Volume 30: Finally. What took you so long.

1. What took you so long? Aunt Jemima & Uncle Ben finally set for change.

tl;dr: Pepsico & Mars respond after years ignoring demands for change.

This week both Pepsico and Mars finally announced their intention to retire the visual presentation, and potentially the names, of both Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s. All I can say is, good. About bloody time.

Of the two, the Aunt Jemima brand is the oldest and probably the most disturbing, having formed in the late 1800’s when the first Aunt Jemima, portrayed by Nancy Green, who had herself been born into slavery, became the face of an innovative new self-rising pancake mix.

While calls for change to Aunt Jemima have been ongoing since the 1960’s, it’s pretty horrifying that it’s taken this long to finally happen. In this particularly difficult to read article, the author points out that Aunt Jemima’s back story as a “mammy” is far indeed from reality. A real life mammy being much more likely to be young, slim, mixed race, and regularly abused by her white slave-owners. Good god.

Over the past 100+ years, how could any brand manager work on this in good conscience?

What will the change likely look like? Well, unlike with Land ‘O Lakes butter, it won’t be as simple as just removing the cliched and insensitive depiction from the packaging. Instead, they’ll be figuring out how to tread a careful line between removing the racially charged imagery while retaining the commercially valuable brand distinctiveness they’ve created over the years. I’d anticipate the colors, typefaces and general look staying the same (red for whatever replaces Aunt Jemima and Orange for Uncle Ben’s). In terms of changing the name, Pepsico will have a choice to make between something beginning with J that sounds similar or changing it completely (likely the former). And Mars, who’ve said they’re only considering a name change, are most likely to just condense the name to “Ben’s”.

As for other brands in similar circumstances? Well, there’s more to go. Please get on with it.

2. Hertz blocked from selling $500m of “worthless” stock.

tl;dr: As if we needed any more proof of just how disconnected from reality the stock market really is.

Hertz is bankrupt. The company is worthless. Loaded with a crushing hangover of debt from their days of private equity ownership, and with a fleet of over half a million vehicles sitting idle due to CV-19 there’s literally nothing good happening here.

So, it may come as a shock to some that speculators/sports betters have been treating the stock as a game of pass the parcel, bouncing the stock price from a bankruptcy announcement low of around 40c to a high of over $5. A pretty spectacular % increase based on, well, absolutely nothing. Of course, not wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth, Hertz promptly announced an audacious attempt to sell a further $500m worth of these overpriced shares through a new share issuance. The only wrinkle in the mix, this new stock is in fact, as Hertz have acknowledged in legal disclosures, completely and utterly worthless. All the $500m would do is go to servicing their debt, which sits at an eye-watering $24bn.

Hey, I know markets can be irrational and stuff, but this really takes the biscuit and really puts a shot into the whole concept of the primacy of shareholder value. I mean what lesson does this teach us? To go bankrupt and optimize for speculators?

Anyway, the SEC have taken a somewhat dim view of the idea and stopped the auction. I guess we’ll see if it returns in some form or another. But here’s a tip. If Hertz are issuing stock and they themselves say it’s worthless, it’s probably worthless.

3. Digital advertising is just a big fat digital sewer.

tl;dr: 20 years of innovation and VC money and this what we’re left with?

OK. I’m going to keep this short. The digital advertising ecosystem is an absolute mess. Putting aside the monopolistic behavior of Google and Facebook for a second, credible experts like Dr. Augustine Fou believe that as much as 50% of all digital media spend is lost through fraud. A supply chain analysis by PwC showed that even without fraud, only around 50% of what is spent on programmatic ads by an advertiser ever make it to the publisher because of middlemen markups, including 15% that literally disappears as untraceable. And let’s think about PwC for a second. They have an army of forensic accountants and investigative auditors to draw on. If they can’t find out where that money going, things must be really, really bad.

And finally, just this week I read about how advertisers have become the unwitting financial supporters of extremism, fringe viewpoints and outright hatred because their ad-tech vendors haven’t got a clue where their algorithms are placing the ads.

(As a sidebar, the Economist just did a brilliant article pointing out that most AI algorithms are more like idiot-savants than actual intelligences, which seems about right)

What’s so very disturbing is that anyone I’ve talked to on this subject, especially people in agencies, just like to skate on by it. Quite literally suggesting that if we don’t talk about it, it’ll go away and everything will be fine.

Well it won’t be fine. It’s going to be far from fine. Too much money is being lost. The system is too inefficient. And too many companies are unwittingly subsidizing repellent fringe content they absolutely don’t want to be seen anywhere near.

Here’s the thing. If you’re in this business and you aren’t a willing part of the change that’s inevitably coming, don’t go crying when it all goes wrong.

4. Zoom-made horror becomes Billboard No.1 smash hit of the summer.

tl;dr: Independent movie maker creatively takes number 1 spot.

Last month Christian Nilsson, a part-time film-maker from Long Island and his YouTuber buddy Eric Tabach figured that with theaters closed, any movie that could make it into a theater would be the highest grossing in the land.

So that’s what they did and on June 10th the top grossing movie in America, debuting at No.1 on the charts with $25k in gross receipts was their home-made, made for free, and shot using Zoom horror movie, “Unsubscribe.”

How did they do it you might wonder? Pretty simply actually, I just never would have thought of it. They hired out a movie theater, sold all the tickets to themselves (so they kept the money and nobody broke any rules by actually having to attend), and then through a once in a lifetime loophole, officially banked the highest grossing movie in the country.

It’s a small thing, but it’s funny and it’s brilliant and creative and I love it.