Volume 117: Shake, Shake.

1. Shake, Shake.

tl;dr: Tough times are a time for levity, within reason.

Everything right now is a bit grim. We’ve got a war in Ukraine, the hammer of inflation, mortgage rates through the roof, political chaos, unchained energy prices, and the stock of big-tech monopolists tanking like it’s 2000.

In times like these, you’ll inevitably hear decision-makers at major corporations trotting out the cliche, “we don’t want to appear as if we’re tone-deaf.” This always struck me as weird, as if they’re more afraid of the appearance of tone deafness than actually being tone deaf, but whatever.

This is usually code for “put away the silly, the whimsical, the joyous, and the creative, and be all grown up and serious instead.” And this would be precisely the wrong thing to do. When people feel grim, the last thing they want is for the brands they do business with to make them feel even grimmer. They need some lightness instead, within reason.

This morning I drove my son to school. He’d missed the bus. He was up until the early hours last night doing homework; he was exhausted, and his mother has a cold, which made for a truly combustible combination. It was all a bit grim and could quickly have become even grimmer with a solid dose of sitting in the passenger seat, alone with your thoughts and personal recriminations.

So, what did I do? I could’ve lectured him about doing his homework on time and not arguing with his mother, but he already knows these things. So, I put Hair Nation on the radio, and we laughed the whole way to school. Why? Because they were playing Rattlesnake Shake by Skid Row, and the lyrics are so puerile and ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh out loud, especially if you happen to be a 15-year-old boy:

Shake, shake, shake it like a rattlesnake
Boom, boom baby out go the lights
Shake, shake, shake it like a rattlesnake
Staying up late doing the rattlesnake shake

As I drove home after, it struck me that, in contrast to this song, how serious everything is these days. Rattlesnake Shake was released in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall fell. A time of great optimism, where for the first time in almost 100 years, Europe was no longer threatened by war. It preceded the 1990s, which, in hindsight, looks to have been one of the most optimistic decades in history.

I’m no fan of nostalgia (it’s a fantasy we use to tell ourselves that the past was better than today when usually it wasn’t). Still, I can’t help but reflect that within an increasingly serious world, just how desperately serious we’ve become about something that doesn’t warrant it: Branding, marketing, and design are hardly life or death subjects. We’re not curing cancer here; we’re merely trying to move the merch.

And yet, as everything has become increasingly well-designed and professionally branded, it’s also become infinitely more serious, and the joy is being stripped away as a result.

This is why I love that Liquid Death, now valued at $700m, exists. It’s just completely daft. I mean, “murder your thirst” wouldn’t even have been written down had it been uttered in most brainstorms. And yet this brand is cutting through in possibly the most commoditized, challenging, and competitive category to be in - water. Why? Well, I reckon it’s because Liquid Death is the Rattlesnake Shake of drinks, and people quite like silly things, especially amid a sea of deeply serious alternatives.

So, as things look like they’ll get even grimmer over this coming winter, we might all look in the opposite direction. Toward fun and joy, and silliness, and whimsy, and things that don’t take themselves all that seriously at all. And, just perhaps, we might find that this is what people needed all along.

Shake, shake.

2. Make The Logo Bigger.

tl;dr: British Airways has new campaign. Most won’t notice.

Being even remotely connected to advertising Twitter offers a strange view into what can only be labeled a parallel universe.

Take, for example, the recently released brand campaign for the deeply troubled British Airways. I’d summarize as follows: Billboards with an array of clever copy presented via a singular formula that gets old almost immediately, a logo that’s probably too small, and yet another new BA tagline. Most of the poster is blank. And most people won’t even notice, let alone care.

Advertising Twitter, on the other hand, is losing its mind over the creative brilliance, the return of the power of advertising copy, and how this is revitalizing the BA brand and placing it back atop its pedestal.

Well, that’s bullshit.

British Airways has been in trouble for years. The customer experience appears to be in terminal decline, it hasn’t innovated nor invested in its customer in any meaningful way for a long time, and its terrible post-pandemic operational issues have truly trashed its goodwill.

You’re delusional if you think this is fixable with some cute advertising copy.

As a counterpoint, take a look at Delta in the US. Now, I know the market dynamics differ, but not by as much as you might think. Delta, too, has squared off against some tough price-driven competition, faced its own past financial struggles, and had to figure out post-pandemic operations. Yet, if I were choosing any US airline right now, I’d probably choose Delta. The planes are modern, mostly turn up and leave on time, the staff are friendly, the lounges are nice, and their app is the best in the business. This is how you put in the hard yards of revitalizing an airline brand, not by chucking a bunch of posters out there with “500 unique messages” on them.

To be fair to British Airways and its marketing team, I suspect they know this and are much less delusional than the talking heads on Twitter. Instead, they’re probably looking at this more through the lens of “something we can run with immediately to get our reputation out of the toilet” while more difficult decisions are being made elsewhere.

And this, I think, might be the lesson in all of this. Big brand campaigns often happen for one of two reasons - you’ve either innovated, and you want everyone to know and to give you credit, or your problems are so acute that a brand campaign is turned to as a last resort Band-Aid. You’re just hoping and praying it buys you the time to make the fixes you need.

In the case of BA, it’s the latter. Brand campaign from a position of weakness rather than strength.

Were I Easyjet, Ryanair, Virgin, or any other of the other myriad of competitors they have, I’d be licking my chops. This is not a well business, and it looks like an increasingly desperate brand.

3. Pantone Color of The Year: Black.

Tl:dr: Big tech moves. And an Adobe/Pantone spat.

Well, this has been a week in tech. Here are some quick hits because there were just too many interesting things to focus on just one:

Agent of chaos acquires Twitter, might get crushed financially.

Elon Musk finally completed the insanely chaotic acquisition of Twitter, immediately lost circa $30bn of his wealth on the deal, fired the executive team for “cause” to avoid paying severance (yet more chaos, he’s 100% going to lose when this winds its way through the courts, but he doesn’t care because it gave his fanboys something to crow over for five minutes) and then Tweeted out and then immediately deleted a widely debunked right-wing conspiracy theory, All on his first day. No matter whether you agree or disagree with the Musk brand of political chaos, retweeting a conspiracy theory was an incredibly dumb move when it comes to Twitter revenue, of which 90% comes from advertisers who’re desperate to be reassured that Twitter will be “brand safe” and not the dumpster fire this retweet suggests it’s going to be.

Nilay Patel wrote this great piece on the deal, which I’d summarize as follows: Does he deliver the free-speech-absolutism his most fervent supporters want, and in the process, completely tank the advertising business model and watch the majority of users uninterested in extremism slowly wither away? Or does he make Twitter a more consumer-friendly, advertiser-friendly experience and accept the inevitable personal backlash he’ll face from his fanboys? Sadly, I fear his ego is so fragile that he’ll choose the former.

I can’t predict the future, but I can say that the hubris of the Twitter deal puts Musk in a precarious position financially, even if he is currently the world’s richest person. Here’s the stack of cards waiting to fall. Twitter incinerated $30bn worth of his wealth and now represents a significant chunk of what he has left, he massively borrowed against his Tesla stock to buy it, and it has $13bn worth of debt that he almost certainly had to guarantee personally. It’s worth way less than he paid, hasn’t got the revenue to cover the debt payments (and with advertisers bailing, this number looks even worse. Hence the panic “fee” for a blue checkmark), and if Tesla stock slides, he’s going to have to sell to cover his obligations, which adds the double whammy of having to pay heavily in taxes. (Not to mention having to answer to shareholder lawsuits questioning the secondment of Tesla engineers to Twitter) And all this before we even get to the possibility of a Twitter competitor coming along to profit from the chaos. All told, there’s a non-trivial chance of Twitter going bankrupt, Tesla dropping in value, and Musk losing everything.

Zuckerberg gives investors the finger. Has given up on core platforms.

Meta stock plunged dramatically last week as investors continued to process the impact of Apple and TikTok on its advertising revenue. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated a complete disregard for their concerns by promising to double down on his speculative multi-billion dollar bet on the Metaverse. He can do this because his personal stockholding controls the company’s voting rights.

What’s interesting amid all the focus on Apple and TikTok is that Meta (and Twitter, to a much greater extent) aren’t solely facing an Apple and TikTok-shaped problem. What’s happening is far more interesting. Here’s a quick summation: Advertising is massive in Dollar terms, but it’s not a growth industry overall. As a % of GDP, it’s been pretty consistent for years. This means that in recent times, every dollar of digital advertising growth has also been a dollar of traditional advertising decline. (This is why traditional media corporations’ valuations collapsed at the same time the likes of Google and Meta grew exponentially)

Now digital advertising has become so big that the same thing is happening within it, which means that for the first time, we’re going to see digital winners and digital losers. Here’s why. Over the past few years, Amazon has built a multi-billion $$ advertising business, Walmart is now doing the same, Netflix is launching an advertising tier this week, Apple is rumored to be getting back into the game in a big way, and the likes of Uber and Doordash are turning to advertising in a desperate attempt to achieve profitability.

Any tech company with a big enough audience is introducing an advertising layer. This creates more supply, but without more demand, it will simply drop the price per ad and spread the revenue over more properties, thus reducing the available revenue to the likes of Meta, or Twitter. Because of its sheer scale, Meta will be a must-advertise for some time, and Zuckerberg is betting he can divert that advertising cash into creating the Metaverse, which will be even more valuable. For Twitter, however, this is likely yet another nail in its advertising coffin. Good luck, Elon.

Pantone color of the year? Black.

If we ever needed proof that Adobe and Pantone are not our friends, it was just announced that if you want to use Pantone Colors in Adobe products, even if the files themselves are 20 years old, you’ll have to pay an additional monthly fee for the privilege or have those colors rendered as black. This is just plain old greed, but it also illustrates that the SaaS business model isn’t anywhere near as customer-friendly as the tech industry would like you to think. Tech firms love SaaS because the stock market endows firms that rent, rather than sell, their software with a much higher valuation multiple. But, a challenge of always using the “latest version” of a piece of software is that you’re subject to the whims of the company making said software. So, if Pantone decides to shake down Adobe for revenue, it can pass this shakedown on to its customers. And customers don’t have a choice because Adobe is a monopolist, and after purchasing Figma, it’s increasingly hard to avoid using its tools. (Although, with Figma selling for $20bn, and Canva valued at $26bn, look for an explosion of VC-backed design tools over the next 12-24months).

This might be the first, but it won’t be the last time this happens. So don’t be surprised by more surprise squeezes from ingredients that live in the bowels of the platforms you use. The profit-challenged are now looking for any source of revenue in a storm.

Auto-generative spam.

Finally, we’re starting to see the first commercial application of AI-driven generative imagery, video, and text. Unfortunately, yet predictably, the VC world isn’t throwing its dollars at startups exploring the edges of what’s possible. Instead, they’re throwing bucketloads of money at content marketing automation. In other words, auto-generated spam is to be the first commercial application of the awesome potential of generative design. Sigh.