Volume 75: Space janitor.

1. Jeff Bezos. Space janitor.

tl;dr: Can somebody please design a better-looking spacesuit?

Nobody ever made the mistake of thinking that someone had good taste just because they were rich, which is handy because the tastelessness of the obscenely wealthy is on prime display right now as two of the richest men in the world, and Richard Branson, vie to generate the most headlines about their adventures in space by totally reinventing that most iconic of outfits, the spacesuit.

First up on the catwalk, we have SpaceX with what the NYTimes breathlessly refers to as a “space tuxedo.” But literally no amount of PR boosterism dramatically lit studio photography or liberal enhancement through photoshop can hide the sad reality that the SpaceX spacesuit actually makes middle-aged astronauts look like a cross between a half-finished Power Ranger and an Oompa Loompa.

Next up, we have Sir Dick and his collaborators over at UnderArmour letting their imagination run free…No, actually, wait a minute, they didn’t. What they actually did was rob the costumes department over at Star Trek Discovery (Don’t worry if you haven’t seen it, it’s on Paramount+, so not many have). But, while Sir Dick playing out his cosplay fantasies as a gold-trimmed space Admiral is amusing, we really need to talk about the pilot’s boots. I’m pretty sure these were last seen on Judd Nelson in 1980s classic “The Breakfast Club.” Or perhaps on a septic tank technician?

But, we’ve saved the best for last because by far and away the most disappointing of all the spacesuits comes from world’s richest man and most jacked middle-aged billionaire, Jeff Bezos, over at Blue Origin. Here, he and his brother, along with Wally Funk (which is a very cool story, actually) and another passenger with more money than sense, are about to make history dressed as…space janitors.

Seriously, it looks like the entire Blue Origins design budget went on making the spaceship itself look like a…well, see below and decide for yourself. Anyway, as a result, we’re left with a spacesuit that looks like it came from Amazon Basics for $9.99 and two-day Prime delivery. I’ve seen Halloween costumes for kids that look more credible as space attire than this.

It’s all kind of sad, to be honest. NASA in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s made their astronauts look like Michelin men and heroically cool at the same time, and they were the government. So you’d think at least one of these billionaires and their money could come up with a half-decent suit between them? I mean, it isn’t like we haven’t had years of science fiction motifs to draw on or anything.

I suppose, if they absolutely had to borrow from the movies, wouldn’t it have been cooler to go as Darth Vader than a Power Ranger/Oompa Loompa combo? Or maybe Sir Dick could’ve gone the whole hog as a real space admiral in maroon? And as for Jeff Bezos, surely he could’ve raided Amazon for some Han Solo pants.

2. Robbin’ Robin files for IPO. Corporate Governance hits rock bottom.

tl;dr: Company with unprecedented troubles files to go public.

Robinhood is a company that almost perfectly sums up the crazy of the period we are in. On the one hand, it claims, with some validity, to be democratizing the financial markets, evening out the playing field, and giving average folks the ability to trade with the same capacity as hedge funds and other professional investors.

On the other, it faces unprecedented legal and regulatory issues for a business seeking IPO: Its CEO had federal prosecutors serve a search warrant for his cellphone, the financial industry regulator just fined it $70m for an array of anti-customer misdeeds, it’s under a cease and desist order from the SEC that limits its ability to market the offering and faces numerous class-action lawsuits filed by consumers concerning outages and trading restrictions put in place during the meme-stock furor of 2020.

And none of this even touches on the fact that a miss-communication about day-trading losses caused the suicide of a 20-year-old customer who falsely believed he’d lost over $700,000, or the fact the entire app experience is built using dark patterns to encourage the kind of trading behavior that directly contributes to the 80% of day traders who lose money or the fact that the business model driving Robinhood is utterly shady.

It’s a true conundrum. Retail trading on free platforms is the singular and defining consumer trend of the past 18 months; it has directly contributed to wealth creation for a new generation of investors, kept businesses like Gamestop in business, and led to short-seller hedge funds that are used to winning big, losing billions to the point of being bought or shut-down instead.

But. And it’s big but, Robinhood is also a no-good, very bad, maybe even terrible company. Its most senior executives might end up behind bars, and they’re full of shit. Take the claim that the CEO and his co-founder took a 90% pay drop to “help democratize finance.” (Bloomberg paywall, sorry). What a load of utter nonsense with a cherry on it. Do you know why execs in tech really make moves like nominal $1 salaries? It’s got nothing to do with democratization and everything to do with the fact that stock is oh-so-much more attractive than salary because you can perfectly legitimately avoid paying taxes on it. And guess what, Vlad Tenev and his co-conspirator own a lot of stock, which I don’t see them giving up in the name of “democratization” any time soon.

But here’s the real kicker. Robinhood is obviously a problem company, a problem IPO, and a corporate governance disaster, so which investment bank would touch that? Especially considering their own efforts to rehabilitate their corporate images? Oh, yeah. That would be all of them, led from the front by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase as lead underwriters.

Of course, we in the branding world can’t really talk either, as there’s some very high-profile boosterism going on for work done for Robinhood right now. (Look, I get the people doing the work boosting it, but come on award juries. Rewarding mediocre design work done for terrible companies just because they became infamous for entirely different reasons is so last century).

So here we are. While Robinhood is a no good, very bad, possibly even terrible company, at least it’s consistent in its terribleness. It’s arguably worse to see all these other players that like to claim to be doing good boosting something so obviously bad.

Welcome to 2021 and the full glory of all of its hypocrisy.

3. What’s the role of marketing again?

tl;dr: Horse bolted, ad-agency desperately tries to close gate.

I’ve never met Rory Sutherland, but like others, I quite enjoy his ability to talk about advertising and marketing-related topics in a funny and thought-provoking fashion. Having heard many a boring speaker drivel on about marketing, I suspect this is quite rare.

Anyway, while going through this thoroughly readable and quotable, if bubble-gum lite article focused on how marketing needs to shift priorities from efficiency to experimentation (confirmation bias feels so good), I couldn’t help but feel that he was kind of missing the point and about twenty years too late.

Let’s start with missing the point. At the heart of the problem is a common issue that catches many in advertising: The false equivalence between advertising and marketing. It’s one of those situations where people get so deep into their own little world that they don’t even notice. Yet, it’s glaringly obvious to anyone from the outside and creates all sorts of credibility issues when you say marketing, but mean advertising.

Secondly, why is he about twenty years too late? Well, the very large creative agencies (which Rory represents) have long been perceived, with very good reason, to be a terrible waste of money because they’ve done almost nothing over the years to connect their business model to any kind of meaningful measures of value. Instead, seeking to replace the old “15% of media” with a similar level of funding based on “FTEs” (Full-Time Equivalents), which is fine until you turn up to a client meeting with a team that’s six times bigger than the clients and no real means of justifying why because there isn’t a justification.

In parallel, the disruptive world of digital advertising took off, driven by technology engineers and salespeople who had no such business model to protect and instead saw nothing but upside. They understood that from an accounting perspective, advertising is a cost, that much of it appeared to be wasted, and that by using tracking and data, they could tell a compelling story of how to use scarce corporate resources more efficiently (irrespective of whether this is actually true, and much evidence suggests that it is not).

So, where does this leave us? In a world where advertising agencies falsely equate what they do (advertising) with what their clients are tasked with doing (marketing), where they still seek to protect a broken business model based on a desire to achieve the equivalent of the % of media as their fee rather than connecting their business model to any kind of value creation. And where people like Rory get wheeled out to tell marketers that they’re doing it wrong instead of finding a way to create customers out of them, which is ironic considering his own quoting of Drucker.

So, while I thoroughly enjoy his turn of phrase, I can’t help but find Mr. Sutherland’s prescriptions both strategically lacking and overwhelmingly self-serving. Contrast this, for a second, with the writings of management professor Roger Martin. While his focus is largely on strategy rather than marketing or advertising, there are obvious points of overlap. I’ve talked before about his fascinating suggestion that marketing and strategy should merge, but something else caught my eye recently about the balance between “exploitation” and “exploration” within the economy. Now, imagine for a second that instead of railing against the rise of engineering-driven corporations, Rory had instead talked about the relative value of advertising in both exploiting markets and exploring them and the need for business model innovation by the advertising agencies to achieve both.

Well, then we might really have been in business.