Hello World

A new newsletter... and ch-ch-changes!

We’re Back

Welcome to the first Substack edition of The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter.

TLDR: Mailchimp is lovely software with a great arsenal of features, but whose feature set and interface are increasingly geared towards brands and businesses.

And while I do run a business, finding a simple way to email all of you amazing people is top priority. So hello Substack.

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Work Things

Over at Nokia’s in-house magazine Futurithmic, I wrote about how advertising agencies market to Gen Z customers.

Apart from that, I just finished peer review of a book and have been working on some corporate email newsletters, a script for a talking hologram (Hello 21st century!) and developing a few case studies. This is a good kind of busy.

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On The Road

I’ll be working in Boston/Cambridge from February 24-March 6. Restaurant and coffee recommendations are heartily appreciated.

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Recommendations

• Taylor Lorenz, perhaps the best chronicler of digital culture out there, dives into podcast fan groups on Facebook Groups. This is a great read that dives into a big problem with podcasts: A good podcast will have lots of listeners and even a particular cultural identity associated with it. If you tell me your three favorite podcasts, I can make some pretty good guesses about your identity. With that said, listening to podcasts is a solitary experience in a way that music (concerts) and television shows (watching with friends/family) typically are not. Getting together online to discuss Who? Weekly? or Tilt Parenting goes a long way to mitigate this.

• Over at Wired, LaToya Peterson examines what Atlanta can teach the tech industry about fostering black innovation. Money quote: “Mainstream press articles, the experts interviewed for this article, and message groups for black technologists reveal that companies haven’t been recruiting heavily for artificial-intelligence-adjacent positions from the talent pools at HBCUs. “

• Reddit user Harrydry’s very compelling argument for Lil Nas X as marketing genius. Nas’ background—essentially a social media nerd who reverse-engineered the music industry through strategic memeing and deliberately exploiting loopholes in the Billboard chart—is very 2019/2020.

• I’m in awe of DoubleTree by Hilton’s chocolate chip cookies in space. DoubleTree, you see, has hot chocolate chip cookies for guests. Hilton, seeing a promotional angle for DoubleTree, partnered with startups Nanoracks and Zero G Kitchen whose equipment is on the International Space Station. DoubleTree supplied cookie dough for an experiment to see if chocolate chip cookies would bake in space, and Hilton hired former astronaut Mike Massimino as a spokesperson. The cookies successfully baked in space and were apparently delicious, though they took twice the time to cook that they would on earth. Still: Space cookies.