It’s been over a year since The Messenger closed down and the lessons are even more stark today. The meltdown precipitated from a number of out-dated expectations. Social media algorithms are shunning general news content, Google has been re-calibrated to favor original, niche content and news consumption habits have changed considerably.
It’s kind of like running a restaurant on a busy street. If your goal is to touch as many consumers as possible (as The Messenger sought to do) the easiest way to achieve that is to make food quickly and throw it at passing cars hoping that people will 1.) have their window rolled down, 2.) will be hungry and 3.) will like what you’ve made. If your goal is to build an enduring business with a foundation of repeat customers your best bet is it invite them in, speak with them and hope they stay a while.
News articles are a no longer a commodity that is profitable at scale. The age of infinite personalization (via AI) is upon us. Publishers that understand Liquid Content, information that can be adapted to it’s consumer, will prevail. The new moat will be unique archives of well-formatted content, rich with meta-data stored in dynamic data structures that can re-combine on-demand to meet a specific need. Adaptability is key because in this new world it is impossible to know if your growth will come from text snippets, short-form vertical video, interactive graphical representations of data, or audio summaries translated to Chinese.
In this world, the inverted pyramid is but one way to present what you have.
I went to a panel yesterday where online retailers spoke about the changes AI has brought to their profession. Ugly Talk: Selling in the World Run by Algorithms. While a well-structured website with lots of meta-data around your catalog have become table-stakes, success or failure can also come from unexpected data layers in your checkout pages. Frank Pacheco from Nearly Natural spoke about how one of his SKUs sales dropped 75% overnight because of a shipping issue which extended delivery times beyond the usual Amazon two-day. Your supply chain and logistics is just as important to agentic commerce as your descriptions and prices.
As AI Agents and atomization of audiences into niche vertical markets will de-emphasize traditional marketing, social media still remains as an important marketing channel. As marketers try and optimize their sites to get mentioned in the AI Answer Engines, social media is one of the last resources to discover broad trends and what people are looking for in your product.
In this sense, social media marketing has become mainstream and often you’ll see traditional advertising campaigns shot to look like low-budget social media clips to try and emulate the unfiltered and honest perspective of a viral video. It rarely works as audiences can see right through that.
One of the first rules of social media marketing is that you should have faith in your product such that you can allow the customer to amplify your products and brand and remix and celebrate it.
Having your CEO reveal your latest “product” before anyone else can experience it is the antitheses of social media. The bland office, the tiny, tentative bite, not even mentioning that this behemoth has THREE slices of cheese, even the sign over his shoulder that says “petty” – these are all working against him.
That is, unless the goal is to generate mentions on reddit in which case, they win!
Anthropic, makers of AI Assistant Claude, is going after their competition with a series of ads to designed to give users pause after the Open AI’s announcement that ads would be coming to their product, Chat GPT.
The campaign, Time and a Place, was envisioned by Mother London, extending Claude’s positioning from the Keep Thinking campaign.
The ads launched yesterday, timed for this weekend’s Super Bowl, which will feature two of the spots as detailed by AdWeek.
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.
But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic…
Went to visit the excellent selection of ephemera on display at the New York Public Library and picked out a few choice pieces to share.
Interview questionsFont Catalog“In Cold Blood” draft“Spot” illustrationTalk of the Town ideaTelegram to EB White“I want more money!”Oct 1942 coverPitch for “Hiroshima”“Hiroshima” issueJD Salinger letterNabokov doesn’t like editsThat famous coverTina Brown’s rolodexHarold Ross’ mission statement
A The Century of The New Yorker is free to the public on the third floor of the main Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue in Manhattan and well worth the time. The exhibit closes on February 26th.
My father moved our family to Tokyo in 1978. As a local, he had a great run sharing his observations of Japanese culture from a Western perspective in a collection of of essays collected in a now out-of-print book, Home Sweet Tokyo.
Here’s his take on the Japanese culture of gift-giving.
It is curious that in a society as dedicated to sweetness and harmony as that of Japan, a tradition as potentially disruptive as the ritual giving of gifts has been allowed to flourish. People don’t talk much about the consequences of indiscriminate gift giving for fear of being seen as mean, but it is clear that in Japan gifts are launched as missiles, serving, if rightly chosen, to stun the recipient, or as least to nudge him or her off balance.
As gift giving proliferates, it tends to be taken for granted, and so to achieve its purpose of impressing the other fellow with the giver’s scarcely controllable generosity, the preferred gift has to be seen to be twice as magnificent as any sane person would deem reasonable.
In this way the ante escalates. If I give you a cheap souvenir teaspoon stamped “Shizuoka, counterpunch with a packet of fine tea. I fight back with an antique teapot; you ambush me with a round trip for two to a luxury hotel on the grounds of a Sri Lankan tea plantation. I, panicking, present you with a one-third interest in Twinings… and so on until we are both bankrupt.
In Tokyo this annual escalation of gifts given takes place between companies who do business together: one company one year giving its client company ten cases of beer, the next twenty, the next forty, until all corridors, closets, washrooms, and space at the back of the recipient company’s garage are filled with brightly wrapped packages from Mitsukoshi Department Store. At the end of the gift-giving season, the employees of both companies thus locked in gift-giving combat must hire trucks to cart away their share of the bounty, wanted or not, to their own homes and garages.
At a higher level, the presidents of the companies involved will exchange exquisite lacquer boxes, larger ones every year, each requiring the attention of a master craftsman for several months and costing millions of yen. It is said that the hills outside Kyoto are heavily populated with subtle geniuses whose sole occupation is the crafting of fine lacquer boxes destined to be presented by the heads of Japanese industry to each other during the annual gift-giving seasons of o-chugen in the summer and o-seibo in the winter.
Escape from the gift-giving plague is impossible. On every train platform, boxes of the local specialty-pickles, bean cakes, rice cakes, fish cakes, twirligigs – are dutifully purchased by travelers (although they may only have gone overnight to Osaka to visit an aged aunt) to be taken back and presented to fellow office workers and neighbors as a gesture of their enduring concern.
The constant flow of gifts keeps the Japanese economy purring and out in front of the unsupercharged economies of nations that don’t indulge in frenzied gift giving. A good 15 percent of the revenue of the average department store is generated by gifts: boxes of bars of soap, cans of soup, tins of salad oil and pressed seaweed, matched bottles of wine and whiskey and 100-percent orange juice, and hampers of exotic foreign delicacies – a truly prodigious prodigality, as if to make up for the shameful thriftiness of the rest of the year.
Perhaps, though, this gift-giving reflex could be put to good use.
One hears that the American public continues to be concerned that they are buying more Japanese goods than Japanese consumers are buying American goods. Some Americans are evidentily itchier than ever about the trade imbalance and have convinced themselves that behind it all there lurks some great brooding conspiracy.
Would not an appropriate gift serve to ease the tension? Why don’t the Japanese people simply present the American people with a massive present, perhaps a video game or a motor scooter for everyone, or a new national railroad system (staffed by supernumerary JR railroad men), or maybe, because after all it is the thought that counts, an enormous lacquer box?
