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Today in Context Collapse!: Holiday cards, finally getting paperwork processed, Twitterās CEO transition, holding companies and adtech + more.
Housekeeping and keeping-in-touch-with-far-flung-people note: Sending out holiday cards next week. Would you like one? Of course youād like one, even if you didnāt receive one before. Sign up here.

And, Thus, the PPP Saga Ends
Like a lot of other people in this country, I run a small business. Like a lot of American small businesses, we took out a PPP loan to make it through the worst of the pandemic. This week, Iām celebrating a milestone: Getting my first round PPP loan forgiveness approved after nine months or so in paperwork limbo.
Our first round PPP loan was serviced by Kabbage, which was acquired by American Express and spun out their PPP portfolio into a separate company called K-Servicing. Then all sorts of issues occurred with the spinoff company, our forgiveness application went into the digital ether and headlines started popping up like AmEx acquisition of online lender Kabbage hurt PPP borrowers (CNBC) and The Paycheck Protection Program Was Fintechās āMoment to Shine.ā That Spotlight Also Revealed the Problems With Those Loans (Morning Consult). Not good.
Our second round PPP loan was serviced by an entirely different company who, err, processed and approved our paperwork in two weeks or so.
A lot of businesses started having problems a lot worse than paperwork being stuck in bureaucratic limbo, unfortunately. Our problemāhaving to wait months for access to the platform to resubmit loan forgiveness paperworkāwas minor by comparison. Extremely irritating, but minor.
But many emails, calls to call centers and followup from my Congressmanās office (Thanks again to Rep. Chuy Garciaās team) later, we finally had our paperwork processed and approved. This means being able to scope out 2021 business, being able to build a growth plan for 2021, and finallyāfinallyābeing able to plan for our businessā future.
Cheers to that.
Jack Dorsey Out At Twitter
And itās official... Jack Dorsey has resigned as Twitterās CEO.
Dorsey remains CEO of Square. The move follows years of service as dual CEO of both Twitter and Square, which is a long time to serve as CEO of both a leading payments processing company and one of the worldās leading social media platforms. Especially, especially when both Square and Twitter operate in, uhh, regulatory-heavy fields.
I found these two background explainers (both from Axios) by Sara Fischer on whatās next for Twitter and Dan Primack on activist investor Elliott Managementās role in forcing Dorsey out extremely helpful for context-y things.
Iāll also add that Dorseyās resignation follows Twitterās recent introduction of subscription platform Twitter Blue and functionality for tipping content creators, both of which should have been implemented at least five years ago.
Dorseyās replacement, Parag Agrawal, is Twitterās current CEO and a deeply qualified in-house choice to helm the company.
But hereās what bothers me: Twitter Inc., under both Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, has been amazingly talented at building + scaling a worldwide social network while paying a lot less attention to the business surrounding the masterpiece of engineering and user psychology. Twitter the Platform got lots of love while Twitter the Business which underwrites Twitter the Platform didnāt get the support it needed.
Why wasnāt there an edit function for posts years ago? How come Twitter wasnāt able to offer substantially different advertising experiences on desktop vs. mobile? How come Twitter Inc. didnāt have a coherent approach years ago for working with the large brands who kept pouring $$$ into the platform as an advertising and customer service platform? Anywayā¦
IPG Changing Of The Guard
Really enjoyed this piece from Barry Dudley in The Drum about CEO Michael Rothās retirement from IPG, one of the advertising industryās largest holding companies (Disclosure: I formerly worked for R/GA, one of IPGās portfolio agencies).
IPG is a massive holding company that owns high-profile advertising, marketing and PR agencies like R/GA, McCann, FCB, Golin, Weber Shandwick and MullenLowe. The holding company modelāwhere a handful of large corporations own a plurality of the worldās advertising agencies and generate profits on the margins of operations while (ideally!) leaving agencies to function autonomouslyāis something that simply is in the iteration of the advertising/marketing/PR world that we live in1.
Anyway, gonna hone in on this quote from Dudley:
Another part of his legacy was an eye for a good buy ā and for taking the long-term view. A great example of this came in 2018 when IPG bought the database marketing and consumer insight business Acxiom for $2.3bn, its biggest-ever acquisition. The deal raised a few eyebrows, despite the interest in data at the time; the price paid came in for particular criticism. But three years on it was put into a favorable perspective by Publicisās acquisition of Epsilon for $4bn.
Initially IPG focused on using Acxiomās data capabilities across its media agencies, and it took a while to figure out how best to use Acxiom across the groupās agency offerings. But Roth and his team managed to integrate their new purchase into the group, and it has contributed to profits ever since ā and significantly, helped win new clients (as R/GA did years earlier when IPG bought Bob Greenbergās innovative New York digital agency).
Both Acxiom and Epsilon are consumer data companies who make money by finding new ways to collect, bundle and market personal data which can get really, really granular and personal-identifying sometimes⦠and the future of the advertising world is tied in with that. Itās something that canāt be undone; the toothpaste has already been squeezed out of the tube.
And the programmatic revolution that changed (and personalized) internet advertising is quickly coming to both streaming platforms and cable TV as they merge into some weird hybrid-y OTT-y thingy⦠which is something IPG and their peers will be dealing with a lot over the next decade.
Recommendations
Check out Stacksearch, a Substack search engine with their paid option Stacksearch Pro which looks extremely helpful for anyone running either a paid Substack newsletter or a Substack with large readership. Recommend it.
Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis being eccentric British dudes discussing strange things in global culture and the future of politics in The Guardian.
Kaitlyn Tiffanyās in-depth essay on Kodakās rise and fall.
Satire-not-satire from The Hard Times: Kids Finally Decide To Have āDonāt Believe Everything You Read Onlineā Conversation With Parents.


Last but not least, Jerry Saltzās masterful YouTube talk on How To Be An Artist.
Further reading: Adbrands.netās page on the structure of the advertising industry, which is as good an overview as any.