Weekend Links: Yes, Being NYC Mayor is an Optics-Based Job.
Deciphering Eric Adams, modern heresies, Peloton’s worst week & more: CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 118
In this issue: Deciphering Eric Adams, modern heresies, Peloton’s worst week and more.
Content for humans, selected by a human. Mass communications-focused with a universal lens. Mid-week is for the articles, weekend is for the links. Not your thing? Unsubscribe below.
Hey there. The weekend is here. It’s about 25 degrees Farenheit here in Chicago, which is about 20 degrees warmer than it was last Friday. It’s practically tropical.
So let’s go. Here are the links:
New Futures:
Peloton’s No Good, Very Bad Week: Peloton’s stock price dropped nearly 24%, they’re reportedly pausing production on most fitness equipment and planning layoffs in sales and marketing. Oof. Insert your own Mr. Big joke here.
Starbucks Dropping Employee Vaccination Requirements: Following the Supreme Court’s decision to block the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate for large private employers, Starbucks will no longer require US employees to either have COVID-19 vaccinations or get weekly testing. Starbucks’ corporate messaging said this was in response to the Court’s decision…
Biden’s Succession Calculus: Smart analysis from Peter Hamby about who will be the next Democratic presidential candidate post-Biden. And what happens to a political party whose leading figures (Biden, Sanders, Pelosi) are all in their seventies or eighties?
The Power of Eric Adams: I’m fascinated by NYC mayor Eric Adams, and Ross Barkan looks at Adams’ first month as mayor. Adams is an amazingly contradictory figure for a politician—a vegan ex-cop known for his love of nightlife, just for starters—and there’s lots to unpack here. Being mayor of New York is arguably as much about optics as it’s about actual governance, and Adams already shows an consideration of optics that wasn’t really there (for very different reasons!) in either the de Blasio or Bloomberg administrations.
Kevin Kelly’s Contemporary Heresies: The Wired founding editor’s list of 67 contemporary heresies ranging from “Aliens are already here” to “Having a parent-given first name will be unfashionable.”
Wharton Class Separation: Wharton professor Nina Strohminger said that many of her students believe Americans make $100,000 on average (actual number=~$45,000). This isn’t terribly surprising, but… dude! Cognitive dissonance!
Zeynep Tufekci On COVID-19 2022: Zeynep Tufekci, who’s had a better rate on predicting the COVID pandemic’s progression than nearly everyone, speaks with Ezra Klein about what we haven’t learned from our pandemic experiences. TLDR; People are people and institutions are made of people and expecting people to quickly learn from experiences, even in crisis situations = a hard ask.
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
Why COVID Vaccines Have Such Weird Names: Felicia Schwartz at the Journal looks at the dark art of coming up with names for drugs that clear regulatory approval.
Wine Marketing Decoded: In another WSJ piece, Leattie Teague explains what wine marketing jargon means IRL.
Advertising and Web3: Antonio Garcia-Martinez has some interesting speculation about why advertising will still be a part of Web3 platforms. Money quote: “Advertising is in fact deeply weird, which is why it’s so hard to reason about.”
Apple Names Kristin Huguet PR Head: Kristin Huguet Quayle, a longtime Apple spokesperson, has been named as the company’s new head of comms. She replaces Stella Low.1
Burned Out Agency Parents Are Desperate For Help: AdWeek’s Jameson Fleming looks at the tough time parents of young children working at advertising agencies are having. As the dad of a 3-year-old, I am so damn happy I run my own business these days. That is all.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’s “Notflix”: Genius advertising from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter alongside GLOW and Ogilvy—Notflix.
US Surveillance Advertising Ban?: A new Democratic-backed bill in Congress would ban advertisers from targeting online ads using personal data. Great, except for the fact that the digital advertising agency has already been moving away from cookie-based targeted advertising for several years2.
Spotify Launching Call-to-Action Podcast Ads: Spotify’s new CTA cards advertising unit will insert clickable visual ads into Spotify’s app when a related audio ad begins to play. Convergence! Spotify will feel like Hulu which will feel like Xbox.
Inside Pabst Tweetgate: David Griner at AdWeek talks with former Pabst brand manager Corey Smale about the tweet about eating ass that got him fired. Dude, 2022 is weird.
Marques Brownlee’s Studio Tour: Touring YouTube tech guru Marques Brownlee’s million-dollar studio.
Media:
The Inside Story of Facebook Marketplace: Lenny Rachitsky
and Deb Liu assembled a massive case study on how Facebook Marketplace was developed that is useful for all sorts of things.
The Rich Niche: Brian Morrissey writes about why so many new media companies are targeting the same demographic of rich readers. Hint: Advertisers.
YouTube Shutting Down Oirignal Programming Division: In a move that surprises absolutely noone, YouTube is closing their original programming division. Shed a tear and thank those magnificent bastards for giving the world Cobra Kai.
TikTok as Witch Hunt Machine: Ryan Broderick dives into the whole West Elm Caleb TikTok saga, which is a whole separate internet rabbithole, but stumbles onto something important about TikTok’s UX.
TikTok built a witch hunt machine and doesn’t really give a shit what people do with it. Its users have been trained to follow trending topics, forensically analyze each other’s content, and endlessly iterate and remix to build online clout that is now directly linked to actual personal wealth and success.
Tech:
Moxie Marlinspike’s Web3 Letter: Signal co-creator Marlinspike has written a detailed blog post on Web3’s future and what it means for software that’s very worth reading.
Fake QR Codes on Parking Meters: Genius scams of the future = Putting fake QR codes on meters to intercept parking payments.
Majority of Game Developers Want to Unionize: In a new Game Developers Conference Survey, 55% of developers say they support unionizing game studios.
Chat Room Literacy: Patrick McKenzie put together a detailed guide to chat and email literacy for the tech industry aka how to read the digital room.
Oddly enough I think I’ve never seen an official guide to either chat or email practice, despite them being core job skills which are clearly as trainable (and amenable to automatic aid!) as e.g. code standards / linting.Chat literacy is super trainable, but is a distinguishing trait for a remote worker that can be more easily papered-over for an in-office worker. I like to call it "literacy" because failing at this is the same magnitude of issue in remote envs as not being able to read or write
Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh
Misc.:
Love something like Henry Cavill loves Warhammer.
Why is this Interesting looks at the eating phenomenon that is Hillstone… and answers everything but why Hillstone’s and not Houston’s and why the chain has so many different names. We need to know!
The Onion: “T.J. Maxx Recreates In-Store Shopping Experience With New Website That Randomly Scatters Products All Over The Place.”
Reimagining Country w/ Jamal Khadar is a great NTS radio series that looks at the influence of US country music across the African diaspora. Nigerian country music!
George Harrison as god-level practical joker.
Our CAPTCHA life.
And, last but not least, Buttsss is a (NSFW-ish) collection of butt clip art for “your pitch deck, product screens, marketing campaigns, business presentations, and motivational speeches.”
Working with Apple’s corporate comms as a journalist was… interesting? I remember that in my time at Fast Company, Apple was a company that was extremely hard to get any comment out of—even if the comment was no comment. While other large tech companies tended to be proactively interested in stories being written about them, Apple was generally a tougher cookie for fact-checking or providing information outside of their large-scale events.
Disclaimer: I’ve worked as a consultant on messaging projects involving post-personalized advertising models already. What I can say is that the digital advertising world isn’t moving on from the cookie/ad auction model out of altruism, but because the traditional cookie model both leaves a lot of money on the table that interested parties would rather have in their pockets and because treating customers as larger aggregate groups rather than as tiny micro-segments is, in many cases, more profitable.