Newsletter 1/6/2023: The Millenium’s Jordan Year
From the Desk of Dennis:
Happy New Year!
2023 is the Jordan Year of the Millenium, the Year of the Rabbit, and the year the United States government is anticipated by some storytellers to be formally overthrown by corporate interests. Okay, I’m more optimistic than that, but there are a lot of power vacuums out there in the world today:
Kevin McCarthy can’t get the R’s in the House together to name him Speaker
In hype culture, Virgil Abloh is dead and Kanye was rightfully exiled after going full anti-semite
Crypto prices continue to scrape the bottom of the barrel following the FTX implosion
Putin and Xi have both had to deal with public dissent to their authoritarian regimes in recent months
Twitter is melting down, FB ads don’t work like they used to, and TikTok is banned from US gov’t devices
Take a look around - where’s the power vacuum in your market this year? What’s the open niche inviting you in, the opportunity you can seize to make moves in 2023?
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
TechCrunch: “Burned by Layoffs, tech workers are rethinking risk”
“Never again am I going to put myself into a position where I’m dependent on one stream of income from one company that may or may not do what’s in my interest,” Aaliyah said. “They’re gonna do what they want, and I’m going to do what’s mine.”
Lots of interesting anecdotes in this report on the various fortunes of tech workers during our great economic “reshuffling” (still not technically a recession!). I can sympathize deeply with this woman who shared the quote above, and currently works full-time remote for two companies while also running her own consultancy business. It’s unfortunate how the scale of large, successful businesses clouds leadership’s ability to see the human impact of their decisions.
SearchEngineLand, “Why advertisers should reassess Google Ads Recommendations”
“As an agency owner, I like to operate as if I were a fiduciary operating on behalf of my clients. The best interest of the client is always #1, #1a and #1b. Frankly, the recommendations system and Optimization Score has a notorious history and operates differently in my opinion.”
So happy to see SEL finally saying what I’ve been saying for years - Google recommendations start with the aim of having you spend more on Google Ads, and work backwards into maybe calculating better conversion rate for your campaigns. Never trust them.
New York Times, “Streaming Changed TV. Is TV Changing Streaming Back?”
“Now, for much the same reason, “Kaleidoscope” feels like a throwback. It’s one in a series of attempts to use streaming to alter the space-time fabric of television, to make it less linear and in some cases more interactive — many of which have gotten attention, but none of which have really stuck.”
I’m using this space to plug an amazing video game implementation of nonlinear narrative - Telling Lies puts you in the role of an investigator scrolling through video files on her laptop (the progression of in-game time is punctuated by changes in the “reflection” of the room behind her, always subtly visible on-screen). These files, which you navigate by keyword-searching their transcripts, tell the story of an ecological activist-turned-terrorist group and the deadly fallout from one of their protest actions. Since you’re using keyword search, you won’t watch clips in chronological order, but you might pickup the name of an activist collaborator, or the company whose projects they’re protesting, and search for more videos mentioning those keywords. It’s a creative way to tell the story in a completely player-driven structure, and the cast of TV actors (Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé, Angela Sarafyan) keeps the drama engaging.
