In this issue: Of course war misinformation / Ads coming to Prime Video / New Linktree report drop / State sponsored hacking / How to manipulate reporters / Texas Pete not Texan? / Modelo Especial makes $$ / Taboola-Yahoo mega ad deal / Twitter ad decline / Twitter private equity tactics / Oppenheimer fandom / Violent crime gawkers / Noami Klein & Naomi Wolf.
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.
Lots to cover today. My 4-year-old is jumping on my office chair and asking me if it’s winter yet. On to the links.
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“Online misinformation about the conflict between Hamas and Israel - day three This video doesn't show a salvo of rockets fired by Hamas towards Israel. It's from the Syrian war, and was shared online in 2020.”
“Amazon revealed new stats about its viewers to ad buyers to pitch Prime Video advertising, which will roll out early next year. These ads will be added to shows and movies in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany in early 2024, then rolled out in France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and Australia later that year. Prime Video users can opt out of advertising by paying $2.99 more per month.”
“Though Linktree is a notable name in the creator economy, its latest report devotes more space to a different ecosystem: The so-called “attention economy.” Approximately 200 million creators are competing to get the attention of viewers who feel more overwhelmed then ever. Linktree reported that 40% of people are “overwhelmed” by the amount of choice on the internet, and the average attention span is one-third as long as it was in 2004.”
“As soon as China decides it wants to hack your company, it will do it.”
“If you’re a press secretary, an operative, a flack or the actual principal, it’s not hard, over time, to get your way with the media. Members of the media, in turn, must understand how they’re being played. Journalists like getting played more than you might think.”
“A federal lawsuit was dismissed Wednesday that alleged T.W. Garner Food Co. deliberately deceives consumers because its Texas Pete products are not made in the Lone Star state.”
“Sales of Constellation Brands’ Modelo Especial beer, which surpassed Bud Light earlier this year as America’s top brew, continue to accelerate, the company’s chief executive said. “The good news is, there’s just so much opportunity still to go,” CEO Bill Newlands said in an interview Thursday. While the Mexican import is now the top-selling beer by dollar sales in U.S. retail stores, there are areas of the country where the brand isn’t well known, he said. “It’s just terribly exciting to think about all the potential that Modelo has.”
“Ad tech giant Taboola and Yahoo's exclusive 30-year native advertising deal, announced last year, is now live, Taboola CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. Why it matters: The deal increases Taboola's annual top line by roughly $1 billion, Singolda said, and Yahoo expects it to make its native ad placements more competitive. Details: The deal makes Yahoo's native ad units across all of its digital properties available for advertisers to buy through Taboola. (Yahoo will still manage sales of its own display ads.)”
”Monthly U.S. ad revenue at social media platform X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter in October 2022, according to third-party data provided to Reuters.”
”This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site"
“Oppenheimer will probably win some Oscars but the lasting impact the movie has had on me, a person who never got around to seeing it, is the encouragement it has provided to a small community of people on Twitter who are yaoi-fangirl-obsessed with the scientists of Los Alamos and associated political figures of the mid-20th century, including Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.”
”This past week, a young “social justice” activist, Ryan Carson, was knifed to death on the street by a deranged 18-year-old assailant, as Carson’s girlfriend, paralyzed with shock, looked on. We might once have just heard of or read about this attack. Now we see it as it happens. Its reach might once have been limited by media gatekeepers. Now it can reach millions in a matter of hours on social media. And if you’re Elon Musk and your strategy for Twitter is to make it a more visual, visceral, sticky site, it’s gold. Within hours of Carson’s death, his last, terrifying moments were accessible to millions: a snuff video in all but name, now available to be monetized by gawkers.”
“Lucky is the writer upon whom misfortune smiles, especially when it’s a relatively minor misfortune from which a lot of narrative mileage can be wrested. Take, for instance, the “personal-branding meltdown” that has recently befallen Naomi Klein. A prolific writer and activist, Klein became notable at a youthful age for having written a mega-best-selling anti-branding manifesto, No Logo, in 1999, which naturally led to her becoming a massive brand herself, a twist of fate about which she’s both amusing and astute. But fate proved to have a further irony up its sleeve: Beginning in the 2010s, Klein would also spend more than a decade being chronically mistaken, online and off, for the increasingly unhinged writer, conspiracy theorist, and former feminist Naomi Wolf—both being attractive Jewish public intellectuals named Naomi, and current attention spans being what they are.”