Newsletter 7/22/2022: Blue Birds, Spiders, and Bugs
From the Desk of Dennis:
This week marked a milestone for Loon Call Media, LLC, as the company released its first piece of original media: King Bedhead Sound Pack Volume 1: Cute Ghosts.
King Bedhead is a handle I’ve used for nearly seven years now across different pieces of media, starting with music, dipping hard into streaming and other gaming content, and now sound design. All of this is housed under one roof at the (mildly monetized) blog www.KingBedhead.live. Cute Ghosts represents a piece of the brand development I’m doing for King Bedhead, trying to expand the audience and discover new revenue streams without compromising my own integrity - just like I hope to do for the creative client base I’m cultivating at Loon Call Media, LLC.
Boo!
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
TechCrunch, “Twitter posts quarterly sales drop and says it spent $33M on pending Musk acquisition”
“Twitter announced that its Q2 revenue amounted to $1.18 billion, down around 5% on the previous quarter and 1% on the corresponding period last year — analysts had estimated its Q2 revenues at around $1.32 billion.“
It shouldn’t be surprising to see ad sales down over at Twitter. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Twitter is anywhere near the best ads platform of the major social players - the userbase is less engaged and the environment is text-heavy and therefore not as product friendly as Instagram or TikTok.
Vulture, “The 5 Biggest Storylines to Follow at This Year’s San Diego Comic-Con”
“San Diego’s annual extravaganza of cosplay, saturation hype, ambush marketing, and comic-book commerce is back to business as usual this Thursday through Sunday for the first time since 2019.”
SDCC has evolved as a fascinating litmus test for hype generation. It also begs the question, what’s the right way to tell a multiverse story? The genre is a post-modern gumbo of content opportunities that was first introduced to justify more comic lines for the same superhero, and production companies have been quick to recognize the same model is extremely useful for retaining a film or TV audience. When I can make a cartoon Spider-Man for the kids, a coming-of-age Spider-Man for the teens, and a gritty reboot Spider-Man for the 18-35 crowd, I’ve got a whole-life product cycle I can offer you (assuming that in your elderly years you’ll be buying the collector’s remasters of each of these Spider-Men). What’s the point of new IP?
Defector, “Now Is As Good A Time As Any To Start A Spotted Lanternfly Kill Log”
“If you find any life stage of spotted lanternfly in a municipality where it is known to exist, you should try to destroy it. This insect is considered a threat to some crops and many people are working to try to prevent it from spreading.”
My personal municipal policy proposal for Philly is that we each get bodycams for our shoes that record when we step on the lanternflies. We’re paid $0.10 for each verified kill (this is job creation too since we’ll need auditors watching the tapes in City Hall). After you earn enough blood money to pay back your piece of the new citywide surveillance network, credits are deposited into your SEPTA Key account for use on mass transit. Yay or nay?
