Oh G-d It's Almost September Already?!
I know we're supposed to be Positive Mental Atttitude... but 2020 really is a dumpster fire of a year.
Hey there. It’s been a weird year, huh?
The summer of 2020’s has been... different. No diner breakfasts. No Saturday afternoons at White Sox games. No taking the kid to the playground. No live shows. No going to the mall. Lining up in a queue six feet apart to buy a damned cup of coffee or go to the post office. Lots of things. But we’re hanging in there!
In a normal year, my family would hop on an airplane to visit relatives and friends in another part of the country for vacation. But we have a 20-month-old, and… have you ever met 20-month-olds? They’re freakin’ germ machines. The last time I flew with my kid pre-COVID, he kept on licking the airplane window over and over again. He thought it was the funniest thing. That doesn’t work these days.
But I *did* get to go on vacation this year, and it was pretty damned good. My wife, kid and I rented a house for a long weekend about 90 minutes away from our Chicago home in South Bend, IN. It turns out that South Bend has really good beaches nearby at Warren Dunes with real waves and hiking on giant sand dunes. The Midwest is a strange, exotic culture to me—when all’s said and done, I’m a lower-middle class Jewish-American kid from Staten Island whose comfort zone is the Wildwood boardwalk, garlic knots and cramming onto a rush hour 4 train at 14th Street—so the Great Lakes are an entirely new thing.
We had some pretty good Vietnamese food, drove around the Notre Dame campus, did some hiking and the 20-month-old was obsessed with our neighbors’ giant RV (and they were good sports about it!), so no complaints. It wasn’t the Pacific Crest Trail or the Vegas Strip, but it worked.
Anyway, it’s nearly Labor Day. I’m back at the office, wrapping up a few projects for my clients, doing business development-y things and figuring out how this fall’s gonna look.
Stay tuned.
Interesting Stuff
Google funding 100,000 career certification scholarships for newly unemployed workers. This stuff’s great except that relatively few people thrive doing self-directed online learning. You can find any kind of educational materials you can imagine on Coursera or YouTube, but the masses are going to play Call of Duty or watch cat videos instead.
Speaking of video games, here’s how brands are making their own Animal Crossing islands.
TheirTube shows what YouTube’s algorithmic recommendations look like to members of different digital subcultures.
The history of Chicago’s punk rock Dunkin Donuts.
Cory Doctorow on how the adtech industry is increasingly betting on contextual ads instead of cookie-based ads based on your web activity. (Disclosure: I work with clients who spend a lot of money on contextual ads. However, Doctorow is as ad-agency skeptical as you can get and this is 10,000x worth reading.)
Big candy is freaking out about COVID-19 ruining Halloween candy sales. As well they should! Just thinking about what socially distanced trick or treating would be like makes me want to drink a whole bunch of whiskey.
The continuing implosion of Bon Appetit’s wildly successful YouTube presence due to what sure seems like a bad mix of institutional racism and Conde Nast not knowing what the hell to do with YouTube creator compensation. See also: Bon Appetit is dying because media companies don’t know what makes videos work.
What alternate reality games can teach us about QAnon and American conspiracy theory as general. All I know is that, judging from the “people in charge” that I’ve met, they’re just as stupid and f**ked up as the rest of us and I wouldn’t trust them to Bavarian Illuminati their way out of a paper bag.
Last but not least, the reason why Amazon isn’t sending you receipts anymore. Hint: It has to do with them not wanting to give Google and third-party email clients sweet, sweet anonymized data.
A genuine thank you for spending time with this newsletter. Likes? Dislikes? Suggestions for future issues? Write me at neal@nealungerleider.com + if you could share this newsletter with folks, that would be amazing.
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider runs a boutique strategic communications consultancy which helps clients with things like website copy overhauls, pitch decks, ghostwriting op-eds and press strategy. In a past life, he was a reporter at Fast Company magazine and an op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times. This newsletter is where he discusses the thorny intersections of media, advertising, public relations and marketing.
Follow Neal on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com.