Monday Morning in the Coop
Reviewing Doomberg’s most talked about plays in 2023.
“I would have double-bagged it.” – Brett Favre
In 1997, Mastercard was a business in decline. Often an afterthought to its much larger and better-recognized competitor, Visa, the company was in search of a brand reboot. After reaching out to five of the world’s best advertising firms and sifting through 35 different concepts, executives at the credit card company were pitched an arresting framework by Joyce King Thomas of McCann-Erickson. In watching a preliminary spot featuring a young boy enjoying a baseball game with his father, the Mastercard team knew they had a winner when the pitch signed off with this now-famous tagline:
“There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s Mastercard.”
The Priceless campaign would go on to become one of the most successful in modern history, with many of its commercials going viral before going viral was even a thing. It was the perfect vehicle through which the company could feature its myriad celebrity endorsers, and the concept is still woven into Mastercard’s corporate culture more than a quarter century later.
One particularly humorous iteration involved superstar quarterback Brett Favre. In the tightly edited spot, Favre is seen critiquing common mistakes of average citizens as he goes about his day. A scoop of chocolate ice cream falls off the cone onto a young child’s white wool sweater, and Favre chides the girl’s father, “I would have gone vanilla with that sweater.” Construction workers stand defeated after cutting into the wrong city pipe, water spewing forth, and Favre knowingly says, “I would have looked out for the water main. But that’s just me.”
The brilliance of the ad lies in the fact that, as an athlete routinely in the spotlight, Favre was subjected to an endless barrage of second-guessing over his on-the-field split decisions, from people armed with nothing more than the benefit of hindsight. The opportunity for Favre to do a little Monday morning quarterbacking of his own? Priceless.
At least when this commercial was shot, Favre didn’t have to grapple with Twitter on game day. For all its positive attributes, Old Twitter did have a few notable downsides, especially for anyone who produced a high volume of original analysis. The company practically weaponized Monday morning quarterbacking in its relentless drive for engagement, playing to the fact that anger and conflict keep people’s attention, and attention is what advertisers ultimately pay for. The algorithm specialized in placing the nastiest face-rubbing tweets in front of you, making them virtually impossible to avoid. And now, under its new owner, accounts that specialize in hunting down out-of-date tweets to amplify the mistakes of others can buy the appearance of credibility for a nominal fee, circumventing the need to earn the influence that comes with directly participating in civilized debate over time.
Having left Twitter at the end of July to focus exclusively on the Substack ecosystem, we must confess that the absence of such noise from our daily lives has been a decidedly liberating thing. Sure, people still leave critical comments or send the occasional scathing email, but such criticisms are presented to us chronologically—it’s not like Protonmail goes searching through our inbox to amplify negativity and de-emphasize positive feedback. While our official goal is to average seven articles a month, we managed to crank out eight in September with three days to spare, testimony to the power of positive energy as an input into productivity.
With extra time to think comes more room for self-reflection, and as we embark down the home stretch of 2023, we thought it would be a good time to take a look back at some of our pieces that drove particularly high engagement. Be it heat pumps, dead whales, train derailments, electric vehicles, or room-temperature superconductors, what did we get right? What did we miss? Let’s break out the game film and review some of Doomberg’s most talked about plays in 2023.