📦Newsletter in a box
Using AI for your own ludicrous ends, Twitter LARPing + more: Context Collapse #167
In this issue: Comms consulting update / Making AI work for YOU / A whole bunch of YouTube moves / Mr. Beast owns the world / Cody Rigsby’s Talk Show adventure / Twitter is still a brand nightmare + More.
Working as a communications consultant in 2022 is a trip, dude. It’s a trip. I’m simultaneously:
1) Giving my clients advice on what to do on Twitter when the CEO has the interests, attention span and self-restraint of a hyper six-year-old.
2) Helping brands and agencies navigate Schrodinger’s Recession. Are we in a recession? Are we not in a recession? Who the heck knows but there sure are a lot of layoffs and hiring freezes in white collar work right now!
3) Developing email newsletters and podcasts for clients who—to a degree that’s been pretty constant since 2020 but pretty rare before that—have very little idea what the next couple of months will hold. Maybe we’ll have a energy crisis in the US this winter! Maybe we’ll have a flu-COVID double punch causing closures again this winter (Editor’s note: Please no)! Maybe shipping will be screwed and holiday shopping will be a mess this year. Everything’s unpredictable and that sucks when humans thrive on predictability!
With that said, I also have work availability in December. Can I help you with something? Then click below.
From our home base in beautiful Chicago, here’s what’s on the radar:
I’ve been mucking around with Open AI. GPT-3 and DALL-E a lot lately. Simon Willison has a great guide on how to get started with GPT-3 for total newbies that I highly recommend reading.
Speaking of that, Tyler Cowen argues (correct IMO) that AI will require you to relearn how to use the internet.
MrBeast, YouTube’s first mega-mega-mega star, is seeking $150 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation for his business. He’ll probably get it! The line for the opening of his new fast food restaurant went on for hours, after all.
Speaking of social media superstars, the White House and the DNC are heavily courting TikTok creators ahead of the midterm elections.
Smart case study here on how Defector Media turned the Normal Gossip podcast into a tool to get listeners to pay for Defector subscriptions. And it worked!
McDonald’s happy-meal-for-grownups collaboration with Cactus Plant Flea Market has generated a ton of sales. (See also: A YouTube review of the actual happy meal.)
Farhad Manjoo on why the humble USB-C is the Meryl Streep of cables.
YouTube is pushing shorts really aggressively on their mobile app. Good! Even more impactly, they’re going to start segmenting longform videos, shorts and livestreams for viewers. They’re also expanding their paid television offerings. Yes, YouTube is Google’s true content revenue generator.
Speaking of mobile short-form video, TikTok’s reportedly adding a gaming tab.
Christopher S. Penn has some interesting thoughts for marketers about Twitter, the end of the public digital watercooler and the move towards fragmented social:
Media fragmentation inherently means more polarization and insulation, which are societally detrimental. However, they also mean more focused groups of people, and for the purposes of reaching very specific groups of folks, this is a silver lining. The absence of cultural touchstones also means we can no longer bank on generic, general content and creative; what we create as marketing has to be as specific as our audiences are becoming.
Yes, that whole thing.
Ernie Smith tries to decipher Elon Musk’s public, chaotic Twitter decisionmaking and it’s worth reading:
One gets the feeling that the man who bought one of the most public companies in history, a firm that exists in a literal fishbowl, is just kind of going for it, throwing every idea he can at the investment in hopes they make at least some of it back.
Smart move from Peloton: Brand superstar Cody Rigsby is doing a hybrid talk show/exercise class where celebrities are interviewed while they’re on the bike with Cody.
Over at the WSJ, Nicole Nguyen has a really interesting feature on why power users keep preferring Garmin smartwatches over Apple, FitBit and Samsung. My own personal data point? 5+ years ago, I had a FitBit flex. It kept breaking, the glue kept coming loose and the quality of the product was less than ideal. I switched to a very, very modest Garmin Vivofit tracker that cost the same as the FitBit and IT KEPT WORKING FOR MORE THAN 3 YEARS. IT JUST WORKED. It probably still works today but I made the jump to a Samsung watch with more features but truly crappy battery life. Score one for well-made products. Go!
Ben Smith (who used to work at the Times in a very prominent media reporter role) goes behind the scenes at the NYT with a must-read piece on the identity crisis at the New York Times. Choice excerpt from ex-NYTer James Bennet:
The Times and its publisher, Bennet said, “want to have it both ways.” Sulzberger is “old school” in his belief in a neutral, heterodox publication. But “they want to have the applause and the welcome of the left, and now there’s the problem on top of that that they’ve signed up so many new subscribers in the last few years and the expectation of those subscribers is that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids.”
Last but not least, I just stumbled on this 2020 project from advertising journalism dude David Griner where users build a virtual ad agency on Twitter and crowdsource what happens. Check out the thread below, it’s awesome:
And with that, today’s newsletter is a wrap.