🤖Context Collapse: Why Industry Shifts Matter
My media career story and the failure of smart guesses: CC #295
In This Issue: Neal talks about his own career, how smartphones and streaming made everything weird, and why making cool stuff means embracing the weird.
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.
CONTACT ME IF WE CAN HELP WITH NEWSLETTERS, PODCASTS, OP-EDS, VIDEOS, UX WRITING AND ANYTHING ELSE MARKETING-Y! WE BELIEVE IN DEVELOPING STRONG BIZDEV PIPELINES (FOR US) AND HELPING CLIENTS MAKE COOL STUFF (FOR YOU). WE BOTH WIN!
So before we jump into today’s article, a few videos and articles I’ve published lately. I hope you find them helpful:
Breaking bad habits at work (LinkedIn video, 1:00)
Podcast: On Public Art and Intellectual Property
With Sarah Conley Odenkirk, Partner at Cowan, DeBaets and Yayoi Shionoiri, Executive Director, the Estate of Chris Burden and the Studio of Nancy Rubins (AccelPro podcast, 23:25)
How do you network when you work-from-home or hybrid? (LinkedIn video, 0:30)
Maximizing Revenue: Bizdev Pipelines For Small Agencies (Small Agency Journal)
-Neal
Let’s Talk Work Trajectory
Confession time: I’m 43 years old. I had a chaotic family life growing up (another article for another day) and didn’t graduate college until I was 24.
In those almost-20-years in the professional world, my career had a few distinct parts.
I worked in the trenches of NYC media from 2004-2008 or so at places like Gawker Media and MenuPages.
I then went to grad school—coincidentally and conveniently right before the economic crisis—which lasted from 2008-2010.
I then worked at Fast Company as a reporter, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, from 2010-2017.
I then switched industries altogether to advertising and became a senior copywriter at R/GA’s Los Angeles office in 2017. I was unceremoniously laid off around 2 months later after our office lost a key client and had a major new client fall through.
I started freelancing across the advertising, marketing and PR world in 2017 because journalism was unsustainable as a well-paying career. I initially planned to freelance while looking for my next advertising job.
I then found out I was so good at freelancing that it made more sense to become a high-value freelancer and consultant than to find another job.
That led to opening Ungerleider Works in 2022.
The industry across PR, marketing, advertising and journalism have shifted a lot in that time… which is something I recently wrote about in 🔎Context Collapse: PR? Marketing? Advertising? In 2024, They're All The Same.
With that said:
Industry Shifts Matter
Media (including journalism, advertising, marketing—-everything) is in a deeply confusing place right now.
Most importantly for the creation and distribution of media, the old ecosystem of free content supported by advertising is turning out to be unsustainable. On bigger screens, cable television is a dying format (sorry not sorry), broadcast TV has audiences but they’re not the audiences advertisers want, and streaming services keep getting more expensive while completely diluting their brand identities by replicating each other.
On small screens… What the hell is happening there? YouTube and TikTok are still king. Consuming content on mobile kills it—tiny screens, so-so speakers, watching video on mobile web is a slow form of torture. RSS, which powered the best content reading experience ever in Google Reader, now lives on primarily as a podcast distribution tool.
Audiences are in the walled gardens like Meta and Substack, but the metrics are so so. There’s also a built-in tension with platforms: The platforms want viewers and creators to stay on their platforms, which matters to everyone from audiences to advertisers.
On the creative side, I love this stuff. Scripting complicated interactive experiences for VR is fun. Helping brands turn technical documentation into YouTube tutorials is a genuine good deed. Working with sales teams to create newsletters which serve customers who don’t have trade publications writing about their professional interests is awesome.
But from the boring forecast side of things where we’re trying to predict marketing and advertising spend and ROI and all that fun grown up stuff for the future… It’s increasingly uncharted waters.
So welcome to the Context Collapse.