In This Issue: Greed Killed Sports Illustrated / Ikea Cutting Prices, Citing “Significant Deflation” / Amazon Layoffs / The Prestige Recession + All The Memes!
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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Each Monday I publish a collection of links and stray ideas I think my readers should know about. They aren’t necessarily the best-known pieces of industry news but they’re the things you should be thinking about. Especially if you want to make more money or have more impact on the culture.
May you have an amazing week. May the internet gods smile upon you.
Now on to the links.
Greed Killed Sports Illustrated: “In August, Manoj Bhargava’s Simplify Inventions — the company that makes 5 Hour Energy drinks — bought a majority stake in Arena. Soon after, Futurism found that S.I. was publishing error-riddled, A.I.-written articles, a revelation that embarrassed the company and led to an internal investigation. Bhargava later held a town hall where he told staffers that “The amount of useless stuff you guys do is staggering,” according to Front Office Sports. Soon after that, Levinsohn left, as did Andrew Kraft, the president and chief operating officer, in what was largely seen internally as a clash between Bhargava and the previous C-suite. “Ross and Kraft were widely despised from day one. I’m glad to see them gone but not convinced Manoj will be that much better,” another employee said in December. Bhargava then stepped into the role of Arena’s interim CEO.
The end functionally came on January 3, when Arena Group failed to make a $3.75 million debt payment to Authentic Brands.”
Ikea Cutting Prices, Citing “Significant Deflation”: “Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka Group — which owns most Ikea stores globally — told Reuters on Monday that price pressures have eased, so it's sticking to planned price cuts this year even with the Red Sea shipping woes.
Speaking to Reuters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Broden acknowledged "quite significant deflation" upstream in its supply chain. This means input costs are now lower for Ikea, so the retailer can pass on savings to consumers.”
Amazon Layoffs: “January 10th is when I woke up to the news that Amazon had conducted another one of the "Red Weddings" that the tech sector, and corporate America in general, seems so fond off. This time, one of the casualties was the truly brilliant Amazon exec who had been running (and championing) the show I had got set up there.
Getting laid off in corporate America is not a fun experience; it's sudden and brutal and needlessly cold. I don't know why these companies conduct themselves in this way. I believe they think it's somehow Darwinian and macho, but I find it sneaky and cowardly, and I think it's braver to look a person in the eye, explain to them what is happening and try to help them transition out of the job. If we're searching for reasons why I'm not a billionaire with my own spaceship, this might be one of them.
I checked in with the exec in question to make sure she was OK (she was, and also she really wasn't) and to offer whatever useless moral support I could.
Meanwhile, Amazon got in touch via reps to say "Dear Sir or Madam, we are still very excited about [insert name of project here] and can't wait to progress this further just as soon as we have figured out what it is you do and who should be in charge of it."
It's an almost-Golden Rule that when your exec goes, your project is dead in the water.”
The Prestige Recession: ”This week Pitchfork was effectively shut down by Conde Nast, the corporate overlord that bought it out a half-decade ago in what back then felt like the culmination and end of something. It was, and now it really is. Not just at Pitchfork. The editorial jobs like the ones I had two decades ago are long gone, unlikely to return.
If I think back to those corporate meetings I was part of early in my career, it’s easy to see today's decision-making. A decade ago cultural criticism was a sparkly pixie dust you could spread over a business to give it a veneer of prestige. But in a world where TikToks dwarf all over forms of consumption and a video that someone spent a day making will get more attention than something a studio spent years and millions of dollars to make, who needs prestige?
The death of Pitchfork and cultural criticism is evidence that the mainstream is going through a prestige recession. It’s a value in decline. Witness the recent changes in programming decisions by the streaming services. Two years ago they were prestige maxing to garner cultural attention. But now it's the opposite. Values have changed.
Rather than prestige, this cultural moment is dominated by metrics.”
Born Too Late To Have A Career Like In Mad Men:
Can You Explain This Gap In Your Resume:
Incredibly Humane: