👀 Anthro Newsletter #020 | 🍾 Closed Communities & The Art of Briefs
Your weekly newsletter on brands, campaigns, culture and insights.
Welcome to Anthro, a weekly community newsletter featuring must read content about the best and most exciting movements by brands, with a heavy focus on culture, actionable insights and brand’s relationship to business success. Whether you’re the founder of a company, at a start-up, in an agency or in-house - this is the place for your dose of industry news. I’m trying to make this one of the most valuable emails you receive each week. If you’ve enjoyed this issue, please like it above 💗 and leave me a comment 💬
Woop it’s December what upppp! You know what that means!?
No. Not Christmas ❌ It’s my birthdayyyyy!!! 🍾 Despite lockdown rules ruining shindig plans. I’m still excited. What have you learnt this year? Any major revelations you’d like to share with me as I wrap up another year around the sun, and we all wrap up the maddest year in modern history? Life tips, work tips? Email me your sage guidance 😘 Let’s all continue living to the max.
And soon we’ll make Anthro all Christmassy 😉 Promise xoxo
Here’s what you’ll learn today:
The rise of closed communities & getting into music marketing
How to write a creative brief
Lessons about the creator economy
For those of you new to Anthro, and those who missed last week’s issue featuring new age media relations based on the Coinbase x New York Times saga you can check it out here.
Part 2 interview with Duncan Byrne. The brains behind Anjunadeep & Anjunabeats music marketing
We heard from super smart Duncan from Involved Group Music in the issue before last 👀 You can catch Part 1 of his interview here if you missed it. This week we have an exciting Part 2! Yay! Duncan talks to us about closed-wall communities, selling out NYC’s Madison Square Garden & LA’s Hollywood Bowl, the hazards of working in the music business, and the best music venues and sets he’s been to. Duncan shared so much cool stuff with us. As you know I’m a bit of a geeky megafan of Duncan’s team’s work, so I really hope you enjoy reading what he has to say as much as I did! A couple of key takeaways from Part 2 below 👀 Read the full interview with Duncan Byrne (Part 2)
SO IMPORTANT: The rise of “closed wall communities” is gonna be more important than ever for small & medium sized business in future according to Duncan 🏡
Tips for getting into music marketing: Make your own opportunities! Show that you’re contributing to the culture. You could run a club night, work a festival, manage your cousin’s band, or write a blog! 🔥
If you work in an industry where it’s easy to lose your balance, the key is to surround yourself with good people. Ones who truly care and have patience for you 💖
How to write a creative brief
I’ve been working in agencies for my whole career until this year and I’ve always been so intrigued by people’s abilities to give and receive briefs. Creative or strategic.
The issue is, many people in business actually don’t give great briefs. And that’s okay. But it means your life can be a bit difficult… Asking yourself the question “What does my client/stakeholder actually want or need?!” And taking longer than necessary working it out. Brief writing, and taking, isn’t something that’s formally taught. Not in my experience anyway. It’s something you tend to learn on the job. Generally speaking, the art of asking good questions always helps you get to what you or a client really need. But Planning Dirty have shared an amazing, super simple format for this which I thought I would share with you. Here’s an example for ya, and the specific “How to” below 👀 Take the full free short course on Creative Brief Writing by Planning Dirty
CREATIVE BRIEF FORMULA:
GET - consumer target
WHO - consumer problem
TO - consumer goal
BY - single message
🎵 SPOTIFY EXAMPLE 🎶
BUSINESS PROBLEM:
Members of Gen X think Spotify is only for new music and young people. That’s not true, and we want Gen X to use Spotify too. They will love it if they try it 💗
BRIEF:
GET music loving gen Xers…
WHO feel frustrated that their music taste is irrelevant today…
TO reconsider Spotify as a song library for all music listeners, including them…
BY showing that the music they listened to is as relevant and available today as it was when it first came out…
A creative brief translates the business problem to the consumer problem. It helps create a bullseye for creatives to aim for 🎯
The crux of a good brief is knowing who it’s about, what the business problem is, what action you want the target audience to take 💸
⏩ GET [target audience] WHO [feel xyz problem] TO [take this action] BY [us showing them a solution in a single message] ⏪
Other interesting things:
Lessons about the creator economy from Twitch and Substack - Peter Yang, Substack
The best brand tweets of 2020, from Uber’s #MoveWhatMatters to Ben & Jerry’s dismantling white supremacy - Twitter Marketing
Stories everywhere on social - Mark Carroll, A Twitter thread
And in case you missed it:
👀 Media Relations & Laser Focused Missions: Coinbase vs New York Times
👀 Interview with Vikki Chowney, Global Head of Content & Publishing at H+K
👀 Anthro Free Guide #1: Brand Strategy 101
Righto, that’s a wrap for this week.
Wishing you all a super fun and rewarding week ahead.
We’ve got 4 weeks left of 2020. Pandemic or no pandemic, make them count 🔥🔥🔥
Sanya 😊
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Written by Sanya-Jeet Thandi, a brand strategist & consultant with a love for culture, start-ups and good karma. British Indian currently in Kent & London, and soon to be US ex-pat. You can connect with me on Twitter, but not Instagram, because it’s boring so I deleted it.