Volume 32: Regulating addiction design & a marketing do not call list.
1. “I had no clue what I was doing.” Time to regulate addiction design.
tl;dr: Designing tech products for addiction is proving deadly.
Technology's primary disruptive, commodifying effect is that it takes slow, difficult and expensive things and makes them fast, easy and cheap. This effect has proved remarkably constant from the Gutenberg Press to Google.
The challenge we face today is that some things should probably remain slow, difficult, and expensive for good reason, like the trading of complex financial derivatives.
The recent suicide of a 20-year-old, who believed he’d racked up $730,000 worth of trading losses, and whose last words were “I had no clue what I was doing” has put Robinhood, the fast-growing fintech unicorn in the spotlight. While the company response was swift and apparently genuine, it raises deeper and more fundamental questions about how technology companies apply the craft of design.
Businesses like Robinhood are predicated on three things. First, they sacrifice profits for growth by taking things we’d otherwise pay for and making them free. In this case, stock trades. Second, they eliminate friction from the experience with an almost messianic zeal, because they understand that the lower the friction, the more likely we are to transact. Third, they deliberately design addictive, gamified qualities to make things fun, keep you engaged on their platform (rather than a competitor), and keep you coming back for more.
In the case of Robinhood, their business model depends upon transaction frequency: the professional brokerages they send trades to pay for each referral. So, while they don’t charge the consumer for a trade, they do get paid every time someone does. This creates an overwhelming pressure to design an experience that pushes consumers toward making as many trades as possible in as short a time as possible: volume pays.
But the effects can also be chilling. A whole generation of investor-gamblers are today dabbling in a “fun game” with complex derivatives that have potentially disastrous financial consequences they’re entirely unaware of, ten-year-olds are ditching Fortnite for day-trading, and 20-year-old Alexander Kearns committed suicide.
There’s been plenty of discussion in the past about social networks like Facebook deliberately designing for addiction and pattern libraries that are the equivalent of digital junk food. But designing a streaming video app so we’ll watch “just one more” episode and using similar design techniques to turn highly risky day trading into a game of Mario Kart are operating at different orders of magnitude regarding their dangers.
Most designers I know are fundamentally decent people. The idea that the work they’re doing might be addictive, dangerous or otherwise anti-human is something they’re horrified by rather than attracted to. But they also operate within a system that fetishizes engagement metrics, has elevated friction-removal to an almost religious status, and where the addictive elements they design underpin the very business models of the companies they work for. They’re unlikely to be the ones driving for change, even if they want to.
No, I think it’s time for a broader debate about the impact of these addictive design practices on society, with an aim to regulating them in a similar way that we regulate addictive substances.
2. When is an expert not an expert? When they’re on the AdAge Expert Collective Panel.
tl;dr: AdAge gives marketers a handy “do not call” list.
This week, a LinkedIn post by a naming specialist caught my eye. He was apoplectic at the naming advice given by a panel of experts brought together by AdAge. I couldn’t resist, so I clicked and read. Hoo boy was he right. This is literally the single worst collection of naming advice you could ever be given. Of the 8 “tips” provided, only one is remotely accurate - “make sure the name is available” (hardly rocket science). Of the other 7, you could do the opposite and achieve a superior result. I also love the comment asking what could possibly go wrong when taking naming advice from people at companies called WPBeginner, Mindgruve, ZenMango and Rootstrap?
Anyway, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to investigate further to find out what the abysmally named AdAge Expert Collective Panel even is. Here’s how they describe it:
“A community of leaders shaping marketing and media. Our members are today's most noteworthy marketing and media agency leaders, marketing and communications executives, martech and adtech founders, and technology executives in the media space. We're bringing them together into one powerful collective, together positioned to be the most influential force in the industry.”
Well, with a description like that, I had to dive deeper into this rabbit hole. I mean, goodness, surely I’d have much to learn from such luminaries, and this couldn’t possibly be a pay-to-play gambit now could it?
Luckily for me, the AdAge Expert Collective Panel is prolific, posting something new every week, typically with appropriately clickbaity headlines, so I simply couldn’t resist clicking on a few. Well, let’s just say that they aren’t exactly living up to their billing. After I stopped laughing at the sheer banality of the commentary, the ridiculousness of some of the tips and the general smear of incompetence, I had to take a step back for a second.
This isn’t a panel of experts, of leaders shaping marketing, of noteworthy executives, or the most influential force in the industry. This is a do not call list for anyone looking for decent marketing advice.
3. Canva & Catalog. Two very different takes on the business of design.
tl;dr: Australia’s biggest unicorn & a business that can’t possibly be viable.
Sometimes things pique your interest just because you see them on the same day and make a connection. That’s the case with Canva and Catalog. What are they you might ask? Well, Canva is a photoshop competitor that also happens to be Australia’s largest unicorn with a valuation of circa $6bn. What’s most interesting about Canva is that rather than the everything and the kitchen sink approach of Photoshop, they’re attempting to create a tool for the masses that makes good-enough design fast and easy for everyone to execute. They’re taking the technology-driven commodification of design and pushing it to its logical end-state where good-enough approaches a price-point of zero. Of particular interest to me is their enterprise product, which bakes brand asset management into a creative tool, limiting users to approved brand colors, fonts, images and a range of layout options. More flexible than a preset template, but vastly more restrictive than weaponizing the typical corporate salesperson or social media manager with the full Adobe Creative Suite. For anyone who’s spent any time at all helping corporations manage their organizational design chaos, that’s a product with seriously big potential.
Catalog are interesting for a very different reason. They look more like the victims of design commodification rather than the beneficiaries of it. Their core proposition is that they’re a group of experienced designers who’ll work with any startup for a flat fee of $3,000/month for any design requirement. Now, I know what you’re thinking. That’s an amazing deal. But let’s think about this from a different perspective for a second. I don’t know about you, but my experience of startups is that they’re typically needy, chaotic and take more time than you can profitably give. They’re clients you work with because you want to, not because you’ll make any money working with them. This is why the most successful startup-focused agencies operate on some form of fee plus equity or bonus model (which has its own issues but serves to incentivize the upside and manage the overall scope). So, either Catalog must have some pretty black and white contractual wizardry and by the book project management going on, or they’re going to be in for a helluva shock when they re-design the same icon for the 25th time in a week and find themselves with many more tasks still to go. It’s hard to see a way they aren’t going to find themselves working for less than minimum wage.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to my point. Design is an incredibly potent tool in the world of business. Great designers can add tremendous value (just look at the impact of Jony Ive on Apple), but there aren’t that many design entrepreneurs who’ve figured out how to monetize, productize and capture a fraction of the value they can create. Instead, they’re much more likely to be duking it out to be the lowest fee provider (like Catalog) which drags down pricing for the whole industry and will ultimately bump them right into the good-enough design that people can do for themselves via low cost tools like Canva or Squarespace.
Instead, designers need to be thinking in one of three ways:
Where can we align against a higher value, higher fee niche?
How can we apply our design skills to create value in another adjacent arena?
How can we leverage the technology-driven commodification of design to provide more value to more people at a lower cost?
Like other industries, those who get stuck in the middle will lose the most.
4. Frameworks: The emperor’s new clothes of brand strategy.
tl;dr: A detour down strategy lane.
Many moons ago, I worked in a newly designed office that was a preciously designed box. Literally, it was a white box—white floors, walls, furniture, carpets, and computers. Within this white box was another floating white box that contained our conference rooms, all of which had the unfortunate side effect of not being soundproofed. At all.
This meant that one day, I overheard our then head of new business interviewing a potential senior strategy hire. After a few pleasantries, he started repeatedly questioning which strategic frameworks they used, a process that went on for quite some considerable time. I remember being shocked by the basic conceit of the questioning, which was that the quality of a strategy consultant can be measured by the nature and number of the frameworks they use because it can’t.
Let me provide an example. I was once asked to attend a client meeting by a design firm I work with occasionally. Their client, a well known major global corporation, had recently hired a new head of brand strategy and he was hosting a summit to walk through their new brand strategy.
So, we arrived at an all day working session and the head of brand strategy, who’d previously worked for a major brand consulting firm, brought us up to speed with the three month global market research program he’d just completed, it’s profound impact on the strategy he was about to share with us, and how this was the basis of a transformative change for the company. So far so good. He then walked us through thirty to forty slides that articulated the strategy, where there was a different framework on every single slide. Many of them deliberately containing the same information, just applied differently. (I don’t know why, maybe he’d been bored on a flight somewhere) It was truly awful work. Asinine, lacking depth, extremely difficult to understand, and very hard to make sense of what you could do with it. While there were many beautifully filled in frameworks, it was clear that the strategy being articulated by the frameworks was in fact terrible.
And this is really my point. This is not an isolated incident. There are many people out there working in the field of brand strategy that make the critical error of mistaking the framework for the strategy. It isn’t. There are only two uses for any framework:
A/ To help you, individually or in groups, think through a problem.
B/ To help you communicate the strategy you’ve created.
The important part is in the middle, which is the formulation of the strategy itself. The framework does not define the strategy; the problem you are trying to solve and the nature of the strategy you are trying to articulate does. Any frameworks you choose to use should only serve those two factors.
Yes, your brand consulting employer might have a set of “proprietary” frameworks they insist you use. But let’s be clear, these aren’t designed to help you create and deliver superior strategies, they’re designed to ensure a consistently productized output that can profitably be sold to clients.
So, next time you’re working on a strategy project, maybe try going framework-free. You might just find it liberating.