In this issue: Panera caffeinated lemonade crisis comms + more!
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.
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“It is the second lawsuit filed against Panera Bread over its Charged Lemonade, which has more caffeine in its large size than a 12-ounce Red Bull and a 16-ounce Monster Energy Drink combined.
The lawsuit said the company “knew or should have known” that the drink could injure children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and people sensitive to caffeine.”
”It’s about a parallel publishing space that has risen up while the legacy publishing houses in New York have been declining thanks to a combination of threats that are both external (the internet; the upending of print) and internal (new progressive staffers; sensitivity readers; etc.). A publishing space in which writers, known and unknown, can make more than they’ve ever made traditionally.”
”Chances are you haven’t even been exposed to Pink’s recent music. She got the party started back in 2001, and I’d be stunned if you didn’t know that ubiquitous single, which was all over music television. But now music television is dead. Video is on demand online, and if you don’t want to see it, you never have to. And the power of terrestrial radio? The brain dead, not the active listener, they’re all on streaming services. And it’s the active listener who buys concert tickets. And the bottom line is Pink does have enough active listeners to sell stadiums, and that’s utterly amazing!”
”The end of SAG’s strike did not trickle down to the Internet’s working content creators who aspire to one day join their ranks. Many of whom were actively discouraged from making new content (aka doing their jobs) after the Screen Actors’ Guild pointedly singled out influencers with threats of future ineligibility; tacitly encouraging the use of social media shaming for any creator found by the Internet to be guilty of “promotion of struck companies or their content.” No clarification necessary for that perfect, unambiguous phrasing, which could never be open to interpretation or determined on a black box, case-by-case basis.”
No tech consultant is worried about AI robots…
