Lucky 13: Rotten Whopper, underwhelming Gates & Juul is an ashtray.

1. Rotten Whopper: BK agency desperate for awards.

Tl;dr: Hard to find the appeal in decomposing food.

Working in advertising for burgers must be a tedious business. I mean there’s only so many ways to make a burger look big, delicious and tasty. So, while the agency working for McDonald’s literally gave up, it’s admirable to see the team at BK going all out for awards instead. I mean, if they succeed, the team will be poached by another agency for more money and not have to work on burgers again. Win.

It’ll likely be hailed an incredibly brave campaign, showing that yes, when you remove the artificial preservatives, even a BK will rot. And there’s something delightful in their use of studio lighting to make various shades of mold look so beautiful.

But I find it hard to imagine anyone rushing out for a burger after seeing this. It’ll probably get plenty of media coverage, which will increase its reach, but does anyone really find decomposing food attractive?

2. Ethics optional. Juul is an ashtray of a company.

Tl;dr: Seriously, what the hell are they doing and why do we let them?

Juul is a startup phenomenon. Their blitzscaling growth trajectory straight out of the Reid Hoffman playbook. They’re also poster children for everything that’s wrong with modern capitalism.

While there’s a very serious conversation to be had about vaping as a means of saving lives from smoking cessation, Juul blitzed straight through it by aggressively targeting our kids with the most addictive product in history. Handily, a slew of recent lawsuits allows us to peek behind their veil of PR bullshit.

Let’s walk through a few facts: Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on Earth and a single Juul pod holds the equivalent of 20 cigarettes worth. Juul says they’re about smoking cessation, but very few of their customers use them for that. Juul says they don’t market to kids, but mango fruit flavors and hip influencers suggest otherwise. 80% of their Twitter followers are under the age of 18, and they’ve even been accused of going into 9th-grade classrooms telling kids how safe their products are.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It’s exactly the playbook used by the cigarette companies in the past, and while Juul is facing a myriad of lawsuits here, they’re also following the big tobacco playbook in how they target other countries. I don’t know how they can sleep at night.

3. Bill Gates buys electric Porsche, Elon Musk ‘underwhelmed.’

Tl;dr: Tesla better get ready for some serious competition.

As I write, Tesla is worth roughly the same as Ford and GM combined, yet sells roughly 26x fewer vehicles per year. I’ll let that settle in for a second. An exuberantly irrational market is pricing in a LOT of future growth for this company.

But here’s the thing. One of the reasons for Tesla’s success to date is that it had the EV category pretty much to itself. Now this position is seriously under threat. As car companies from Ford to Porsche enter the fray, it’s going to get a lot harder for Tesla to retain its category of one status.

Which brings me neatly to Bill Gates. While it doesn’t really matter that a billionaire bought a Porsche, this is the canary in the coalmine of the brand challenge ahead for Tesla. Combining strong car brands with pent up demand for electric vehicles means things are going to get seriously competitive ahead. If you own Tesla stock, you’d better be hoping Musk has a better response than a tweet about a lost customer.

4. Marketing down to a single P and even that’s under threat.

Tl;dr: The fast dive to tactics isn’t working out so well after all.

The B2B Institute over at LinkedIn recently released the results of some research that very handily supports their value proposition. In it, they demonstrate shocking ignorance in the executive ranks of the connection between marketing, brand-building and business performance.

Now I could talk until I’m blue in the face about how brand-building has been empirically proven to be among the top 1 or 2 things any company can do to create value, but I won’t, because clearly the people responsible for value creation haven’t a clue.

I could also say this is an indictment of a mar-tech industrial complex that’s got rich off the back of pushing marketing to become ever more tactical, but I’m not going to go there either.

Instead, we have to look a this as an unfettered opportunity. If only a tiny percentage of business executives see the connection between building a strong brand and positive future cash-flows, they’re going to have a huge advantage in the market, and when they exercise it FOMO will kick in big time.

With this big of a disconnect, look for brand-building best practices to be on the agenda of every management consultant soon.