BOTW: How Four Pillars became an Aussie brand success story; Why Meta’s Threads might – might – just work; The AFR’s smart brand extension
Welcome to Best of the Week, written in London ahead of an unpalatable 17-hour flight home to Australia. The anguished hope of waiting for the upgrade gods to smile is harder to stand than their inevitable rejection.
Today: How Four Pillars conquered the gin world; a savvy brand extension from the AFR; and the arrival of Threads.
Unmade’s half-day deep dive into the impact on AI on the world of marketing and media is this coming Wednesday. This week Sir Martin Sorrell predicted most media planning jobs will be wiped out. Our humAIn conference is your chance to hear about the opportunities as well as the threats. Secure your ticket now.
Unmade members get discounted tickets to all our events, along with access to our paywalled archive.
Four Pillars: How to distil a brand
Tim Burrowes writes:
This week saw the founders of gin brand Four Pillars achieve a magnificent exit. They sold the rest of their business to Lion for a deal that reportedly valued the brand at $100m. According to the AFR, having sold the first half of the business in 2019 for $40m, they got $50m for the other half.
Gin is the ultimate distillation of brand. Most of the value of the business comes from the brand attributes, not the product, although that has to be good too.
That’s how actor Ryan Reynolds turned the apparently somewhat average Aviation Gin into a powerhouse. He sold it to Diageo in 2020 for a reported US$600m.
The barriers to entry of producing gin are relatively low, and the production timelines remarkably short. There’s little of that pesky barrel time required for whisky.
Lots of people can make a decent gin, but unlike Four Pillars, most do not end up selling 1.2m bottles per year. A drinkable product is table stakes. The difference was the brand strategy.
Over the last decade, Four Pillars became, amongst other things, the unofficial beverage of the communications industry.
Before Four Pillars, if you visited the office of a media agency boss, there’d be a yellow bottle of Veuve Clicquot sitting on the windowsill, a gift from some media owner or another. Now, the standard agency gift is Four Pillars. It became ubiquitous enough that when the fat little bottle arrived wrapped in tissue paper, you’d be able to guess what it was just from the shape.
But it also quickly earned a cult following from gin aficionados.
Rare Dry Gin was the classic, Bloody Shiraz Gin neat, on ice, the one that earned a nod from the bartender that you knew what you were talking about.
The founding team behind the Four Pillars was, like a good G&T, in the right proportions – two brand people to one maker.
The extroverted Stu Gregor, a former News Corp journo turned boss of PR agency Liquid Ideas, which specialised in drinks brands, was the well connected front man. And brand strategist Matt Jones, who’d cut his teeth for the British Conservative Party and then experiential agency Jack Morton Worldwide, designed and built the brand architecture.
The third founder, Cameron Mackenzie, who’d come from the wine making world, merely had to distil a really good product (which has won most of the major global awards for gin).
Perhaps the first public outing of Four Pillars came at Mumbrella’s CommsCon PR conference in, I reckon, 2013 or maybe 2014. Cheekily, Stu and Matt set up an unofficial tasting of their new drink in a corner of the Doltone House venue.
The crowd they drew was far bigger than our sponsor’s official drinks down the corridor, which was awkward. I confess, I told them off. Now I feel like the man who turned down The Beatles.
The brand still thrives and retains customer loyalty as it has widened and built smart alliances.
Last Christmas, Qantas switched away from its traditional Christmas gift to Platinum One customers of a bottle of vintage Dom Perignon. Instead a limited edition bottle of Four Pillars arrived in the post. It probably cost Qantas quarter of the price of the Dom, but it was just as appreciated for its exclusivity.
The brand has stretched – there are currently 21 varieties on sale on the Four Pillars home page, but the perception of premium has been retained, even as sales moved past 1m bottles per year.
Aesthetically, the labels are gorgeous. What terrific packaging.
Gregor will depart Four Pillars in a few weeks, while Jones and Mackenzie will continue to shepherd the brand for Lion.
What a fantastic, Australian brand story.
New Threads, who dis?
So there’s yet another new social media platform in town.
From Meta, the people who broke democracy with Facebook, and wrecked teen psyches with Instagram, comes Threads. This time though, the mission is one we can all get behind: To spoil Elon Musk’s week by creating an alternative to Twitter.
After the recent arrivals of Substack’s Notes and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, comes Threads. It arrives eight months after a flotilla of lifeboats departed Twitter for Mastodon, as it began to dawn on users that Musk wasn’t just going through some temporary pain with his new toy; he really was going to break it.
Twitter has been in a downward spiral which shows no sign of easing.
The devaluation of check marks on Twitter saw blue ticks evolve from signalling legitimacy to a badge of a right-wing grifter willing to pay to find an audience to shout at. The changes triggered a degraded user experience as the algorithm started to promote the tweets of those paying Elon fans over those that were popular because they had something to say.
It drove away many of the politicians and public figures who were Twitter’s secret sauce. The proximity to influence was always a key attraction.
As Mark Di Stefano put it in the AFR yesterday:
“Early Twitter, circa 2009-2016, was like you had snuck into a backroom. Annabel Crabb and George Megalogenis were talking to normal people about politics. Comedian Wil Anderson was there. So was Malcolm Turnbull in the replies, giving his thoughts about the NBN to some random guy from country Victoria.
“That’s all changed and Twitter in 2023 is mostly a cesspit that sane people stay away from.”
Brand safety has gone out of the window, with moderation mostly abandoned.
And just last week, Twitter had to start limiting the number of tweets users could view each day, because of its creaking infrastructure.
As a result, Threads has a fighting chance of success. There’s a genuine appetite for a text-based platform to fill the void left by old Twitter.
There’s another reason it may work. The network effect that was key to the rise of Twitter, Facebook et al is present once again. Anyone who signs up to Threads will, by default, find their Instagram connections.
That’s not perfect, because the sort of person that users follow for food selfies on Instagram isn’t necessarily the one you’ll want to offer a hot take on world events. In my case, Instagram has mainly been where I’ve shared cat pictures, Springsteen crowd shots and Tasmanian landscapes. My lowkey Instagram persona is entirely different to my Twitter persona.
Any network is better than no network. That’s going to be a key advantage that Threads will enjoy over Substack’s Notes, which is the one I’d prefer to be the winner. However, since its launch three months ago Notes has become an amplification of Substack writers rather than something that has gone mainstream.
There’s also a third factor which may be important later. Unusually for Meta’s philosophy, Threads is built using a protocol called ActivityPub. Effectively that means it will be possible to move followers and content between platforms built on the same protocol, like Mastodon.
For brands and publishing outlets, that slightly reduces the risk of putting effort into building up yet another following.
Incidentally, if you’re interested in understanding more about Threads I recommend this week’s Hard Fork podcast interview with the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri.
It’s too early to say whether it is going to be worth the effort. There’s no evidence yet whether Threads will be a traffic source for publishers in the way that Facebook and Twitter were in their early days. Most threads that have got traction so far are about Threads itself.
Even if an early effort pays off, the platforms have a habit of changing their algorithms to preference content which keeps their users from clicking onto external sites. So publishers may not get much of a long term reward for engaging even if they get short term results.
As for advertisers, there are not yet paid ads on Threads, although that will inevitably come if the platform finds an audience.
More social media platforms fail than succeed. But Threads has a decent chance of making it.
One to watch
The Australian Financial Review launched a smart brand extension this week.
About Time is a watch fair, taking place in Sydney in September.
The high end, high value watch sector is a spot where the AFR’s upmarket business audience meets a prestige consumer niche.
While the logo feels a little low effort, I like everything else about this.
The AFR has the legitimacy to run the event because it has covered the sector seriously for several years and has become an authority in the space.
Now do wine, please.
The Week In AI:
Cat McGinn, curator of humAIn, writes:
Novel hardware
Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement through the training of the company’s AI model, ChatGPT, on their copyrighted books. The complaint asserts that OpenAI profited from “stolen writing and ideas” and calls for damages on behalf of all U.S.-based authors used in ChatGPT’s training. The suit is likely to set a precedent for future generative AI class actions.
The only way to stop a bad AI with a gun…
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is forming a team led by co-founder Ilya Sutskever and researcher Jan Leike to develop systems ensuring AI acts in accordance with users’ intentions, known as alignment. This initiative aims to put measures in place to control for the possibility of a superintelligent AI. The tech giant is dedicating 20% of its computing power to the task.
A big robot did it and ran away
Pig’s-bladder-brandishing billionaire Elon Musk claimed the new limitations on Twitter users being able to access posts were a necessity to combat data scraping by AI companies. The announcement came amidst rumours Musk hasn’t paid his hosting bills. The move affects unpaid and new accounts, and means users can only see 600 posts a day if they don’t have a paid subscription. Despite ongoing platform stability concerns and layoffs at the tech company, Musk continues efforts to monetise Twitter through advertising.
Race to the bottom
Reddit has amended its Content Policy to permit “AI-generated sexual media that depicts fictional people or characters”, a reversal of its 2018 rule banning deepfake AI porn communities. This change comes with caveats – the AI content cannot feature a real, identifiable person and must respect intellectual property rights.
Careful now
The Australian government’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) have released interim guidance on the public sector use of generative AI. The document, which supplements individual agency policies, encourages low-risk usage and formal staff access to AI platforms.
The Department of Industry, Science and Resources is seeking submissions on the use of responsible AI in business – if you would like to make a joint submission with Unmade on uses of AI in media and marketing, please contact Cat
(Submissions are due on 26 July 2023)
It’s your last chance to book tickets to our AI conference humAIn | human creativity x AI, which takes place in Sydney this coming Wednesday, 12 July.
Campaign of the Week: Bonds – Total Package undies
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting advertising campaign of the week.
LBB’s ANZ reporter, Casey Martin writes:
Our campaign of the week comes from Special Group for Bonds. Special’s latest tongue in cheek approach sees superyacht captain Jason Chambers, star of the reality TV show Below Deck, use double entendre to explain the features of Total Package undies.
Unmade Index joins the slump
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
Australia’s listed media and marketing stocks followed the wider ASX downwards yesterday as the market reacted to the growing likelihood of multiple further interest rate rises.
The Unmade Index, which measures the performance of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks, fell 2.28% to 631.24 points.
The four biggest stocks on the Index all saw falls in their share price. Domain had the sharpest fall, with its share price dropping 3.55%, while parent company Nine fell 2.52%.
Seven West Media also had a negative day, dropping 1.35%, while Ooh Media dipped 1.19%.
The mid-sized stocks suffered similar misfortunes. ARN Media had the biggest fall of all on the Index yesterday, its share price dropping 4.75%, while rival Southern Cross Media tumbled 2.13%.
The only stock on the Index to see some positive movement yesterday was SEG, lifting by 2.22%.
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
Please do consider coming to this Wednesday’s humAIn – human creativity x AI. It’s designed for anyone working in the communications industry who wants to understand where AI it taking us, for better or worse – and we’ll be talking about both, in practical terms.
I hope to see you there.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
