In This Issue: Industry rebound / Creative prices going down / GenAI didn’t destroy the world / Battle of the elderly political candidates on TV / Social media audience fragmentation.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
Things are busy at work this week. I’m going to skip the long article and get right into what’s up right now.
#1: Marketing, Advertising, PR & Journalism Are Rebounding
Late 2022 and 2023 were kinda hell time for big swaths of the comms world. Lots of layoffs, lots of aggressive budget cutting, lots of shutdowns. Some of it was the C-suite playing line item elimination FOMO, some of it was the economy course-correcting after the weirdness of the COIVD years, part of it was the mass comms world’s tendency towards boom & bust cycles.
Things are going in the opposite direction. LinkedIn job boards are filling up again, I’m seeing a lot more RFPs going around, budgets for projects are going up again. But…
#2: Creative Pricing Is Changing And It’s Because Of Freelancers, Not GenAI
I’m seeing a distinct 10-20% drop in the amount clients are willing to pay for creative services including graphic design, video editing, animation, voiceover and writing. This is happening when there’s a ton of inflation everywhere (LOL ask me how many of the SaaS services my agency uses tried to do crazy price increases this year) and it sucks.
The reason for this isn’t generative AI like ChatGPT and MidJourney. It’s largely the fact that a lot of great talent came on the market last year because of layoffs and are largely willing to work at reduced rates.
I expect the decline in pricing for midrange and high-end creative services to correct itself over the next year as agencies and in-house staff up again. However, I think entry-level creative service pricing is going to be low for quite some time.
#3: GenAI Didn’t Destroy Creative Jobs
MidJourney, ChatGPT, Claude and all the rest came into the world with a ton of hype.
It turns out that, no, DALL-E won’t put graphic designers out of work. ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for a copywriter.
You can do amazingly cool art with MidJourney, but in almost all cases it would be cheaper to just hire a talented human artist.
ChatGPT is great at generating outlines and short 100-word articles, but chokes and fails at longer copy.
We’re early on in the process for all of this, but my feeling about GenAI in general is that it’s more of a cool new technology like smartphones than a destroyer of everything.
#4: This Presidential Election Won’t Be Like 2016 Or 2012
I lose subscribers every time I post about politics, so I’ll just say this: Joe Biden and Donald Trump are as old as the hills. The 2024 election media cycle will most likely have minimal debates between the candidates, media coverage that focuses more on gaffes than a political horserace, and much less social media presence from both candidates.
That said, there are lots of unknowns here. Given the Chicago area’s propensity towards aggressive protests, the DNC might be a shitshow. Trump’s array of legal problems might turn into a circus. But this won’t be the year for the cable news channels to turn political drama into ad revenue.
#5: Social Media Is Fragmenting
Now that Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X is complete, the service still has a healthy user base thanks to network effects but it’s nowhere like it was in the 2010s. Instagram is still chugging along, TikTok’s user base seems to be aging (not a bad thing), Threads is gaining in popularity and LinkedIn keeps growing. Then there’s Bluesky and Reddit and Substack and…
Audiences are fragmenting into an endless array of walled and semi-walled gardens. Find where your audiences are and go for them.
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