Context Collapse: What To Be Excited About In 2024
Radical optimism beats doomerism everyday: CC #259
In this issue: Generative AI goes mainstream / Disney’s Hulu plans / Industry spending and hiring returning to normal.
Know someone who would enjoy reading this?
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.
2024 is almost here.
If you work in the industry, you know that 2023 was a weird year. Epic weird even.
Layoffs? Hollywood strikes? Shrinking budgets? Bipolar economy? Bad geopolitical stuff? Weird industry deals?
We had all of that and then some.
But there’s a lot about 2024 that I’m excited about from the media and comms perspective. Here goes after the jump:
1. Generative AI Normalizes
I’ve written about this before, but I really, really, really don’t buy into the school of thought that ChatGPT and Midjourney and all the rest will be job destroyers who will unemploy knowledge workers on a scale basis. They’re more like typerwriters, desktop computers, smartphones and GUIs like MacOS and Windows—powerful tools that will upend industries and introduce widespread change, but won’t hollow out office work opportunities like offshoring and automation devastated United States factory work.
Right now genAI is still niche-y. ChatGPT use is a black box and Google still hasn’t released Gemini and you really have to muck around with Midjourney and DALL-E a lot before you come up with stuff that’s fun instead of embarrassing. We’re still at that old school phase of genAI where you have to be a hobbyist playing with the LLMs in order to achieve real effects instead of a normie just trying to accomplish your work tasks.
My full expectation is for more and more onboarding/training tools to come aboard in 2024 from Microsoft, Google, Apple, OpenAI and other players that will make generative AI much easier to use. This is a positive because it will make dreary office shitwork much better—imagine being able to tell Excel to make you a spreadsheet template with columns for this and rows for that and having it just do it!—and will increase worker satisfaction with jobs while saving enough workhours to make the corporate masters happy.
I also expect more companies to make their own in-house LLMs so sensitive material can be handled securely and for settlements or licensing agreements to be made for photo, video and text-based training data that will reduce profitability for genAI companies and compensate rightsholders to training data without making either side truly happy.
2. DisneyHulu Spurring Industry Changes
Hulu has always fascinated me because it’s an immensely popular streaming service whose ownership has pursued benign neglect at every opportunity. Almost like it’s the Twitter of streaming services.
But barring anything unexpected, Disney will be in full control of Hulu in 2024. This will be good for both Hulu and the television industry (not streaming industry! television! streaming is television now!) as broad generalities.
Disney is planning to release a combined Disney+/Hulu streaming app in late 2023 and will almost certainly integrate Disney+, Hulu and possibly ESPN even more in 2024.
Noone’s quite sure what Disney’s brand vision is for Hulu. Disney+ has all the expected Little Mermaid and Avengers and High School Musical, but it also has Gordon Ramsay shows and random action shows and all these things that don’t really fit under the brand umbrella. Meanwhile, Hulu… can you explain Hulu to me? Can anyone summarize Hulu’s content offering and brand identity in a sentence without talking about years of squabbling between the different broadcasters that own it?
Anyway, Netflix is still the undisputed champion of streaming. It has competition. Peacock and Paramount+ have both been making incredible strides in the US this year. But Hulu, which used to be Netflix’s great rival, has been floating hither and yonder these past few years. Hulu is great at ad-tech and ad offerings, but everything else since 2018 or so has been stasis.
If Disney’s Disney, they will pour resources into Hulu over the next year and build a more defined brand (or possibly fold Hulu into Disney+ entirely).
This is good for television.
3. New Normal For Industry Spend + Hiring
Running a boutique agency (Ungerleider Works. Hire us!) one of the big topics that kept coming up for me and other small agencies this year was the weird budgets at lots of our clients.
Marketing and comms departments would keep coming up with potential projects. We’d submit proposals for the projects. Comms and marketing departments would try to get funding for the projects… and then silence followed by an embarrassed email a few weeks or months later.
Or maybe you’d just find out that your marketing or journalism contacts who you worked with for years had been laid off because their large corporate employers had FOMO of not doing layoff rounds when all their rivals were.
I’ve argued before that the pandemic truly and deeply fucked up the corporate comms and media landscape, and I still argue that. Even if lockdowns have been over for a long time and travel is booming, we’re still living in a media economy that’s been deeply impacted by the rapid changes of the 2020-2021 COVID era.
The good news is that, from what I see, the uncertainty is starting to clear somewhat with companies hiring back marketing/comms/creative staff or increasing spending for their projects. And everyone disrupted by the writer’s strike slowly getting back to business while waiting for the actor’s strike to clear. This could all rapidly change if the geopolitical situation gets worse or there are sustained extreme weather events, but I’ve definitely seen industry things getting better and more predictable—and it’s great to see this.
Now on to 2024.
Know someone who would enjoy reading this?