Drinks Advertising Photography: Pimm's Case Study

One of DH&Co’s specialisms is advertising drinks photography, so we were especially delighted when a brief for the much-loved British brand Pimm’s landed at our door.

The advertising brief came through St. Mark’s Studios, and was centered on Pimm’s identity as the drink-of-choice for the Wimbledon Tennis Championship. Apparently Wimbledon spectators drink over 250,000 glasses of Pimm’s during the two-week competition.

We were thrilled to act as the agency’s production arm, and working within a tight deadline and to a strict brief, we shot the imagery and videos over a few days in the studio. The imagery was then featured across Pimm’s social channels and beyond, disseminated during their summer campaign.

This election will be won or lost with one weapon: data

Brexit was the beginning of a new era of campaigning in UK elections, and we're about to see the sequel.

Up until June three years ago, political campaigns in the UK were comparatively simple affairs. Messaging gurus would test campaign slogans with focus groups, canvassers took to the streets, adverts were bought and issues debated by candidates. But the Brexit vote saw a new tool in the campaign manager's arsenal: data science. This wasn't employed by Theresa May's team in the last election to anywhere near the extent seen in June 2017, but there's no doubt it will be in December. And there's one reason why: Dominic Cummings.

Cummings, often portrayed as the villain in the Brexit saga, has been open about the role data science played in the Leave campaign's strategy. His speech at the Ogilvy Nudgestock 2017 Conference is definitely worth watching if you can stomach another 30 minutes of Brexit content. I particularly appreciated his jibe – at an Ogilvy conference – about the 'advertising charlatans' in the room who graduated with gender studies and will soon be out of the job:

"In the long run all the parties are trying to learn from some of the things we did [...] The future will be about experimental psychology, and data science. The reality is that most communications companies are populated by bullshitting charlatans, and most of them should be fired. Silicon Valley will take over this industry in the same way they've taken over other industries. And if you've got a not-very-good degree in English or Gender Studies, you're going to get fired."

That soundbite is 25 minutes into that talk, in case you don't want to watch it all. Aside from his insight into the future of advertising, Cummings outlined what will be the key weapon in future elections. Data.

He had explained that the Leave team's strategy involved taking every scrap of data they could from the campaign – emails, phone calls, social media posts – whatever they could get their hands on, and giving it all to data scientists. In partnership with behavioural psychologists, they then 'crunched the numbers' to analyse what was working and resonating with their target voters. The team then responded by A/B(/C/D etc) testing huge vast quantities of ads on social until they saw results, ruthlessly targeting areas they thought they could swing.

A similar approach was taken in the last US election, and Cambridge Analytica's involvement in psychometrically profiling the electorate with Facebook's data has been well documented.

Given that Cummings is central to Johnson's inner circle, you'd be mad to think his team isn't employing those same tactics in this election. Even now, if you hang about Tory HQ and are quiet enough, I'm sure you can hear the frenetic typing of dozens of data scientists, determining who to target, with which ads, on what platforms. In other words, you are being watched.

Social media is dead. Long live social media.

It's no secret that attitudes towards social media are changing. Where once only academics were concerned by its growth, now everyone from Prince Harry to Kanye West is talking about the potentially detrimental effect it's having on society. Most of the criticism seems to be centred on three well-documented issues – risks around privacy and data, the culture of division it fosters in political debate, and the effect it's having on young people.

The warnings are having an effect, at least on some platforms. Facebook's US user base declined by 15m over the last two years. In 2017, 67% of the total US population over the age of 12 used Facebook. In 2018, 62%, and 2019, 61%.

So where does social media go next, and for our industry, what do these changing attitudes mean for advertising and marketing?

In response to the concerns, some platforms are shifting strategy. Instagram is slowly removing its 'like' feature, country by country, and Twitter recently confirmed it would no longer host political adverts on its platform. But is there a more radical approach? Commentators seem to be suggesting Facebook's strategy going forward will focus a lot more on the growing area of its business - private messaging (notably in messenger and WhatsApp). But given advertising opportunities are sparse across those platforms, I don't imagine Facebook will sacrifice one of its main sources of revenue – the newsfeed – anytime soon.

So as the public's perception of social media is changing, advertisers would do well to have strategies in place for when a tipping point is reached, and social media advertising and influencer marketing no longer reach a receptive and engaged audience.

Image // Prateek Katyal