink TaxFor sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This podcast discusses Google and Meadow, which are financial supporters of NPR. NPR. So the other day, Adrian, I bought some extremely ordinary pants. There were plain Navy chinos from J.Crew. As opposed to unusual pants? They were not going to win any awards for novelty. Okay, so you were in the market for some classic, you know, preppy American clothes at reasonable prices. Yeah, J.Crew's slogan is Heritage Made Modern.

And so it surprised me that when my order arrived, I got this email. Subject line, best news ever, your order has arrived. Pst, check your mailbox, doorstep, wherever. And there were three exclamation marks here. We hope you really, really love it. Wow, that's like an uncomfortably personal tone to take from like a marketing email. It would make sense if it was like selling ice cream or something. Yeah.

But it was just kind of incongruous to what I thought the brand was about. This is something that I've been calling your cool friend, TM. So brand strategist Joe Burns thinks J.Crew is part of a wider plague. It's a tone of voice, a type of personality that more and more brands are adopting. They're trying to make it feel that, you know, they're just relatable. They're your friend. But slightly cooler. The coolest one of your friends is what they want to be.

Your cool friend, TM. Well, this is the indicator for Planet Money. We're your cool friends. I'm Adrian Ma. And I'm Darien Woods. Also your friend, questionable though, whether I'm cool. The pervasiveness of your cool friend, TM, is starting to grind Joe Burns' gears. And maybe yours too.

That's why today on the show, we are looking at three pet peeves in advertising. Our guests will vent and come up with some new ideas after the break. So advertising rant number one, every brand speaking like it's your cool best friend. Joe Burns is the strategy lead at the ad agency Quality Meets Creative. You go back 10 years, you'd have brands like Old Spice being this kind of crazy dude on a horse. Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back at your man. Now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me. Well, you'd have one of my favorite brands of The Economists. You know, they had this really austere tone of voice with, you know, it kind of sounded like an NBA.

grad who's read a dozen books before breakfast. Good evening. Good evening. It's Henry Kissinger. Ready for a good chat. You know, brands used to have a tone of voice that was designed to be distinctive and to cut through and to be really noticeable to consumers. Yeah. And then came social media and the rise of your cool best friend, TM.

All of this, I think, started off with the likes of Wendy's. So Wendy's on Twitter were one of the first brands to really employ this tone. Around 2017, Wendy's ditched its polite corporate voice on Twitter and kind of went off the rails. It roasted customers and started talking trash to McDonald's in the comments. Yeah, so like a customer would tweet, is it shameful to be eating Wendy's food while sitting in a McDonald's parking lot? And Wendy's would tweet back, you're probably raising the property value, TBH. Is this cool or is this just kind of like snarky? It's snarky and cool.

Now, Joe, he says he isn't criticizing the pioneers of this. this voice. But what I do feel like is that this tone of voice has become so pervasive. It's kind of become the new generic and it's lost its cool edge because every brand starts to speak like that. Joe thinks this kind of witty tone became popular with brands because it boosts its ability to get shares and likes and reposts on social media. What does immediately very well, it tends to be that relatable tone of voice. The problem there is, you're already talking to an audience who's engaged with your brand. But there isn't necessarily the data that backs up that that tone of voice is going to also work for new customers too. Well, thank you, Joe Burns. And next we have our second

marketing gripe. This one is from a legend inside the advertising industry, Sir John Hagerty. My market, well, I have a number of marketing gripes, actually. He co-founded the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. They've worked on everyone from Levi's to Nike to IKEA. And among his many marketing gripes, generational labels. This whole Gen X or a Gen Y or a millennial, you know, is just marketing nonsense. Because it excludes, it doesn't include. And I think once you exclude, you're failing ultimately your shareholders. In fact, John doesn't think there is such a thing as a Gen Z or a baby boomer.

He says this is just a marketing. invention. So he does not believe that we should think of Gen Z people as digital natives who can't focus or millennials as burnt out and unable to buy a house. We're talking about billions of people after all. So, you know, these are just stereotypes, he says, not market research. I've seen you've written that generational labels are just horoscopes for marketers. They are. They are. They're just an excuse. They're lazy. They aren't about thinking about How do I create a product that people admire and has value in it? And now for our final marketing frustration.

Our guest, Katie Keating, is creative director at an ad agency called Fancy. And for her, this is more than a bug bear. She feels really strongly about the advertising gatekeepers at digital platforms like meta, Google and TikTok. She says they won't allow brands to talk about women's bodies in a straightforward way. This kind of algospeak has started to show up lately where brands will have to, instead of saying sex, they have to spell it S-E-G-G-S or S-G-S or instead of saying vagina, they say down there. And all of these things that will ultimately just tell women and culture at large that these things really should be censored and should be kept in the dark. and are kind of shameful and shouldn't be talked about,

but they really are normal aspects of everyday life for women. And what really irks, Katie, is that she thinks there are double standards for men. I mean, if you think about all the, like, erectile dysfunction ads that are, you know, everywhere all the time all at once, just being, like, super direct. And women just can't, we just can't do that for ads. We asked meta, Google, and TikTok for comment. They all said they allow for ads for a wide variety of women's health products,

but they also had policies to avoid sexualized content, and none of them want pornography to be advertised. I think that that's actually very valid, and we don't really want to have that. I think that there has to be a way than to have human beings review the work and make sure that it's not. offensive in that way, that it's not a piece of dangerous content. I think the problem becomes when we are told that women's bodies and women's health is dangerous.

And I think that end of itself is actually what's dangerous. This year, six women health-related companies in the UK and Europe called for an investigation by the European Commission into the digital platforms for this, And to some extent, this issue is about tech companies taking an easy path, following what all other digital platforms do. It's really kind of a hurting behavior that is a theme across all of the three marketing pet peeves we've heard today. Whether it's shadow banning women's sexual health products or adopting a your cool friend brand voice or using generational labels. Sir John Hegarty is an evangelist for blazing a different path. Look at a forest. Are all the trees the same? Or all the plants the same? Nature understands. It wants variety. It makes you look again. It makes you see. And it has a functional value. It's in the same way a brand is. So what great

brands try and do is say, no, this is different from everybody else. So maybe your deweevish friend might be the next thing? What do you think, Adrian? You've hit on a pioneering, marketing concept. I can certainly play to type there. Darien Woods, your dwebish friend, TM. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Patrick Murray and Neil Rauch, who was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez. Kate Canaan edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.