Newsletter 2/10/2023: Super Bowls and Camera Rolls
From the Desk of Dennis:
Weeks like this I just want to hop on a Chinese spy balloon and float far, far away from it all. Shout out to the private healthcare insurance system which, for no reason other than bureaucratic obstinance, granted me the clarity of a week without my depression and anxiety medication. See below for an artist’s rendition of my headspace right now.
Moving on to sanity: ChatGPT is just a chatbot, it can’t open up Wordpress for you and hit publish, or Outlook and hit send. If saying the right words was all it took to succeed in life (or like, take away whole industries of jobs)… well, automation in communications has been a thing since telemarketing came onto the scene. You could have 1,000 robocalls doing multivariate testing with Machine Learning to find the best way to generate a sale out of me, and I still wouldn’t pick up. Yes, ChatGPT will probably eliminate the jobs of information middlemen and gatekeepers - what happens when ChatGPT gets trained on the pay-walled contents of LexisNexis or another academic database by a subscriber who has the access? But taking all that knowledge and applying it to the real world is only possible if you have the means to interact with the real world, and the best Chatbot ever still doesn’t have the eyes or fingers to do so. That invention is something much more than what Microsoft has accomplished.
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
Hyperallergic, “Melting Robots Are the Future, Accept It”
“The original idea is inspired by sea cucumbers that can shift their bodies’ stiffness for environmental adaptation… Thus, we were thinking how about we make robots that can also switch their stiffness or even push to the shifting between solid and liquid.”
I never cared for the Terminator films - I took a fantastic nap during a screening of 2009’s middling reboot subtitled Salvation, gently rocked to sleep by the booming subwoofers of the theater. But I always loved the aesthetic of the chromed out liquid form that Terminators could take in later films as CGI technology rose to the challenge. This week, that movie magic comes one step closer to reality as an unarmed Lego minifigure has achieved the ability to transition states of matter using magnets. As usual, we are doomed.
StreamHatchet, “HOGWARTS LEGACY BREAKS TWITCH PEAK VIEWERSHIP RECORD”
“Hogwarts Legacy has broken the record for the highest peak concurrent viewership for a single-player game on Twitch with 1.3 million viewers watching on Tuesday. This number beats the previous record set by Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 with 1.14M concurrent viewers. Hogwarts also beat out Elden Ring which hit a peak viewership on Twitch with just over 900K viewers last year.”
Very interesting to see how these insane numbers may or may not convert into sales - I suspect a non-zero percent of the viewership was really hate-watching this, as evidenced by instances of backlash against content creators who streamed the game and ongoing debate because of the transphobic beliefs of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. With all that in mind, streamer xQc is not somebody I go to for well-thought out social justice discussions, so Gringott’s bank will probably stay full.
NYTimes, “Floodgates Open for Beer Ads During Super Bowl”
“After three decades as the only alcohol brand to air its commercials nationally during the game, the parent company of Budweiser, Bud Light and Michelob Ultra gave up that exclusivity in June.”
Fascinating decision by Anheuser-Busch here - they are still running ads, so obviously the impressions generated by a Super Bowl ad are still desirable for the famously high costs. But what does it say that they are prepared to forgo the exclusivity deal - certainly a premium price tag on top of already massive rates for this event - and dilute one of the biggest drinking-and-TV holidays in the United States with their competitors messages? Perhaps this is another step in the ongoing reshuffle of alcohol purchases post-pandemic and in the heyday of Gen Z and Millenials, where a lifetime of anti-drinking healthcare messages intersect with an image-focused aspirational culture that squarely centers fitness and the visual projection of health as a marker of success. In other words, Budweiser has had to diversify away from heavy beers into hard seltzers, whatever the hell a Lime-a-Rita is, and other low-cal beverages. Maybe as they’ve had to diversify their product line, they’re more comfortable with giving up the dominance of Bud Light partiers and Bud Heavy Clydesdales during the Biggest Game on TV.
