💩 Stupid Internet = Stupid Real Life - The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter
Hazard pay for business travel + Zelle loves Venezuela + Quibi collapse + more!
Photo: Social media, pre-internet (Via Visualhunt.com)
I. Why Our Stupid Internet Is Our Stupid Real Life
I’ve been working over a problem these days - the fact that the separation between the online world and the real world doesn’t exist anymore.
The internet is real life, and there’s no way to separate our digital selves from our IRL identities. Separating our daily lives from the time we spend online is a fool’s errand, and our stupid internet is our stupid real life is our stupid internet.
Working in the advertising/marketing world, it’s rare to encounter campaigns that don’t have online components. Legacy print publications like the New York Times and The Atlantic function as digital media brands nowadays. Social lives that typically took place having dinner at a friend’s house, spending the afternoon with relatives, or watching a football game at a bar transition seamlessly into our text message chats and Facebook feeds. (And, of course, 2020’s “events” have proven this argument correct).
This isn’t universal—4% of America’s population still lacks access to high speed internet and there’s still a good chunk of the population which, for various reasons, has limited internet access—but it’s predominant. It also leads seamlessly into Alex Balk’s Three Laws of the Internet:
Balk’s First Law: Everything you hate about the Internet is actually everything you hate about people.
Balk’s Second Law: The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.
Balk’s Third Law: If you think the Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.
If the stupid internet is stupid real life, where does that leave us?
It leaves us in a world where we send party invitations on Facebook or by email through Evites before gathering in person. It leave us in a world where conversations start on the job in the breakroom and then jump mediums to text message or Slack backchannel. It leaves us downloading GIFs and unironic memes from our foreign relatives on WhatsApp instead of jumping on expensive transcontinental phone calls. It leaves us navigating the trolls and worrywarts of our local Nextdoor group instead of having a community newspaper. It leaves us having real-time global chat rooms on Twitter just as easily as we sit on our porch and talk to neighbors. It leads to lots of places.
We’ll discuss this more—and what it means—in our next edition.
II. New Futures:
SINGAPORE REOPENING NIGHTCLUBS: That is, with up to 100 guests allowed at a time, all of whom must have taken a negative COVID test within the last 24 hours.
HAZARD PAY FOR BUSINESS TRAVEL: Apple is reportedly offering employees cash bonuses for business travel to China as de-facto hazard pay. Important caveat: The bonus covers inconveniences such as mandatory 14 day quarantine before visiting work sites.
UNIVERSAL MEDICAL TEST?: Scientists at UC San Francisco have made serious progress on a universal medical test that shows results for any known microbe from a single sample.
CANCEL CULTURE AND SOCIAL MEDIA: British singer/songerwriter/national treasure Billy Bragg argues that “cancel culture” is a by-product of marginalized voices getting equal weight on social media:
Before the rise of social media, the anger of young people was restricted to pop music. Print and broadcast media kept youth corralled on the margins. We may have been angry about Thatcherism, but our ability to sway mainstream public opinion was limited. Today, a 22-year-old footballer with a Twitter account can force the government to make a U-turn in less than 48 hours. Darnella Frazier, whose smartphone footage of four Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd provoked outrage around the world, is just 17 years old.
III. Advertising/Marketing/PR:
PETCON GOING ONLINE: Petcon, a pets-and-social-media convention beloved by the influencer set, is going online only.
RIP GREY: Holding group WPP is retiring the Grey creative brand and merging it with AKQA. Grey had over 2000 employees pre-pandemic and dates back to 2017.
CAR DEBUT ON TWITCH: Honda is debuting the new Honda Civic on Twitch via livestream. Choosing Twitch over YouTube or a web portal is a hearty reminder that, yes, gamers have a metric shit-ton of discretionary income.
WILL BIDEN ADMINISTRATION PASS ANTI-FREELANCER LAWS?: Over at AdWeek, Minda Smiley tackles the over-under on Biden passing restrictive independent contractor regulation similar to California’s AB-5. TLDR = Unlikely but possible.
WALMART, KROGER EXPANDING ADVERTISING PLATFORMS: Walmart and Kroger are both making it easier for third-party brands to advertise on their websites and apps.
TOWER RECORDS RETURNS, KINDA: The Tower Records brand, which shut down in the US in 2006, is returning as an online vinyl shop.
DOMINO’S PIZZA AS TECH INNOVATOR: The Ringer’s Allison P. Davis makes a convincing case for Domino’s Pizza as a brand turnaround.
IV. Media:
SAPIENS, THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: Yuval Noah Hariri and French illustrator Daniel Casanave are releasing a graphic novel version of Sapiens.
QUIBI QLUSTERDUCK: JP Mangalindan’s epic postmortem of Quibi’s shutdown for Bloomberg is a case study in executive hubris, the perils of micromanagement, the sunk cost fallacy and being afraid to learn from competitors. Read it.
ATLAS OBSCURA’S PARTNERSHIP STRATEGY: AdWeek’s Ryan Barwick talks inside baseball and how Atlas Obscura adopted brand partnerships for their most profitable year ever. Atlas Obscura rapidly switched to brand partnerships after COVID wiped out their travel and experiential business.
WALMART POP-UP CENTERS: In their latest anti-Amazon salvo, Walmart is opening pop-up distribution centers inside their existing distribution centers for rapid holiday order fulfillment.
YOUTUBE’S COUNTERFEIT MERCH PROBLEM: YouTube personalities are stumbling into a problem that’s plagued musical acts, comic book characters and cartoon characters since the beginning of time: Bootleg merchandise.
RECORD DEAL SIMULATOR: A new record deal simulator from Create/OS lets musicians easily estimate how much money they’ll make (or lose) from deals with labels.
SUBSTACK GETS TRENDY: Columbia Journalism Review’s Clio Chang looks at Substack’s rapid growth, complete with this gem:
They have a system, created by a former employee named Nathan Baschez, that measures a Twitter user’s engagement level—retweets, likes, replies—among their followers. This person is then assigned a score on a logarithmic scale of fire emojis. Four fire emojis is very good—Substack material.
V. Tech:
RIP, FREE UNLIMITED GOOGLE PHOTOS: In a movie that surprises absolutely noone, Google is discontinuing free unlimited online photo storage in 2021 on their Google Photos platform. Google Photos launched in 2015 and quickly crowded competitors off the market with its robust free feature set, which customers will now have to pay for. Separate Google news: Google is launching a VPN.
UBER LETTING USERS PICK DRIVERS: With current events causing a sharp decline in rideshare use, Uber is using the reduced demand to launch new features such as booking rides up to 30 days in advance and keeping a “favorite drivers” list of preferred drivers.
ZELLE IN VENEZUELA: Payments service Zelle is rapidly growing in Venezuela with customers using the app to avoid local hyperinflation through digital US$. Bloomberg claims 17% of retail transactions in Caracas are now done via Zelle.
VI. Fun:
BRITAIN’S FIRST FEMALE ROCK BAND: This short documentary tells the story of the Liverbirds, a 1960s Merseybeat band who were on the way up before hitting some bad luck familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a touring band.
WHERE BILL GATES CONSPIRACY THEORIES COME FROM: Buzzfeed’s Ryan Broderick looks at just why there are so many Bill Gates conspiracy theories.
PURPLE STATES OF AMERICA: The new Purple States of America site rejects Blue State-Red State visualizations in favor of showing just how mixed each state is in terms of political sentiment.
SIMCITY, SIMEARTH, SIMREFINERY: Phil Salvador over at the Obscuritory digs into what happened when SimCity creator Maxis made a SimRefinery game for Chevron and attempted to expand into bespoke Sim games for corporate clients. It didn’t go well.
Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:
SHARON VAN ETTEN & NORAH JONES: The only thing better than a Sharon Van Etten song is Sharon Van Etten on the Late Show with Norah Jones.
HOW TO NEGOTIATE WITH HOSPITALS: Jeffrey Fox speaks with the Arm and a Leg podcast about how to negotiate medical bills like a champ.
MORE STATEN ISLAND POP: In my continuing quest to find more Staten Island-centric rock/hip-hop/pop, I just learned about Joni Mitchell’s Song for Sharon, about the Island’s late and lamented Mandolin Brothers.
JOE EXOTIC AND THE VOLGA GERMANS: Tiger King was a while ago, but Jennifer Mendelsohn’s look at Joe Exotic’s family history and the Volga Germans of Kansas is well worth reading.
MAMBOS ON PARADE: Last but not least, here’s the Lou Bega-Rage Against the Machine mashup we’ve needed forever.
That’s it for this issue. Email me here and please don’t hesitate to contact if I can be of assistance. Thank you for taking the time to read this damned thing. And donate to help Aligator Robb with heart surgery and help Community Kitchen Chicago serve free hot restaurant meals.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant working with brands and agencies on marketing/advertising/PR projects. Heworked as a journalist in a previous life and now writes this newsletter about the future of strategic communications.
Thanks for taking the time to read it. For more, here's Neal’s bio, portfolio, and current projects.
Connect on Twitter or LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com. Contact him by replying to this newsletter or emailing neal@nealungerleider.com.