Making sense of nonsense times - The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter
+ In-house podcasts + Advertising during COVID + Geographical arbitrage + More!
First things first: I just wrote a new article on creating corporate and in-house podcasts that are actually *good*. I’ve worked with a few clients on these and… it’s an interesting process. You have far more stakeholders than your average podcast. You’re a bit more limited in what you can say and what opinions you can express. It’s less “two interesting people in front of a microphone!” and more meetings about scheduling and brand identity and internal expectations. But there are still some really, really good branded podcasts out there—and I like helping people make them.
2020’s been a long year. The US economy is still a hot mess as I write this, there’s still a presidential election coming up, and there’s plenty of well-founded anxiety about what the hell happens next.
I’m a pessimist at heart—not only that, but a pessimist who believes that human beings are especially unable to understand structural problems and put contradictory facts in context—so… yeah.
Here, have a Bojack Horseman GIF.
Making Sense of Nonsense Times
Since October 1 is the official start of Q4, I thought this would be a good place to put together my unofficial summary of 2020 for the advertising/marketing/oh G-d do we have to say “digital agency” worlds:
Q1: Normal and then everything falls off a cliff.
Q2: WTF just happened.
Q3: Slowly finding a new, interim normal for the time being.
Q4: ??
Being blunt, COVID’s arrival shoved many industries and job categories over a cliff. Advertising and marketing survived better than some other industries (Just ask your friends who own a restaurant or work in hospitality how all of this is going), but it’s been rough.
In the United States, the federal government’s complete and mindboggling incompetence at both aiding state/local governments and utter failure in responding to COVID have made the economic situation much worse than it could be otherwise. We’re in the middle of a lopsided economic recovery with piddly one-time $1200 checks and both parties failing to extend the $600/week CARES act unemployment. While white collar work has quickly picked back up, America’s lower-middle class, working class and poor are still absolutely f**ked. And that’s bad news for advertising and marketing, no matter how much spin we put on it.
Here’s the calculus: When times are tough, the first line items slashed on the client’s budget are marketing and advertising.
When times are better, awesome! More money for everyone and more projects to work on. But when the economy gets worse… Not so good.
Now the question is what happens next. Will COVID come back in a big way in late 2020? Will it be more of a small uptick? Will there be post-election instability? If so, of what nature? Is there more civil unrest coming in 2020? Will there be more forest fires, hurricanes or other natural disasters? So many known unknowns.
Everyone I know in advertising/marketing is working on contigency plans and contigency plans for the contigency plans, all the while working with clients who are eager to spend their earmarked comms money before it disappears. How is it in your industry? Let me know.
Return To Office Space
One of my obsessions in this newsletter is the gradual return to office life and the tension we’ll see in the future between remote work and in-office work.
Two data points I recently came across re: this.
McKinsey recently put together a pretty extensive report on what they call “the postpandemic workforce” based on a survey of 800 executives. The survey is worth digging into in-depth, but standing out the most: COVID-19 accelerated trends towards digitization and automating job roles (things like making it easier to share documents between offices, making it easier for remote employees to work on supply chain logistics, etc). Executives also expect employees won’t be in the office full-time and will instead mix working remotely and working in-office to varying degrees.
Payments firm Stripe is giving relocating employees a $20,000 bonus and a pay cut. The bonus and pay cut apply to employees who move from the Bay Area or NYC to lower cost of living cities; VMWare has a similar policy as well. While geographic arbitrage—that is, living in an area with a lower cost of living while drawing your old paycheck designed for a metro area—is an old thing, the pandemic is bringing it into sharp focus. $150,000 a year will get you much further in Nevada than in Noe Valley, but so it goes…
Tangential reading: Ask a Manager on how do I network now that I can’t ask people to coffee?
Sharp-eyed readers might notice that this newsletter looks a bit different this week. And that I’ve taken a few days off in releasing the newsletter.
Yup, and yup. We’re trying a few new things here, and stay tuned. One of the biggest is switching to one issue a week with extra editions as needed instead of 3x a week.
This newsletter has diverse readership: Friends, family and people I know IRL; current and former clients; colleagues, readers and contacts from my journalism days and even more folks besides. Making the best possible newsletter for you = part of it.
New Futures
The very real risks of moving too quickly on a COVID-19 vaccine.
Nahal Toosi at Politico on the Trump foreign policies Joe Biden might keep in the White House.
For this expat New Yorker, nothing brings back the “these aren’t normal times” narrative as quickly as seeing no local businesses make money from a virtual-only UN General Assembly.
Natalia Antonova explains how stalkers and spies figure out your location from ordinary photos.
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
Craig Ainsley on the normalization of overworking in advertising. Money quote: “I realised I know 9 people in advertising who have had to seek medical help because of work induced burn out and exacerbated mental health problems.”
New academic study links small cities with longer Wikipedia profiles to higher tourism rates (PDF).
Jesse Singal argues about gaming Twitter mobs for PR and brand-boosting purposes.
OK, this gimmicky Reebok plant-based sneakers coming with a side of fresh veggies is actually pretty fun.
Reebok debuts its ultra-sustainable, plant-based runner, the Forever Floatride GROW 🌱 bit.ly/33SAgMZ
Media:
Quibi is reportedly “exploring strategic options” including a possible sale. So many things going on here.
A former YouTube content moderator is suing YouTube and its outsourced content moderation firms for failing to protect workers who flag and remove violent videos posted to the site.
I’m still reading my way through Casey Newton’s amazing piece of Facebook kremlinology: “In 2020, Facebook would be roiled by a global pandemic, internal protests over racial injustice, a deeply polarizing election, and the ongoing threat of multiple state and federal investigations into antitrust and privacy. But on the morning of July 16th, Mark Zuckerberg found his workforce asking for something else: their missing office snacks.”
RIP Great Big Story, you were too beautiful for this world.
Tech:
Facebook finally opening a Lagos office in a sign of the African market’s importance to the social media giant.
Adobe’s new “Liquid Mode” uses machine learning to make PDFs easier to read on smartphones.
Google is quietly launching Tables, an Airtable competitor.
Protocol’s David Pierce has an amazing interview with Evernote CEO Ian Small, who faces a huge task: Rebuilding a hugely popular freemium app that’s struggled with enterprise sales and has massive technical debt.
Fun:
Qantas is selling fully-stocked airplane bar carts.
That’s it for this issue. Email me here and please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance. Thank you for taking the time to read this damned thing.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with advertising/PR agencies and in-house clients. He worked as a journalist in a previous life. Neal’s newsletter focuses on marketing, media and communications news.
Follow Neal on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com. You can contact him at neal@nealungerleider.com.