In This Issue: Gen Z Broke The Marketing Funnel / Procter & Gamble’s Big Detergent Move / Why You Should Never Depend On Platforms / Actors Are Contractors Too / TikTok Monetization Changes / Why Email Marketing Works
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
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Lots going on this week. Lots and lots.
But first… Need marketing or PR help?
I’m taking on a few projects for early April at Ungerleider Works. Need help with white papers? Executive ghostwriting? Newsletters? Creative or strategy stuff in general? Let’s talk.
Now on to the links.
Procter & Gamble’s Big Detergent Move: “Procter & Gamble is rolling out what it hopes will be the future of detergent: liquid-free squares.
P&G says the soft, white-woven tiles, which it is calling Tide evo, clean better than the dose of bargain liquid detergent that many Americans use to wash their clothes. But the new technology eliminates the need for plastic bottles and drastically reduces shipping weight when more people are buying their detergent online.”
Why You Should Never Depend On Platforms: “In an email, Kaigan told us:
I’ve lost every single person that was 'following’ my podcast. I’ve lost all of my paid subscribers - when they deleted my podcast, the system then refunded each of my subscribers - and I had money sitting in my account from the last 4 months that I hadn’t withdrawn. All my stats are gone, too.
In spite of the podcast being back on Spotify, she was going to have to start all over again - no followers, no paid subscribers, no income, no stats. Worse, she claimed that Spotify had stopped responding to her emails.”
Gen Z Broke The Marketing Funnel: “Due to the algorithm of platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, TV, music and fashion and beauty content can spread like wildfire. It’s given a new level of exposure to culture (via “second screen” content of TV or film) and previously exclusive events such as concerts or fashion weeks are now more mainstream than ever, which is inspiring consumers and birthing micro-trends including Barbiecore and Girl Math. While the percentages remain low, young people are becoming increasingly open about having mainstream tastes in comparison to their predecessors: 13 per cent of Gen Zs said they are happy to embrace their mainstream taste, versus 9 per cent of millennials.
As a result, retailers are behaving more like media companies and media companies are behaving more like retailers, says Alex Hawkins, strategic foresight editor at agency The Future Laboratory.”
Actors Are Contractors Too: “Sydney Sweeney is one of the brightest young stars in Hollywood. She is an actor's actor. She's young. She's implausibly hot and lives in a home worth $3 million. The outcry against the issues she raised was trained entirely against her, in large part but not entirely because Sweeney is, by almost all standards, rich.
Specifically, the backlash to what is a very measured and thoughtful interview centered on one section. "If I wanted to take a six-month break, I don’t have income to cover that," Sweeney said. "I don’t have someone supporting me, I don’t have anyone I can turn to, to pay my bills or call for help."
Many people, the internet yelled as one, can't take a six-month break and those people also don't live in a house worth $3 million. While this is true, it also ignores the context that Sweeney provides in that article. About 20 percent of her income, she says, goes toward paying various people who help her do her job. And the reason she would want to take six months off would be to have a baby. The United States has no mandated maternal leave, and because Sweeney is a freelancer who is contracted out for acting gigs, no show would pay for the healthcare costs related to having a baby.”
TikTok Monetization Changes: “The Creativity Program, as you probably know, is TikTok’s replacement for the $1 billion let’s-get-creators-paid fund it established in 2020. It first introduced the Creativity Program around this time last year, paying out only on videos longer than 60 seconds.
As TikTok revealed at its For Creators: Future Formats Summit today in Los Angeles, that stipulation is remaining as the program comes out of beta, but one thing that isn’t staying is the name. TikTok has gone from Creator Fund to Creativity Program and now to the (possibly permanent?) moniker Creator Rewards Program. […]
Unlike YouTube and Twitch, TikTok only allowed creators to offer subscriptions if they did livestreams.
Until now. Soon, the feature–which is also changing names, from LIVE Subscription to just Subscription–will expand to creators who make VOD content.”
Why Email Marketing Works: “Email, thanks to its independence from monopoly-power and the inevitable enshittification their incentives demand, is the channel that never dies.
If you’re not investing in an email list, you’re almost certainly missing out. That TikTok/Instagram/Threads/Twitter/LinkedIn following you’re building? Statistically it’s better to trade 1,000 new followers for a single email subscriber. That’s how lopsided the value-exchange is.
“But young people aren’t using email! In a few years, once <insert arbitrary generation name here> is a majority of the workforce, email will die!”
Yawn. Prognosticators have been saying that since 2003. It’s never come true. As people age, they need email addresses. They realize important things they can’t ignore come through email. They want discounts at furniture stores for their first apartment and on video games that go on sale, and the IRS notifications and their driver’s license renewal notice. Young people won’t kill email. AI won’t kill email. FAANG won’t kill email (much as they’d love to). Email is here to stay.”
