been gone for a bit, did i miss anything big?
been gone for a bit, did i miss anything big?
just kidding.
Greetings! Here’s the mood (swap ‘social media’ for capitalism/consumerism also lol)
It’s been a few weeks since my last note; a lil self-promo-ey housekeeping:
check out my Q+A w the good folks at
check out my guest post on
abt my fav place to swimfor jnr/mid-level strategists or strategy-curious people, i’ll be at Sweathead Do-Together talking about some of my quick n dirty research methods that are non-AI dependent. the Do Together will be great for strategy folks who want to brush up on fundamentals. If you are a junior or mid-level strategy person and want to go but the cost is prohibitive for you, hit me up. I have a couple of passes to use, first come first serve! (women and marginalized folks to the front please).
ANYWAY —- here’s all the tings i’ve been saving n storing away to talk to you all about since my last ‘send!
Hollywoods’ “Great Malaise” i.e the olds won’t let us thrive
I’m a little late to this, so apologies to the entertainment buffs in my subscriber list - keep it scrolling. Hollywood Reporter wrote a couple of weeks back about how “everyone in Hollywood feels stuck.” I want to posit that the themes of this story apply to many industries right now.
“Many of these no-longer-so-young Turks [older execs] are now old enough to qualify for AARP discounts. But few of them seem in any huge rush to retire.
And that’s the problem. Or at least it is for a new generation of ambitious show-business strivers […] who find themselves unhappily stuck on the middle rungs of Hollywood’s corporate ladder. Unlike their bosses, some of whom ascended to the heights of authority in their 30s and even their late 20s, young professionals today — who are toiling in an industry plagued with title deflation and ever-diminishing paydays — see no clear path to the top. Not one that isn’t blocked by an all-powerful boomer who’s been perched in a corner office since the Bush administration. The first one.
Sound familiar? It probably doesn’t need to be said, but there’s an obvious issue with creating conditions for innovation (and thereby, growth) if you keep the same folks in the same seats forever. Not to mention the distance of key decision-makers from the audience:
“You get to a point where you’re living in your beautiful house in the hills, you’re meeting only other wealthy people and you’re not connecting to the audience… And the moviegoing audience is primarily young, so at a certain point you become really detached from them.”
…Aaaand, with diminishing entry-level opportunities, the landscape will soon be full of people who do not know how to actually execute:
In the long run, it’s bad for the future of the business. In fact, it’s potentially deadly. It means that someday, maybe soon, there won’t be anybody left in Hollywood’s dwindling workforce who’ll have a clue about how to run a set. Or a slate. Or a studio. Says one 50-something former studio exec of the looming brain-drain crisis, “It’s an existential threat.”
Anyway, what do yall think? I could swap ‘Hollywood’ and ‘entertainment’ out of this article for so many other industries/verticals and it still feels relevant.
AI appears to be the smoke and mirrors we thought it was, but the labor market hasn’t figured it out yet
If you believe the most bearish skeptics (which i choose to), LLM’s (i.e tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity etc) have reached the point of “diminishing returns” as outlined by
.“The economics are likely to be grim. Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence. As I have always warned, that’s just a fantasy.
He previously wrote:
If enthusiasm for GenAI dwindles and market valuations plummet, AI won’t disappear, and LLMs won’t disappear; they will still have their place as tools for statistical approximation.
Interesting. so will all the jobs come back now? ? ?
On that note - a sobering read at HBR on how AI is impacting the labor market, with notable losses in job listings for writing, design/image-making folks.
Additionally, we noticed that over time, there were no signs of demand rebounding, revealing a growing trend of job replacement. We compared this impact against both typical seasonal demand fluctuations on the job platform and the effects that automation had on traditional labor markets. The impact produced by gen AI tools was significantly more substantial.
So basically, from these two stories i’m getting that creative output and opportunity is being taken away from humans in favor of machines generating a ‘statistical average’. Sweet.
Why is everyone so obsessed with mens media? or with making media more masc? or whatever?
I shudder to add to the election chorus, so please consider this only tangentially related, but immediately post-last week’s results, a deluge of “We need more lefty bro-casters”, “podcast dudes are radicalizing everyone” etc stories began. I think the emphasis on mens media was interesting. Not long after, I heard whispers of how some media entities closer to home are apparently pivoting their content strategy (and even resourcing) to account for a growing appetite for content that appeals to the Adin Ross-style overflow.
has a really good piece on how the conservative media ecosystem is bolstered by an inordinate amount of funding, which doesn’t exist for voices on the other side of things. Of course, as we’ve seen modeled by social media platforms themselves, it isn’t the content that is healthiest for us as a society that tends to generate good metrics for ad money-reliant platforms; it’s the rage-bait or weird shit. also pointed out the timing on her substack of recent (possibly) audience-motivated strategic shifts, in a summation of HighSnobiety’s layoffs and even the all-male SOTY panel happening this weekend:Does ComplexCon’s decision to retreat back to an all-male panel mirror HighSnobiety’s efforts to renew its focus on the male customer? […]
I will just say that it feels too fitting in a year that Donald Trump was reelected president and just over two years since women lost their ability to control their healthcare decisions, the panel reverts to its all-male lineup.
To me the first issue with the panel is the already-clear Nike bias (yachty and pj tucker? come on! it’s been a BANNER year for everyone but swoosh) but yeah it is a little bit of a weird time out there in the media landscape and people do seem overly fixated on what Men will and won’t consume.
It’s a genuinely confusing strategy to focus singularly on men when women ostensibly wield 85% of purchase power in USA. ? But alas….
other interesting links round-up
I preferred this piece about long island pizza joints (and the guys you find there) from
@ as a perspective onto “Tr*mp’s America” over any of the other industry navel gazey takes on campaign strategy or voter sentiment or whatever else. I will spare you ANY of that. It’s a beautiful piece of writing about what it’s like being in new york right now, dealing with questions about ‘migrants’, crime, etc.Great read on why Brand Historians are a CMO’s best friend.
next time you think your little work side quest doesn’t matter, please remember Google Maps only exists because of one guy.
This man is skating from LA to NYC. Chipotle, sponsor him!
Interesting housing trends from DTS.
Whoopi Goldberg is investing in a womens sports network.
Style/Footwear quick links:
Really appreciated this spicy LinkedIn post from Chris Davis (CEO and heir to the New Balance empire) on their recent collab with Amine.
"Never hear of Aminé? That's not the point. Tapping into the “creator economy” is an increasingly utilized tactic by brands to ignite commercial return. But is that the right approach?
If you are a brand that "sponsors" an influencer based on their scale, versus partnering with a creative ambassador on a co-authored vision, you are simply renting relevance instead of establishing an ownable stylistic voice.”It is true, zip hoodies are back. Also, the girlies shopping at Brandy melville couldve told us this approx 5-6 years ago.
Interesting to see Crocs-acquired “Hey Dude” (personally speaking one of the uglier shoes i’ve ever seen in my life) keep struggling after being hailed as some gen z /teen phenom on all those goofy lists a few years back (the north remembers). It begs the question, can teen preference alone build a brand? I think we are at an interesting point in footwear where the traditional tools to achieve volume/scale/mass commercialization (e.g a LOT of distribution partners, hyper-mass messaging and marketing) are not working and some brands don’t know how to adjust. I know Sydney Sweeney is hot but no one is buying shoes because of her. The CEO says the company is dealing with near-term pain due to internal org prioritization & strategic re-alignment; “The shift from performance focused marketing to brand focused marketing, which we believe is the right thing to do for long term brand success, is causing near-term pain.”
Relatedly (in a way…) i agree that banality is tanking the luxury industry.
Not banal: New one from jae tips ft. the homie noel!
Bootleggers are now making some pretty convincing Total Air Foamposites. It’s interesting to consider what product dev will look like in a few years, and if bootleggers will actually drive design and strategy the way Resell did for awhile. I think there’s something awesome about the fact the community is just like ‘fuck it, if yall won’t give it to us we’ll do it ourselves’. i wish them well.
Fab social content round-up
LOVING this series called ‘fashion neurosis’. the casting so far has been straight from my dreams!
very smart branded content play from Zelle to talk about scams via the most unhinged, confession-forward editorial voice (The Cut).
Tony hawk tracked down a skater from an iconic old photo. we love tony.
Great community radio round-up
Thats all folks! I won’t leave it so long next time ;)
GG x
Absolutely killer. The NB CEO quote about “renting relevancy” rang so true. As you’ve said in other space feels like people are taking notes from McDonald’s and understanding power in niche community, brands, etc.
The Hollywood problem could apply to the Democrat party right now - not listening to the audience and meeting them where they are.