Volume 128: A Little Different…

A Little Different This Week.

tl;dr: Loads to talk about, but I have Covid. So, different.

It’s the epitome of sod’s law that, after weeks of slim pickings, when I feel utterly spoiled for choice in terms of things to talk about, I should fall foul of Covid for the first time. Fortunately, I seem to have a fairly mild bout, but it does mean a more stream of consciousness Off Kilter as I battle my way through it. Rather than share nothing, I figured I’d give you a quick run-through of things worth discussing—apologies for typos, grammatical quirks, or any loss of personality. I’m not quite myself.

First up, it looks like the Helvetica in Pastels movement is finally getting stomped on as Burberry unveils its retro-new logo, which unlike what came before, is loaded with character and personality. Thank God. Finally. Hallelujah. I’m doing a little happy dance over here. Well, as close to happy as a Scotsman can get, anyway.

I’ve talked so often about the commoditizing effect of monotonous minimalist branding that I was boring even myself, so it’s nice to see a major global brand finally doing something different.

It’s hard to say why all these brands fell down the exact same rabbit hole at the exact same time, but aside from FOMO, I suspect tech firm aspirations had a lot to do with it. Over the past 14 or so years, we’ve lauded tech firms every which way from Sunday. We’ve viewed them as the smartest cats on the block, idolized them as innovators, desired them as clients and employers, and been jealous of their stock market performance. But, now things are changing.

Not only have tech firms shown what they really think of designers by firing them (the link is to a post by Marc Shillum, who is worth following on LinkedIn. I once had lunch with Marc. He turned up in a disheveled tuxedo shirt, minus the tuxedo. I spent the whole time trying to decide if this was a sartorial statement or whether he’d just come straight from some raucous awards afterparty).

Anyway, the facade of tech superiority is finally beginning to crack. In light of its anemic response to ChatGPT, Google was this week described as the IBM of the 21st century. Which probably wasn’t meant as a compliment.

With that in mind, Google belatedly launched; wait for it. “Bard An Experimental Conversational Service Powered by LaMDA.” Yeah, that’s the best name the best minds in tech could come up with. I guess Google must’ve fired all its good naming people too, and just left the engineers to get on with it. More importantly, Bard got shit wrong live on stage at its announcement, and Google’s stock dived 7% as a result. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles North in Seattle, the launch of a new version of Bing enabled by ChatGPT led to a 10X increase in downloads of the Bing app, which I’m guessing means at least ten people downloaded it then.

All told, this is nothing less than an existential threat to Google. Yes, it might have the best AI tech and engineers, but that’s not how it makes gazillions of dollars in profit. Instead, that comes from enshittifying the Google search experience via ads. Shift a meaningful proportion of search traffic to an AI engine answering questions rather than pointing you toward websites, and suddenly all that juicy AdWords profit is threatened.

It will be interesting to see if Google can live up to its carefully crafted image as the world’s pre-eminent innovator while simultaneously dealing with the twin existential threats of search disruption and antitrust action. If the rather pathetic introduction of Bard is any indication, it will struggle.

Thinking of all the newfound tech frostiness toward design, in some ways, this is a good thing because it releases talent into the wild who can go on to do other things. I’m guessing we’ll see a bunch of very talented people ending up in very unexpected places…Like Landor.

Rounding out these observations on tech, I subscribed to the BrXnd newsletter by the rather brilliant Noah Briar. I’m unsure what to make of it, but I laud his efforts to document experimentation around AI and brands. There’s clearly going to be a huge amount of change coming to us all on that front. Within the nuggets in there, I was particularly intrigued by his notion that brand guidelines are simply APIs for humans and that in the future, we’ll likely see a new version where guidelines become literal APIs meant for machines. I’ve felt this to be a logical evolution for a long time, even if it will be pretty revolutionary when it happens.

Stepping back into marketing for a second, some fascinating work has been done around advertising effectiveness. Cutting straight to the chase, new empirical research shows that ads with the largest brand-building effects are just as good at driving short-term sales as short-term activation-focused ads. The neat part is that it doesn’t work in reverse. This means short-term sales activation does nothing to build a brand, whereas longer-term brand-building builds a brand and drives short-term sales too.

This tale will run and run and has huge implications. First, forward-thinking businesses that already believe in brand-building will double down. Second, it’s likely to push fence-sitters into the brand-building camp. And, finally, it’s empirical proof that much of what the tech firms (them again) have been pushing at marketers for the past ten years or so was, in fact, bullshit. Or, perhaps more accurately, an engineer’s fantasy of what advertising should be. Which, it turns out, is something akin to them being drug dealers with marketers as their well-heeled yet unwitting junkies. You see, the net effect of the push to digital sales activation under the guise of “one to one, blah blah” rather than enabling us to efficiently build memorable and effective brands with staying power just made businesses dependent on tech platforms for a continuing fix of short-term sales.

Finally, in a move I cannot fathom the details of because it’s so arcane, retailer Bed Bath & Beyond went from imminent collapse to a novel and weirdly structured $1bn capital injection. As far as people much smarter than I on the topic can decipher, it’s a bailout explicitly designed to profit from BB&Bs status as a meme stock.

It seems that Hudson Bay Capital and its partners are buying $1bn worth of stock in a company that’s currently worth only $300m in a deal designed to become wildly profitable to them should BB&B go on one of the meme-driven rollercoasters it’s been on multiple times in the past few years.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that this incentivizes certain parties to release the bot hordes to pump BB&B on Twitter and Reddit. But, yeah. Don’t be surprised if you see some major boosterism coming.

Just remember. What’s good for a hedge fund bailing out a failing corporation in a novel fashion might not be so good for diamond hand apes on their journey to the moon. So be careful out there.