Context Collapse: 🤯It's Almost 2024?!
Newsletter plans for 2024: CC #261
Damn. Look at that calendar.
Like a lot of ADHD- and ADD-adjacent people, I have a strong desire for novelty and challenge in my life. On the work front, that made advertising and marketing and PR a particularly strong match for me.
But the path to running a boutique agency was pretty complicated. I went from content development for startups in the mid-2000s NYC Silicon Alley scene (MenuPages, we miss you!) to graduate school in Israel (Went with a vague plan of becoming a foreign correspondent, realized all the foreign correspondents I met in the region IRL were working two or three jobs if they didn’t come from family money. Whoops!)1 to nearly seven years as a reporter for Fast Company (Which was pretty amazing, all things considered.) to working as a senior copywriter for a major ad agency (Write a script for a television commercial? Write copy for a retail end cap for Best Buy? Typical day, natch.) to consulting to finally opening a small agency.
In the past month I’ve:
Written a script for an extended video commercial.
Hosted AccelPro IP Law podcast episodes for Kaplan on topics like artificial intelligence and copyright, building patent portfolios, and patent eligibility in biotech.
Ghostwritten five enterprise software blog posts.
Written two industry award applications for clients.
Overseen a website and mobile app content revamp for a client including a top-to-bottom content audit and SEO/graphic design/UIUX overhaul.
Again, never not busy.
(Also, we have some bandwidth to take on projects in early December. Visit Ungerleider Works to make an ask!)
Which brings me back to Context Collapse, and the newsletter in general.
This Substack scratches a couple of different itches for me. It gives me a place to write for me, rather than for a client. Our paid tiers (subscribe!) generate extra revenue for my business. It helps me share my industry expertise with readers who can use it. It builds relationships with readers. It allows me to do the industry news and insights thing with more control and independence than I would on another platform.
I’m going to write a proper State-of-Context-Collapse article in a little bit, but I’m thinking more and more about doing something different with this newsletter in 2024.
Journalism, marketing, advertising and public relations are in some deeply weird places as I write this in November 2023. I keep hearing from people who are supposed to be smarter than me that we’re not in a recession2, but I sure keep seeing layoffs across the board across all of those industries and very hesitant ad spend from agencies/clients.
Then there’s the whole AI thing. While talk of ChatGPT and Midjourney destroying freelance work and contractor work across verticals were looney tunes, there were several specific areas where I’ve seen AI specifically replacing hiring a freelancer:
Blog posts of 500 words or less.
Copy for low-quality websites, videos and landing pages3.
Low-level graphic design with repetitive changes (Text, color, photo) for large-scale campaigns.
Unfortunately, all three of these areas impact beginning/early-career freelancers more4. For the more complicated projects my company works on, we’re seeing much more use of ChatGPT and Midjourney as assistants — making quick prototypes of images, generating outlines for longer articles, allowing users to ask questions of long PDFs, that sort of thing.
Which is another deeply weird place.
The challenge for me—a journalist-turned-consultant who lives in the middle of the comms industrial complex—is how to write about all this deeply weird stuff without churning out either faux-naive future optimist PR boilerplate copy or going the other end into cranky doomerism. Or, worse yet, getting so stuck in the weaves that we’ll be talking about TPS reports all day long.
But back to the newsletter!
I really enjoy putting together daily link collections and the feedback I get from readers on that. Those will most likely continue (and eagle-eyed readers will note that there weren’t any this week. They’ll be back soon!).
I’m also most likely doubling down on our more evergreen educational posts like getting media coverage when legacy media’s collapsing and when the client wants boring interviews. I continue to get feedback from readers5 on how valuable those posts are and want to keep that momentum going.
I’m also going to keep interviewing interesting people because it gives me an excuse to talk to them and because readers like it.
But I’m also going to experiment with more essays, more personal stories from the industry and talking about the day-to-day of running a small shop more often. It’s my newsletter, damn it, my rules. It’s also something we don’t talk about except in hyper-perky LinkedIn posts written in thought leadershipese so I better get on it.
And also mucking around with video and podcasts more. I like video. I like podcasts. You should like them too.
Thank you for being part of this weird community of PR people, magazine journalists, creative directors, YouTubers, CEOs and other assorted miscreants. I love you all and here’s to a great 2024.
-Neal
And no, no plans to write about the Israel-Hamas conflict here. There are much better places on the internet for that.
We’re in Schrodinger’s Recession. Trades are booming, ecommerce fulfillment and logistics are booming, advertising and media are having the roughest year I’ve seen since 2020.
“Low-quality” is a strict descriptor, not snark. Good copywriting requires the experience of a good copywriter, good graphic design requires the experience of a good graphic designer. However, this world has plenty of cash-strapped startups and greedy medium-size and large companies who will gladly sacrifice generating revenue for cheaper line items.
I generally would not want to be an intern or an entry-level writer or social media manager in 2024 as machines seem to be gobbling up all the shitwork tasks one does when they start in the industry. I’d just make YouTube and TikToks instead.
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