Volume 47: A new low from the King of lows, designer CEO’s & an Ant.

1. A new low from MullenLowe for the King of lows, Burger King.

tl;dr: Free burgers for visiting sites of economic despair is gross.

A whole bunch of stuff has been written about how awful advertising has become, how ineffective, how creatively lacking, and how deeply cynical it is. I’ve always felt that the ads that get made are more reflective of the agencies' cultures than the brands they are made for, which is why we see so much casual cruelty in the ads. Not because it’s right for the brand, but because the advertising agencies' cultures are so casually cruel. (Don’t just take my word for it, advertising agencies have normalized inhuman working conditions)

Anyway, casual slapstick cruelty in an ad is one thing, but poking fun at widespread economic depression amid a pandemic is something else entirely. In a Halloween campaign for Burger King, entitled “Scary Places,” we are shown abandoned fast food restaurants with the schtick that they’re abandoned and scary because they weren’t originally a Burger King.

But let’s get real here. The reason these restaurants are abandoned has nothing to do with who used to own them and everything to do with the economic collapse of the communities they served. These aren’t scary places because they were once a McDonald’s or Wendy’s, they’re desperately sad places because they’re a permanent reminder of the economic depression and hollowing out of jobs that used to serve these communities. And what are we supposed to do about it? Oh yeah, that’s right. We’re supposed to drive over there in our fancy cars and use a location-based coupon to rub salt in the wounds and claim a free burger.

Seriously, come on. This is a new low from MullenLowe for a brand that seems to embrace new lows under the mistaken impression that trolling equals creativity. (As I’ve pointed out before, if you look at it on a same-store sales basis, moldy burgers and nonsense like this simply aren’t working as a means of executing their creatively driven strategy.)

There’s a special place in hell for anyone who thinks this campaign is OK, the people who came up with it, those who signed off on it, and anyone who thinks it is somehow to be lauded as creativity. This isn’t creative. It’s just gross.

2. Designer CEO’s?

tl;dr: Good idea. What’s it going to take?

As a throwaway line during last week's Pivot podcast, Scott Galloway mentioned that he thought the next wave of CEOs would probably be designers. Which is pretty interesting when you think about it. Of course, it isn’t unheard of; the former CEO of Nike and the current CEO and founder of AirBnB (which was the subject of the Pivot conversation) are both designers. It’s just an exceedingly rare path.

Typically, in Western corporations the most common route to the top has run through one of two avenues: Finance, especially popular in the UK, or the law, especially popular in the US. Of course, over the years there have been a few CEO recruiting fads and trends that led to marketers and management consultants getting the nod, but generally speaking the most likely path to the top is way more likely to run through spreadsheets and contracts than Photoshop.

This is problematic on its face because it means the best minds and most ambitious young businesspeople are way more likely to go to business or law school than to pursue a design education.

Unfortunately, neither finance nor the law offers the best skillset when we consider what’s happening around us in today’s economy. Yes, these remain essential skills in terms of how corporations manage shareholders and regulators. Still, they don’t inspire a particularly expansive mindset when it comes to imagining and re-imagining what the corporation can do for its customer. And that’s important, because if you look at today’s “story stocks” that are receiving a vastly disproportionate volume of shareholder capital, what sets them apart is largely their perceived ability to leverage intangible assets (technology, brand and other IP) to out innovate and out-imagine the competition in creating new value for the customer.

And what background is most likely to create an imaginative, innovative, and value-creating mindset? Yes, design really should be ticking that box. But does it?

Design thinking has greatly muddied the waters. Accountants and lawyers claiming to be designers because they once read a book by Tim Brown and watched a workshop on YouTube doesn’t cut it, but corporations seem to find that separation exceptionally hard to make. Equally, the many years of design education most designers receive don’t really prepare them at all for the realities of business leadership, so this doesn’t much help either. There needs to be something in the middle that pushes the agenda forward.

Where’s that going to come from? Well, I suspect some of it will have to come from education. Specifically, design schools embedding business leadership into their design courses, business schools emphasize design more specifically as a part of business leadership, and/or business schools tailoring an MBA-like Masters degree program for people who already have a design background. Probably all three.

It also requires that designers get the opportunity to step up within organizations, get onto leadership tracks, and demonstrate their real value. I fear that while there are many more designers in modern corporations than ever, many have developed Stockholm Syndrome under their captors, the engineers. Engineers who tend to treat design as little more than the executional wing of engineering dedicated to A/B testing their every whim. (As an aside, I have nothing against A/B testing as a tool, only as a pathology. Contrary to the wisdom of engineers, A/B testing two pieces of crap isn’t modern day alchemy; it can’t magically turn shit into gold).

3. The world’s largest insect is an Ant.

tl;dr: Ant Group, a giant of a corporation, goes public.

Immediately prior to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, I went to China for a pitch. (As an aside, we later found out we hadn’t won when we received a cryptic single-line message in Chinese that roughly translated said, “Client been fired.” At least I hope that’s what it meant, because what Google Translate actually said was that his employer had killed him…)

Anyway, at the time, I distinctly remember being both over and underwhelmed by the Chinese brand landscape. On the one hand, there was clearly the energy of growth and expansion, yet on the other hand, most of it was maddeningly derivative of the West rather than new and uniquely Chinese.

And yet, contrary to my observation, Chinese businesses were already original, it just wasn’t where it could be seen on the high street. It’s easy to sit here in the West and not pay attention, but Chinese internet companies have become by far the most innovative corporations at scale in the world today. And one of those, Ant Group, is about to go public in the world’s largest IPO.

Ant, controlled by Jack Ma of Alibaba fame, is far from as tiny as its name might suggest. Upon listing on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges, it will be valued somewhere north of $300bn. In context, it will immediately have a greater value than Citigroup and Goldman Sachs combined.

But you've probably never heard of it if you don’t live in China. So what on earth is Ant and why does it matter? To put it simply, there isn’t an arena in the Chinese consumer financial system that Ant doesn’t touch. Starting life as Alipay, the payments arm of Alibaba, it spun out in 2011 and then spread its services across the Chinese online ecosystem. Today, in addition to its mostly mobile digital payment offerings, Ant provides loans, savings accounts, investment products, and various forms of insurance to over 700 million monthly users (more than twice the population of the US). From here, the numbers become even more mind boggling. It generated $17 trillion in digital payments volume over the past 12 months, has loaned over $300bn to small businesses and consumers, and during the peak of the Chinese shopping season last year, processed 459,000 transactions per second. (Compare this to Visa, which says it can process 65,000 per second).

But why so successful? Well, not at all downplaying what has been achieved, in some respects this is a story of right place, right time. First, the sheer economic growth of China and the creation of the world’s largest middle class. Second, China was far behind in payments infrastructure, credit card usage, and what we might think of as modern-day consumer finance. Third, cell phones have become people’s primary route to the Internet. Add this together, and just like cellphone companies in the developing world leapfrogged legacy infrastructure, Ant has leapfrogged the card-based payments infrastructure of the West and skipped straight to mobile.