Babies jumping on furniture - The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter
+ Industry secrets + Hillary Clinton's podcast + RIP Uncle Ben's + More
Man, parenting is weird.
So here’s the thing. My son is almost two years old. He was a preemie who gave us some scares those first few months, but has grown into a robust toddler who loves three things:
Climbing on furniture
Testing boundaries
The first two are relevant to this discussion. The kid is fascinated by the world around him (as he should be!) and interacts with people and objects like a noob in an open-world video game trying every possible thing out. Which, I mean, he basically is.
But as a dad, that’s disorienting. When the kid was in the hospital, I was thinking my future role of a dad would be lots of things. But professional stopper-of-toddler-from-using-the-sofa-as-a-trampoline-and-then-climbing-up-the-bookshelf was not one of them.
Anyway, greetings from this NYC expat living on the Great Lakes.
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The Big Picture
Buzzfeed’s investigative team (including but not limited to the amazing Jason Leopold) unveiled the FinCEN Files—a massive investigation into how the world’s largest banks willingly and eagerly launder money for terrorist organizations, international crime syndicates, and more.
Why any Supreme Court Justice chosen by the Trump administration is an existential threat to the Affordable Care Act.
Traces of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus = a strong indicator of life on Venus. Science is awesome.
Loving this masterful Reddit thread on industry secrets in the fields people work in. My favorites: Corporate recruiters on how “job requirements” are really more of a wish list, and that Microsoft Word’s included dictate and transcribe feature works just as well as transcription services like Rev, Otter and Trint.
Marketing/Advertising/PR
The Stanford Internet Observatory on how the President of Guinea has a Facebook troll army, and how it’s petty much impossible to separate political campaigning, coordinated inauthentic behavior, street teaming and online advocacy in 2020. Lots of lessons for the US here.
Judd Legum has a smart report about how the Trump campaign and the White House court Qanon believers. Legum excels at summaries, and notes that “QAnon's adherents believe that Democratic officials and celebrities—including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks—are Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are running a secret sex trafficking operation. They believe that Trump is the only person who can stop them.” This take is accurate! It’s also accurate that Trump is trying to thread the needle of appealing to an influential base who believes in some real batshit WTFery while not sending the many, many, many Trump voters who have no time for QAnon over to Team Biden.
A long overdue change in undoing the legacy of slavery in advertising: Mars is renaming Uncle Ben’s rice as “Ben’s Original” and removing “Ben” from packaging. The Uncle Ben’s brand originated in 1937 as “Uncle Ben’s Plantation Rice.”
Media
Big behind-the-scenes change at Facebook: Facebook is unveiling Rights Manager for Images, a service that uses image-matching tech to automatically detect copyright violating images on Facebook and Instagram. Users upload images they want to detect and Rights Manager automatically detects possibly infringing posts. In other FB news, Facebook is opening a Nigeria office—another indicator of how massive the African market’s becoming.
Joe Rogan’s podcast, newly acquired by Spotify, is in hot water after Rogan falsely claimed left-wing radicals set Oregon wildfires on his podcast. Here’s the thing: Rogan has one of the most popular podcasts in the world, and for good reason (Holding people’s attention for 3 hours is hard!). At the same time, he’s a softball interviewer who gives guests tossed-off questions, actively avoids on-air confrontation and has an extremely hard time calling bullshit on guests. That’s fine when you’re a niche podcaster but is a recipe for trouble when your podcast is massively popular and Alex Jones or Elon Musk is a guest. Rogan loves saying that he’s just a comedian or an entertainer, but he’s now a journalist—whether he likes it or not.
Even though the value of display ads is plummeting, there’s still value in the long tail of a good SEO-optimized recipe site. That’s why Dotdash is acquiring Simply Recipes and Serious Eats.
Hillary Clinton is launching a new podcast on iHeartRadio called You And Me Both, with guests including Gloria Steinem, Samin Nosrat, Patton Oswalt, Stacey Abrams, Ann Friedman, Sarah Cooper and Tan France. Show will run 24 episodes in its initial season and no word on episode length.
Tech
The CIA has a new incentive for hiring tech-savvy officers: A profit-sharing scheme on patents filed by CIA officers. (Oblig Disclosure: I wrote about the CIA’s affiliated venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, a bazillion years ago for Fast Company.)
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom is reportedly in early stage talks to become TikTok’s new CEO.
Love, love, love this article by Owen Williams about how competing standards that tech companies deal with make USB-C a giant headache for ordinary users.
A two-parter: Moe Tkacik over at the American Economic Liberties Project has an amazing report on predatory tactics by food delivery apps like Postmates, Doordash and Grubhub, and Cory Doctorow has a huge Twitter thread on the voodoo economics of food delivery apps. (Second Oblig Disclosure: I am a former editorial employee of MenuPages, a company which was later acquired by Grubhub. Corporate acquisitions are fun!)
Fun
Maria Babikova photographs Siberia’s drag scene.
Loving this CBC documentary about the stand-up comedy scene in the Yukon Territory. One more place on the bucket list…
Chinese researchers create a tiny 3D printer that can be placed inside human bodies.
Holy crap, this playlist of female-fronted punk bands from 1977-1989 is awesome.
That’s it for this issue. Let me know what you think and please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance. Thank you for taking the time to read this damned thing.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with advertising/PR agencies and in-house clients. He worked as a journalist in a previous life. Neal’s newsletter focuses on marketing, media and communications news.
Follow Neal on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com. You can contact him at neal@nealungerleider.com.