In this issue: McDonalds goes after that lucrative SBUX market / TikTok’s 2024 official trend report / Reddit has new ad formats / The Hollywood strike means everyone’s making less money so there’s more content licensed to Netflix again / How Hamas controls language / The Little Kid Industrial Complex + 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’S ALMOST 2024. CRAP. If you’re anything like me (that is to say, running a small agency, handling multiple projects for multiple clients and operating with a worldview that laziness and not working hard is a personal failure—which we’ll unpack when it’s the damn time for it), these weeks are the busy weeks. It’s time to scramble and get things done before offices close and go skeleton crew for the great Christmas-New Year’s lull.
Wishing you a peaceful work blitz and wishing for better things for you and for the world. Now let’s get to the links.
“Iced coffee, all-day Egg McMuffins and a space alien.
McDonald’s is counting on that combination—plus multiple drive-through lanes—as the company this month launches CosMc’s, its first new restaurant concept in the U.S. in its more than 60-year history.
The planned chain is part of the Golden Arches’ expanded bet on to-go eating, and aims to grab a slice of the iced-beverage sales that have helped power record sales for Starbucks recently.”
”2023 on TikTok is defined by life hacks, throwback tracks and thriving small businesses as the community continued creating, connecting and celebrating authenticity throughout the year. Engaging with that content is an increasingly curious audience, seeking new perspectives, communities and stories. And brands have long been a welcome participant, helping to shape the trends we celebrate every year.
Today we're launching the TikTok What's Next Report 2024, our fourth annual trend forecast, which will arm marketers with key knowledge around our community's changing wants and needs in order to shape the year ahead.”
Reddit: “Today, and following more than 60,000 campaigns leveraging the placement, we’re pleased to announce two new formats now available within Conversation Placement: Carousel Ads and Product Ads. These new units, placed in the heart of Reddit discussions, provide an even more dynamic and compelling way for advertisers to scale to relevant audiences, deliver deeper value to users, and drive stronger, full funnel performance among the hundreds of thousands of conversations that happen in Reddit communities every day.”
”Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.”
“In 2014, Hamas Interior Ministry offered guidelines to “social media activists” via a video from its official website. “Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine,” it ordered. “Before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank, don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.”
It continued: “Begin [your reports of] news of resistance actions with the phrase ‘In response to the cruel Israeli attack”, and conclude with the phrase ‘This many people have been martyred since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza’. Be sure to always perpetuate the principle of ‘the role of the occupation is attack’, and we in Palestine are fulfilling [the role of] the reaction.”
Yet as with so much in the region, this all changed on October 7.”
“Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting will merge next year to become a single nonprofit news outlet.
The two organizations, both in San Francisco, have a decades-long history of collaborating. Mother Jones, a progressive website and print magazine, started in 1976. The Center for Investigative Reporting was founded a year later, and is known for the “Reveal” radio public show and podcast, as well as its documentary film arm.”
”Following its launch in over 100 countries — including the US and UK — in mid-2023, Meta’s Twitter competitor has made it to the EU and its 448 million citizens.”
”Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”
”Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. OnlyFans, which began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos, now consists mostly of porn created by sex workers.
But most companies aim to marginalize porn. While OnlyFans has surrendered, Chatroulette and Tumblr appear to take a firmer stand than ever against it. Facebook and YouTube conscript armies of algorithms and humans to banish porn in deference to advertisers who don’t want brands debased by unwholesome adjacencies. Alone among the big social media services, X allows users to post what it calls “intimate media.” But the platform also permanently suspends users who post upskirts, creepshots, revenge porn, nonconsensual erotica, images shot with hidden cameras, or media accompanied by incitements to violence. Pornographic images, which make up about 13 percent of all tweets, cannot yet be directly sold.
Porn in its place may be bankable, in other words, but too much of it in a venue styled as PG can scare off much bigger revenue streams.”
”News-publishing giant Axel Springer has inked a multiyear licensing deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, a significant milestone as media companies push for compensation for the use of their content in artificial-intelligence tools.
Under the agreement, OpenAI will pay to use content from Axel Springer publications, which include Politico and Business Insider in the U.S. and European properties Bild and Welt, to populate answers in ChatGPT and train its AI tools.
The companies declined to disclose financial terms, but the pact is expected to generate substantial revenue for Axel Springer.”
”Jimmy Donaldson has become the most-subscribed creator on YouTube by taking an analytical approach to his big-budget videos. The man known as MrBeast is famous for his detail-oriented personality and his ability to maximize every second of his viewer’s attention.
The data that informs MrBeast’s decisions is now available through ViewStats, a new platform dedicated to YouTube channel analytics. Donaldson co-founded ViewStats alongside Chucky Appleby, a content creator and businessman who works at MrBeast HQ in North Carolina.”
“Just a reminder that Christmas is a hedonistic pagan Holiday for adults that has been gentrified by the greedy Little Kid Industrial Complex”
