Bountiful Cow

Happy Thursday! So excited (but not surprised) our brilliant clients Practice Plus Group have been shortlisted for a Marketing Week award. We'll be keeping our fingers crossed until November 🤞

Hello! Welcome back to Relative Advantage Heroes, our series where we talk all about Relative Advantage, Bountiful Cow’s very own method of growing a brand by finding the clear spaces in audiences, media and culture that competitors have missed. We’re plugging in and tuning out this week because even if you’re not a gamer, odds are you’ll have played some form of a Nintendo game. Nintendo is an enormous world-wide brand, so you’d be forgiven in not necessarily thinking about it as a Relative Advantage hero – but in the world of gaming, it most definitely is. Founded in 1889 originally as a playing cards company, Nintendo has made sure it’s lasted this long by staying true to itself and its customers. Whilst its competitors are trying to outdo each-other with the newest or most powerful technology, Nintendo prefers to simply do its own thing. Take their latest console, the Switch, for example. With less storage, a weaker processor and a far lower resolution than the PS5 and Xbox Series X, you’d be forgiven in thinking the latter two would be the obvious purchase options. In reality, 70% of Switch owners also have an Xbox or Playstation, but there’s only a 30% overlap between Xbox and Playstation owners. So how has Nintendo differentiated itself from the rest of its competitors so well? The simple answer is they focus on and invest heavily into their games rather than the console. Nintendo has a huge number of exclusive game series, with a focus on a broad audience and accessibility, which has worked enormously in their favour. Nintendo’s sequel to their beloved game Animal Crossing, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, went on sale in March 2020 (perfect timing for lockdown) and sold over 44 million copies worldwide, making it the 14th best selling game in the world. Unlike other well-known games such as Call of Duty or Fallout, Animal Crossing focuses on providing a wholesome and stress-free experience meant for casual gamers – strictly no guns or zombies allowed. Despite that, Nintendo also cater to typical gamers, such as The Legend of Zelda and their Switch console is programmed for other games series as well – meaning there’s something for everyone with Nintendo. And the company have been doing this way longer than the Switch as well. Remember the Wii? Originally anticipated to be a huge failure (with Sony having just released the PS3 and Microsoft the Xbox 360), it went on to sell 101M units in 2006 by appealing to the masses and breaking away from the conservative ‘typical’ gaming audience, with a cheaper price point and simple controllers meaning that everyone – and we mean everyone – in the family enjoyed it. So whilst Sony and Microsoft focus on building the biggest, strongest consoles, Nintendo’s ideology prefers to differ from them and focus more on their games, and therefore, their audiences. You could say they focus on the most important bit of gaming itself – delivering the most fun they know how to as many people as they can. 

Consumers are still very much having to tighten their purse-strings, which has a knock-on effect for brands across all industries - check out our CEO Adam Foley's thoughts on the ongoing cost-of-living crisis with The Media Leader FR below

It’s that time of the week again! Welcome back to Relative Advantage Heroes, our series where we talk all about Relative Advantage, Bountiful Cow’s very own method of growing a brand by finding the clear spaces in audiences, media and culture that competitors have missed. This week, buckle your seatbelts as we’re talking about a man who needs no introduction, for better or for worse – Mr Kanye West. Outside of his music career, Ye created a multi-billion dollar business with Yeezy, his collaboration with Adidas that ended in 2022. Since then, he’s been going it on his own. So, what exactly has the Yeezy brand been up to since splitting up with Adidas? Well, he’s been advertising in the Superbowl, for one. We all know that an advertising slot in the Superbowl is one of the most expensive events to advertise in, costing a whopping $7m for a 30-second slot, meaning that only the biggest earning brands can afford to advertise in it without even taking into consideration the price of producing the advert itself. Yet despite the super costly advertising slots, Mr West managed to purchase a 30-second one to promote his new Yeezy website – but his advert isn’t necessarily one you’d expect to see during the famous sporting event. At all. It’s likely that you didn’t watch the Superbowl event live due to the time difference, so bear with me as I try to set the scene. The event itself cuts to one of it’s (many) advertising breaks. You sit back and watch a star-studded after star-studded advert: Uber Eats featuring the Beckhams, BMW featuring Christopher Walken, a Squarespace advert directed by Martin Scorsese. Next up is Kanye West, but with a catch. His 30-second advert is him just sat in the back of his car filming himself on his phone. ‘We couldn’t afford the production costs on top of the advert space, you guys’ is what he says in the advert itself. So, why does this make Ye a relative advantage hero? The Superbowl is the absolute prime-real estate of advertising, drawing in 124 million viewers. Ye avoided production costs and stood out from the rest by sitting in the back of his car and filming himself. ‘I got some shoes and mmm…that’s it’ is how he signs off. Amongst the ultra-slick, ultra-produced and ultra-expensive adverts that premiered before him, Ye’s blurry, iPhone-filmed one definitely stood out. From the second the advert aired, it got heavy social media engagement across X and Tik Tok. Various media outlets reported on the Yeezy advert’s effectiveness, with Forbes detailing how ‘creativity and authenticity can outweigh lavish production values’. The thing is, it worked. Yeezy’s exposure in the Superbowl generated an alleged 284,537 orders made on the site and sales of $19.3m in less than 24 hours – creating a cool profit of $12.3m. This really goes to show that you don’t need a super swanky, costly advert to stand out and deliver Relative Advantage – all you need to do is make sure you stand out from your competitors.

‘No bull’ is one of our agency values and one that we share with our brilliant clients at The Collective UK | B Corp™ What a strange coincidence that this ad ended up on the same page as Jacob Rees Mogg 🤔 Nice work team Tor Hunt-Taylor Amy Bellchambers Luke Boulton Colin Verrall

It’s the best time of the week again! Welcome back to Relative Advantage Heroes, our series where we talk all about Relative Advantage, Bountiful Cow’s very own method of growing a brand by finding the clear spaces in audiences, media and culture that competitors have missed. Guys, its June 2024 – if you don’t know Julia Fox is by now, there’s no hope for you. One person who most definitely knows is singer Charli XCX, whose latest album ‘brat’ was released last Friday. The albums lead single, 360, has exploded online with its all-star it-girl music video, including Ms Fox herself – but it’s not just the single itself that’s gone viral. Let’s take a look through Charli’s campaign for this new album, and why she’s a RA Hero for taking an unconventional approach to marketing it. FYI, Charli’s has always made a name for herself with her unconventional approach to marketing and personal brand. In 2020, instead of anything usual a singer would choose to sell as merchandise, she sold $35 wigs at her US shows and her latest approach to marketing her new album has been just as different. Back in January, the album’s campaign was kicked off by Charli ‘leaking’ her teams marketing ideas, which included her having a breakdown on the tube or getting caught shoplifting on CCTV (so Winona-a-aaa). The leak arguably caused more buzz than following through with the ideas, with the notes screenshot earning 700k views on Twitter/X alone.   Now that brat has officially launched, examples of Charli disrupting conventional album marketing and doing things differently are quite literally endless. Eschewing traditional advertising, Charli promoted her upcoming tour with Troye Sivan on the gay dating app, Grindr and set up a finsta for her fans (a fake Instagram for the oldies). By mirroring the way her fans communicate, Charli is acting like an up-and-coming artist, despite this being her sixth album.   The simple album artwork cover for brat has also been a huge marketing win for Charli. The sickly chartreuse green and simple arial font has showed up everywhere. There was the ‘bratwall’ in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a huge brick wall painted brat green, the bratmobile’s driving round central London – even the London eye was lit up green on Friday to promote the album. There are multiple videos online of items that are nothing to do with Charli but also painted ‘brat green’, like trains on their commute to work and branding of other companies. See what we mean about endless? Charli’s key relative advantage edge is smashing up marketing conventions, having faith that her fans will only love her all the more for doing so (they do). This is set to be her most commercially successful album, despite her focus on exclusivity amongst her fans who all tend to have individuality complexes (it’s true). Charli’s marketing has felt more like a movement than a campaign, a movement that isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Now – who’s ready for brat girl summer?

So excited our lovely client The Collective UK | B Corp™ has been been nominated for an award with The Drum - we'll be keeping all our fingers and toes crossed until the 13th June😉

🍓 🍓 🍓

We’re back at it again with another Relative Advantage Heroes post – welcome back, and if you’re new here, this is our series where we talk all about Relative Advantage, our method of growing a brand by finding the clear spaces in audiences, media and culture that competitors have missed. Funnily enough, we came up with these particular heroes before the Genny Lec was announced, but it’s nice to know we’ve officially got our finger on the pulse. Led By Donkeys – you might not know who they are, but you will most definitely have seen some of their advertising. Set up by four former Greenpeace employees in 2018 disgruntled about Brexit, the political activist group Led By Donkeys have come a long way since their original grassroots origins. Their first billboards consisted of politician’s old tweets on Brexit, that they described as showcasing the most ‘lies, lunacy and hypocrisy’ in their opinion. The billboards were plastered illegally and were removed two days after the group had put them up. By that point, however, the posters had already gone viral – and thus Led By Donkeys stellar rise to the global kind of awareness they achieve nowadays in 2024 was born. But why are they Relative Advantage heroes? It’s all down to the way they use the medium of experiential OOH advertising. They’re not the only political group to advertise on billboards or to use outdoor guerilla tactics, but the way Led By Donkeys have utilised experiential OOH has made sure that it always goes on to gain traction on social media and news-sites. Their campaigns instantly get people talking, sharing and discussing, no matter what political party they align with. With the constant barrage of media and advertising we’re fed in just a single commute to work or a five-minute scroll of our feeds, capturing people’s attention the way Led By Donkeys have done is no easy feat.] Although they’re a UK based group, their experiential tactics have garnered long-lasting and worldwide attention. One of their most famous campaigns was borne back in March 2021, when the group teamed up with the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group to creative the National Memorial Covid Wall, stretching 500 feet along the river Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament, and consisting of 240,000 hearts hand-painted by volunteers. Three years later, and the wall is still being added to, with the local planning authority vowing to keep it preserved. Six years since their inception, the majority of Led By Donkeys campaigns have managed to merge creativity and experiential together to go viral across the globe, showcasing the enormous power of social media for activism and awareness. And outside of their experiential tactics too, Led By Donkeys have showed us that billboards aren’t just for advertising space – they can hold those in power to account on their promises, as well as shedding well needed light on important social and political issues across the world too.

Super excited to announce the launch of Haier’s new UK campaign “Connect to Extraordinary”, which will be broadcast across 30 TV channels at 7:45pm this evening, alongside large format and high spec digital billboards in key cities. But it wouldn’t be a Bountiful Cow campaign without Relative Advantage, and we identified cinema as a space that’s completely neglected by the category, connecting to the extraordinary in blockbuster films like Furiosa, Bad Boys: Ride or Die & Twisters. Keep an eye out and tag us when you see the ads out and about. Check out the beautiful TV ad below – and happy Friday!