Volume 72: Dark patterns.

1. Pepsi takes over as king of stunts. But why?

tl;dr: Value-maximizing behavior disguised as marketing.

Last week, this campaign from Pepsi landed. While graphically cute, it’s one of those at-best head-scratchers. “Addressing the 800lb gorilla in the room” by highlighting that the biggest burger chains in the world don’t sell your product is at best…odd and at worst likely to be talked about intensely in advertising circles while being almost completely ignored by the consumer. But, like other stunt marketers before it, there’s probably a method to this madness; it just might not have much to do with the customer or commercial success for the brand.

For the past few years, Burger King has been the king of marketing stunts, reaching its nadir when the rotten burger campaign blew the minds of advertising talking heads but did almost nothing to sell more burgers. Plenty has been written about the stunt strategy overall, which seems to have two polar opposite perspectives. On the one hand, the “creativity” punches above its weight crowd, and on the other, the “weak commercial results” for BK crowd. Personally, I think they both have a point and that BKs issues go way beyond its advertising. We actually need to look at how the business is structured to really understand what’s been going on here and why it’s relevant to the latest Pepsi stunt.

Let’s start with ownership and control. BK is owned by Restaurant Brands International, which is in turn controlled by (in)famous Brazilian behemoth, 3G Capital, which also owns or controls Anheuser-Busch Inbev and Kraft-Heinz.

Famous for implementing strict cost controls through the exhausting process of zero-based budgeting, the strategy of 3G Capital has largely been one of brand arbitrage. It buys businesses with portfolios of strong brands in mature categories that boast relatively weak sales growth and valuations. It then slashes costs, and because it takes time for brand equity to decline, watches, as sales decline slower than costs get cut, which increases short-term profitability. This, in turn, boosts the short-term valuation of its investments.

One way of thinking of this is that they convert long-term brand equity into short-term profits through the vehicle of slashing costs.

In the case of Burger King, we saw a brand trying to succeed in a highly competitive market with a small advertising budget that had to be justified every year, limited format or menu innovation, and almost no investment in the customer experience. An almost impossible trick to pull off.

So what do you do? Well, in the process of trying to create success where there isn’t the possibility of achieving it, you end up investing in your own profile instead, which is exactly what the now-former CMO, Fernando Machado, appears to have done. Rather than place all his bets on the tiny chance of achieving the impossible, he engaged in what economists refer to as value-maximizing behavior by raising the profile of the work he was overseeing to tee up a move to pastures new. In his case, Activision, a significantly more interesting company in one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, unlike burgers.

Now, executives engaging in value-maximizing behavior for themselves isn’t exactly new. It’s what every CEO does when they take profits and buy back stock instead of reinvesting in the business. Unlike investments in innovation or R&D, stock buybacks guarantee the stock price will increase (as there’s less of it on the market) and thus their own compensation (since executives are primarily compensated in the form of stock).

So, what does the value-maximizing behavior of the now-former CMO of BurgerKing have to do with Pepsi releasing a stunt ad? Well, quite a lot if you think about it. You see, running marketing for Pepsi isn’t anywhere near the prestige position it once was. It’s the number 2 brand in a mature and declining category that’s running contrary to every health-based trendline, where not only isn’t there much of a growth opportunity, but the chances of taking top-spot are literally zero.

This means that if you’re the CEO of Pepsico, you’re looking at the Pepsi brand as a cash cow to be milked for profits so that you can fund other businesses, like snacks, which is where the real growth opportunity lies. In turn, this means that if you’re in charge of marketing for the Pepsi brand, what you’re being asked to do is going to look awfully like what marketers working for 3G Capital controlled businesses are also being asked to do…which is to “punch above your weight” by doing something, anything, with less, possibly a lot less.

So, how do you respond? Well, in this case, Alma and Veynermedia (famous for re-branding spam as “volume creative”) were hired to create a stunt that’ll get vastly more play in advertising circles than it will with the customer.

Why? Because there’ll be a bunch of metrics showing that it achieved more attention through social media virality than the total media spend, which makes it look financially efficient irrespective of whether it sells any more Pepsi or not. For bonus points, almost all of that attention will probably come from the inside baseball world of marketing, which means that hopefully, for the people in charge of the Pepsi brand, they’ll be in the shop window for a move somewhere else.

So, yeah. Stunt campaigns. Almost certainly, they’re about marketing VPs in impossible situations maximizing value by seeking pastures new. And ad agencies seeking creative awards, of course. But there’s nothing new there. They’re always doing that.

2. User-centricity is broken; we need to be responsible to people instead.

tl;dr: Designers need to take a stand for the people they serve.

Talk to any designer about what they do. The conversation will inevitably revolve around ideas of being human and user-centered, designing for people, making things easy, making things beautiful, intuitive, accessible, etc.

These are all fine and good as aspirations, but they’re far from the reality of the designed experience we all face daily.

Far from being user-centric, it would be much more accurate to label contemporary product and service design “business-model centric.”

What I mean by this is that rather than the best way for a user to solve a problem, design is more often used to shape behavior in a way that’s good for the business model but not necessarily good for us.

Facebook says it’s connecting the world, but it’s actually designed for engagement addiction; the more time we spend on the app, the more personal data is scraped, the more ads sold, and the less time we spend elsewhere. The social consequences of what we’re engaging with be damned.

Robinhood says it’s democratizing finance, but it’s actually designed to drive trading volume; the more wildly it makes stock-price changes look, and the easier and accessible it makes complex derivatives trading, the more money Robinhood makes through order flow. The personal consequences of such volatility be damned.

Tinder says it’s about finding your perfect match, but it’s actually designed to get you addicted to it; the more impersonal swiping left and right becomes, the more you objectify people and treat them disposably, the more you require the immediate sugar-hit of being matched, the more money Tinder makes from ads and your not ever finding that match. The emotional, personal, and increasingly violent consequences be damned.

And these are just a few examples. There are so many more, like Instagram driving teen self-image issues, mostly young among girls. Or YouTube algorithms radicalizing mostly our young boys. Or the new wave of creator services monetized by “tipping” people at levels vastly below minimum wage.

The thing all of these negative consequences have in common is that they’re designed-in. These aren’t bugs; they’re features put there to serve a purpose, just not a purpose that’s necessarily good for us.

As a result, much of what we laud as modern “human-centric” design is actually no better than what fast food or cigarettes have been doing for years. And it’s high time that we recognized it.

Now, I’m not naive. I get that businesses are commercial enterprises, and I also get that most designers aren’t senior enough to meaningfully affect what they’re doing because they’re pursuing paths that have been defined for them by others. I also get that this is hardly a new topic. Dark patterns in design is a well-known and discussed issue.

What does concern me, though, is how we’ve elevated many of the design practices behind the products I mention above to the point where people genuinely think that things like Facebook, YouTube, or Tinder truly represent ‘best-practices in user-centric design when it’s clear that actually, they are not.

So, instead of thinking in terms of user-centric design, perhaps we should start thinking in terms of user-responsible design instead. Going beyond centricity to think more about the people we are responsible to. If design is one of the superpowers of modern business, it surely brings with it the responsibility to apply that superpower with the best interests of the people who will be using it in mind and the strength to push back when it is not.

I’m not saying this will be easy, but if we were to expend half as much energy finding commercially viable ways to be responsible to our users as we do self-promoting our claims of user-centricity, I think we could be pretty damn successful.

And perhaps sleep a little better at night.

3. National Lampoons Warner Bros. Vacation.

tl;dr: Fabulous new logo-thing for Warner Bros Discovery.

So, following their disastrous flirtation with being a pipes-to-content company, AT&T cut their losses by spinning off WarnerMedia into a merger with Discovery that left people asking what the new company would be called and what it would look like. Well, probably not that many people outside of the new company's employees, granted, but some people anyway.

And now we know.

It will be called Warner Bros. Discovery, and it will look like National Lampoons Vacation. Which I have to say is kind of brilliant in its utter lack of brilliance.

No flat design here, no considered simplification, no thoughtful reinterpretation of the past with an eye to the future. No hyperbole about how transformational it all is. Nope. Just a good old-fashioned jaunty-looking comedy movie font on top of a blue sky with clouds and a slightly comedic tagline ripped straight from an actual old movie: “The stuff dreams are made of.”

It even looks slightly out of focus and faded, like it’s a screenshot from a pre-HD, pre-4K world. How brilliantly refreshing. Well, at least it isn’t completely boring anyway.

Can we telegraph anything from this move? Well, probably not all that much, to be honest, except that they either have an acute sense of humor, or they don’t have much taste. Probably the latter.

It looks like the name was decided at the last minute and an internal design team asked to knock up a bunch of logo options from which the senior execs picked this one, the design teams last choice, that was only in there because they were told to have an option that felt “like movies used to” because the CEO has a nostalgia for movies past. In fact, this option might even have been a joke that nobody thought would be chosen. (Which just proves the old adage that a CEO might pick anything they’re shown, so only show them things you can live with).

Anyway, if I had to hazard a guess, maybe it does suggest a desire to get Warner back to its movie roots? I don’t know, but Warner Bros. as a name is at least a lot better than WarnerMedia, which sounds like a bad ad agency that does volume stunts. Or maybe that’s VeynerMedia. It’s so hard to keep up.