In 1896, H.J. Heinz was riding a train in New York City when he spotted a shoe store ad boasting “21 styles.” He liked the idea enough to invent his own number. He chose 5 because it was his lucky number and 7 because it was his wife’s favorite. In other words, the brand assigned significance where none previously existed. It turns out, this idea of significance alchemy isn’t entirely new. Brands have been practicing the art of taking something inherently meaningless and declaring it meaningful for years.

Back in the 1960s, Avis turned the embarrassing fact of being the second-largest rental car company into a brand identity with their iconic “We Try Harder” campaign which remained in use for more than 50 years. Snapple looked at the empty space under a bottle cap and turned it into a canvas for brand personality. Guinness decided settling pub arguments deserved an authoritative institution, accidentally creating one of the bestselling series of all time with their book of World Records. Volkswagen took the Beetle’s most criticized features — being small and un-American — and made smallness an aspiration.

Each of these legendary campaigns invented significance. That’s the non-obvious lesson here. The best marketing move is sometimes about choosing something to matter and then believing it so much that it becomes real.

For some consumer advocates, this is just the most ​recent example of a phenomenon described as “skimpflation”​ where companies cut back on services and products as a way to maintain or avoid raising prices too much but rather decreasing the value a consumer gets for the same or similar money. This isn’t entirely a new tactic either. According to food science professor Dr. Richard Hartel:

This is “’a typical story that’s told in the food industry about cost reduction.” If you successfully tweak a product recipe for cost, even expert tasters will not be able to tell the new recipe from last year’s. But what if you repeat this process every year for 10 years? If you “looked at your product 10 years ago [compared] with what you have now, that can be a very different product,” says Hartel. “Each year’s shift is imperceptible.”

This slow ​devolving of quality​ seems to have been thwarted in this case by a clearly invested brand fan who also happens to be related to the original product inventor. He cares more than the ordinary person and offered his platform to shame Hershey’s into backing down. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: consumers with singular passion and the platform to have their voices heard are the ultimate instigators of change. No matter how much products change, this conclusion seems to remain true over time.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

The answers were subsequentially compiled by Claude into a chart which he then built into a website that he dubbed the “Guinndex” to illustrate the price of a pint of Ireland’s favorite beer across the country. The average price was €6.06 with the highest price coming in at €11 from the upscale Temple Bar in Dublin. The effort has gone viral, turned Cortland into something of a local folk hero and is even shaming some pubs into lower their prices—which seems to have been his real mission all along. So far, the plentiful marketing opportunities this should offer don’t seem to be happening … which is a major missed opportunity. The Temple Bar could lean into their “most expensive” ranking and serve the beer in gold rimmed glasses. The brand itself could make him an official spokesperson/ambassador. The only thing that could have made this better is if the whole thing launched on St. Patrick’s Day.

1.  GAP Leans Into Retro Comfort – The “​GAP Hoodie House​” at Coachella allowed people to design their own products, profess their love of the simple hoodie and offered a comfortable counterpoint to all the quirky (and often uncomfortable) fashion on display in Coachella fashion. It was a perfect reminder of everything people love about their GAP hoodies and was perfectly on brand.
   
   
2.   Dove Solves a Sweaty Problem – Last year a ​viral tweet​ from an influencer suggested that the heat of the desert venue made Coachella the ideal festival for a deodorant sponsor. This year, ​Dove answered the call​. Focused on offering free deodorant and solving a very real problem for concertgoers stood out and captured lots of attention and goodwill. Along with their inventive use of ​vending machines to expose “flattening beauty standards,”​ it was yet another win for a brand that has continually helped rethink beauty standards.
   
   
3.  Public Art Company (PAC) Brings the Spectacle – Even in a digital world, sometimes there is no replacement for creating a beautiful spectacle for people to experience in person. As the official art provider for the festival, PAC built ​several immersive installations​ around the Indio festival grounds to allow people to think about space, interaction and feeling: “each piece is designed to be entered, sat beneath, wandered through, and genuinely felt. We’re curating for the body as much as the eye.”
   
   
4. The Coachella Billboard Phenomenon – This may be hard to believe, but one of the most talked about elements of people trekking to the desert for Coachella this year were ​the billboards they encountered along the way​. In a moment of captivity driving to the festival, Gen Z audiences are paying attention to out-of-home (OOH) marketing and (​according to some surveys​), even trust it significantly more than social media. Most interestingly, apparently every year during Coachella “over one-third of TikTok virality trends have started from or included OOH displays.”

By the way, even if you can’t make it to Indio this year, you haven’t missed all the fun. Check out the YouTube livestreaming schedule for all the events you can still ​watch this coming weekend  and let me know what other marketing initiatives stood out for you.

The Free File program, which dates back to 2002, allows the industry to claim that it’s possible to file taxes free while working to ensure that most people keep on paying. The bottom 70 percent of taxpayers ranked by income are eligible to use the Free File program. That’s about 100 million households. Only about three million use it each year. Instead, every year, millions of people eligible for Free File pay to use virtually the same software from the same companies.​

Intuit’s behavior has been particularly egregious. ProPublica reported in 2019 that the company had concealed the landing page for the Free File version of its product so that it was invisible to Google and other search engines. It also created a stalking horse called TurboTax: Free Edition, which pushed users to pay for add-ons. After it got caught, the company abandoned the Free File program.

Despite its success, the potential growth of a free government system allowing people to pay their taxes quickly online threatened the livelihood of the $17B tax filing software industry. So the lobbyists went to work and the extremely promising IRS system that would have saved Americans an estimated 13 hours and $290 in fees met its untimely end.

So what’s the solution here? There’s a silver lining that may point to the answer. Apparently, in 2025 before abandoning the Free File program, “the federal government published most of the program’s source code on GitHub.” Now all we need is an entrepreneur with a similar sort of vision to what drove Mark Cuban to build CostPlus Drugs as a way to cut the middlemen out of pharmacy sales. If you know one, please forward this email on to them.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Based on tracking animal movements, not only can the country’s eco-tourism board identify where animals are going but they can also redirect tourists to other locations when a certain spot becomes overcrowded and human presence might adversely affect the animals. The entire campaign is designed to attract a growing number of travelers interested in sustainable travel and deeper experiences with local wildlife. For your viewing pleasure, a link to the full video is included above from this campaign that ​earned a Cannes Lion award for advertising​ at last year’s Cannes Festival.

Here are three questions that local news helps to answer and why it should matter to you:

1. What’s happening in your area? Your local publications are the ones that are often most in tune to local events, places to go and also local legislation that’s likely to affect your life but that’s mostly ignored by other news media. ​
2. What does the news mean for you? Whether it’s local or state level legislation or the local impact of federal announcements, or just giving you the weather, local news breaks down what the big picture means for your life.
3. Who are the winners and losers? Like most good journalism, local news can help you understand both sides of an issue by focusing on the all-important question behind a story … who’s winning and who’s losing?

Even though Local News Day is today, there’s still time to sign up as a sponsor or an individual supporter. Better yet, use the map to find and support the local news sources near you (if you’re based in the US).

It’s a different experience of watching a game and for years that was pretty much the only other option. Watch the neutral national television broadcast or listen to the game with your people. Now on broadcast TV, one of the hottest trends taking off is so-called “alterna-casts” where they are taking a similar idea even further. This week ​ESPN launched “Courtside”​ in time for the Women’s College Basketball Final Four tournament. This will include four hosts sitting courtside offering a more “immersive” experience for fans.

Perhaps the most popular example of this model is an alterna-cast launched back in 2021 featuring the former NFL quarterback Manning brothers (Peyton and Eli) offering a ​remix of their own coverage​ for Monday Night Football games that was described as a cross between a zoom call and hanging out with buddies watching the game at a bar:

Despite all the attention, the brothers don’t go in for anything fancy, in either setup or presentation. They talk over each other. They barely acknowledge when the show must stop for a commercial break. Guests like Dwayne Johnson get to talk about their love of football, tequila investments and upcoming movie projects — and even a T-Rex skull replica on display in the background — without the slightest pressure to dig deeper. When the Mannings signed off after a Wild Card game not too long ago, they did so without the faintest whiff of TV-hosting skills. “Bye!” yelled Peyton. Neither of them told viewers to stay tuned to watch late-night ESPN mainstay Scott Van Pelt on “SportsCenter.”

This is the golden age for a new idea that is increasingly being applied and commercialized by network TV for all sorts of live programs perhaps beyond sports too. Insiders believe the future of the Oscars, Grammys, World Cup and many other events could include this same alterna-casting idea to broaden the fan appeal for events and offer a more personalized experience. What we all give up is the same thing that has disappeared thanks to streaming media — a shared entertainment experience. As this continues to happen, I wonder if we are losing something here, or is it just a better experience for everyone? Let me know what you think.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

According to NPR, the ​proposal appears unlikely to pass​ and perhaps the best way to understand the difficulties here is to consider some of the thoughtful questions that Supreme Court Justices have been asking about the proposed policy:

• How would you know who the father is, or the mother? What if they’re unmarried? Whose house do they live in?
• How would you adjudicate these cases? You’re not going to know at the time of birth whether they have the intent to stay or not, including U.S. citizens by the way.
• So [are] we bringing pregnant women in for depositions? What are we doing to figure this out?

This is the part I find most interesting about the story. Too often, there seems to be little to no discussion or thought about the realities of HOW things will actually work once rules are made or changed. Case in point – the recent moves by US Department of Energy to reduce safety regulations at nuclear power plants which are ​highly likely to literally kill power plant workers in the long term​ .

So when the questions get real and are asked by people other than deeply invested journalists, it’s worth paying attention. We need more people in positions of authority to ask these kinds of questions about proposed policies instead of choosing blind loyalty and quiet obedience.

“Utopias was actually born from another Samuel Adams creation — 1992’s Triple Bock, the beer industry’s first barrel aged beer, which sold for the then-unheard-of price of $100 per case. In 1999, the beer evolved into “Millennium,” and in 2002 it adopted the name Utopias.”

Jim Koch, founder and brewer of Samuel Adams, calls the beer a labor of love since it’s not a huge money maker for the brand. Its existence does something interesting for the rest of the beer maker’s products too … underscoring the attention to detail and craftmanship that presumably goes into their other products too. This is the sort of old-school marketing idea that is becoming rarer and rarer to see.

A unique product, promoted through an interesting story and something that feels distinctive and new … even though in theory any beer maker could have done it. There was a time when I would see a lot of ideas like this coming from marketers in all industries. It feels like a while since I’ve both seen and written about an idea like this which has little to do with technology or AI. Sometimes a good idea stands out simply because it would have worked at any moment in time. That’s still worth raising a glass to celebrate.