Volume 62: CashApp not Tidal.

1. Square pays Jay-Z $300m to join its board. Has to take Tidal too.

tl;dr: Cash App likely way more important in this than Tidal.

OK, so in the list of utterly bizarre acquisitions, financial services company Square buying music streaming service Tidal is right up there with Saatchi & Saatchi trying to buy Midland Bank way back in the go, go ‘80’s. At face value, it literally makes no sense.

The PR in support of the announcement is hardly believable. Something, something, blah, blah, something about the intersection of artists and money: and while there may well be an attempt to revolutionize music economics, you hardly have to go and buy a profitability-challenged streaming service to try and figure that out.

So, what are the other, more likely reasons for this deal? Well, partly this could be as simple as Jack Dorsey wanting to have an excuse to hang out with Jay-Z and drink champagne on his yacht, but actually, I think there’s a synergy nobody is really talking about right now - Cash App.

Even though it’s been growing, Cash App kinda stinks today. It’s a fairly confused “everything” service trying to become the go-to financial services provider for Gen Z consumers, from payments and peer-to-peer transfers to basic banking and stock market investing. But the product isn’t all that clear, the branding is horrible, and the try-hard marketing is so uncool, they did this. Now I don’t know about you, but if this is serious, it’s ridiculous, and if it’s ironic, the irony is definitely lost. But what I can say with all seriousness is that no self-respecting teen is going to be seen dead walking around in Cash by Cash App duds. Not even my son and his name is Cash.

But, and it’s a very big but, if you look at the valuation of services like PayPal and the likely IPO value of Robinhood, it’s pretty clear that Cash App is the one business Square owns that has the genuine potential to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise in its own right. And that’s why I think Jay-Z is really getting involved.

He and his team have proven highly adept at navigating our current cultural environment. He brings star power and has a proven entrepreneurial record. All things Cash App desperately needs. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Tidal was simply the cost of entry to have Jay-Z and his team take an active role in the Cash App brand to shift it from pathetically try-hard to something with meaningful cultural cachet.

Now, will it be successful? Who knows. But if Jay-Z’s involvement helps juice Cash App even close to its potential valuation, it’ll be the best $300m Jack Dorsey ever spent. Or ever will spend.

2. Finally. Somebody made a responsive identity.

tl;dr: Ten years late, but here at last.

If you know me, there are a bunch of things I’ll likely bore you with. If you’re a designer and you know me, one of them is my rant about why technology hasn’t become an integral part of the creative process when designing brand identities. It’s something I was sure was going to happen ten years ago. It just seemed so logical that we’d see a movement toward responsive identity after responsive web-design became the norm. Only in the case of a brand identity, there’s the opportunity to respond to so much more than scale and screen size. The identity can react to people, conditions, geography, sound, movement. Be reflective of different states, listen, think, talk and use code to open the creative aperture to do something fundamentally new.

But, for the longest time, nothing happened. I mean, the four dots of Google kinda got close, but that was six years ago and was a bit like having an appetizer when you really wanted an entree; it left you hungry for more.

Shockingly, rather than push on from this, we in fact got stuck with the stultifying calcification of 20th-century modernism that continues to plague 21st-century identity design, and which has only recently been broken up by a penchant for 19th-century retro as the kids became utterly bored with Helvetica in pastels.

So, it was like a breath of fresh air to see the team at Collins do the absolutely blindingly obvious and create an identity for the SF Symphony that doesn’t just crudely animate (you know, like every single identity presentation we now make) but has an engine built in code that allows it to react to music that’s being played. Hallelujah, finally, something that looks like it was designed for the 21st century we are in.

I just hope this isn’t the last time we see a responsive identity created with care and craft and code and some semblance of originality. Because as well done as the SF Symphony is, we could be doing a whole lot more.

3. A summary of marketing ROI short enough you won’t fall asleep while reading it.

tl;dr: Some things don’t need much commentary.

Marketing ROI isn’t generally a topic that gets the juices flowing but is critical to anyone in the business. It’s also a topic that a scary number of people on both the client and agency side simply don’t understand.

Any-whoo, imagine my delight when I stumbled across this very excellent summary of what it is and how it works. I’d never heard of Mutiny before, but this is smart and well worth reading, particularly for anyone who’s ever wondered about the concept, not realized that it’s actually a measure of efficiency, or been inordinately impressed with an agency claiming to have created a “354% increase in ROI,” while not actually knowing what that means if anything.

Anyway. It’s good, it’s well worth reading, and it certainly doesn’t need any further commentary from me.