B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 Happy Friday!
Yesterday was bonfire night in the UK, where we celebrate a failed attempt to overturn the UK government. I’m very pleased to say our US friends seem to have done a better job this week, without any gunpowder at all.
Lewes, a town just outside of Brighton, goes hard for Bonfire Night every year. There are multiple bonfire societies that parade through the streets with torches and effigies of some of the Main Characters over the past year. Gianni Infantino, the ludicrous head of FIFA, was a popular choice.
💻 DATA POINT: I want to throw another log on the fire of good news this week - new Pew Research shows that trust in national and local news organizations has actually grown in the last year, after many years of decline. America is healing, y’all.
📕The Short Story
What Happens When Kids Get Behind The Camera (8min read)
The Story Behind C4’s Fake Gambling Game Show (5min read)
How TikTok Hacks Your Attention (1.5min watch)
ChatGPT Ads Have a Conversion Problem (5-min read)
The Last Normal Year (9min watch)
How The Internet Turns Good Taste Into Bad Taste (5min read)
Incredible Collection of Presidential Condolence Cards (4min read)
Sony Relaunches Iconic Walkman Headphones (You Know You Want Them)
📣 Inside our podcast A World With (5min read) 📣
The majority of culture now flows through one algorithm or another, so whether you make furniture or paintings or buildings or albums, you have to contend with their effects. You have to know what succeeds in the algorithmic space without becoming totally flattened or made cliché by it.
📚 The Long Story
What Happens When Kids Get Behind The Camera (8min read)
This is a lovely project and book from Annebella Pollen. Professor of Visual Culture at Brighton University. Her book Whippersnappers (excellent title!) collects examples of children’s photography from the late 19th Century to the present day. There’s an accompanying exhibition at The Photographers Gallery in London until Feb as well.
The Story Behind C4’s Fake Gambling Game Show (5min read)
I haven’t managed to watch this yet, and I won’t spoil it for you in case you want to watch it, but Channel 4 had a new game show hosted by Bradley Walsh in it’s schedule last Sunday. That’s an odd time to launch a new show, and there was little information ahead of broadcast. Turns out there was a deeper, more profound show underneath.
How TikTok Hacks Your Attention (1.5min watch)
We’ve posted Ayo Omolewa’s app breakdowns before, when he unpicked how a mobile game hacked your attention and wallet. This short video does the same for TikTok, and whilst I’m not surprised at the data it gathers from your phone (are you driving, walking or sleeping?) it still made me very glad I’m not using the app.
The Brain Injury That Made a Teacher a Musical Genius (10min read)
Talking of how our brain works, this is a great story about how frontal lobe injuries can sometimes free up remarkable levels of creativity, in this case with a music teacher who suddenly developed perfect pitch. As someone trying to teach myself piano, I’d be quite interested in a hack like this!
ChatGPT Ads Have a Conversion Problem (5-min read)
AI search is changing the user journey, and all the AI providers are trying to build out ad products to recoup the eye watering capital costs they’re accruing. Problem is, the data at the moment shows that AI ads aren’t converting nearly as well as traditional search ads.
The Last Normal Year (9min watch)
History isn’t formed in neat chunks, but there is a strong argument that our current polycrisis kicked off in 2016. John Green’s video stacks up the evidence - Trump, Brexit, etc - and argues that the shift to algorithmic feeds might have been the most important factor of all. I’m hoping we can start to draw a line under that decade now.
How The Internet Turns Good Taste Into Bad Taste (5min read)
Kyle Chayka is back writing his excellent One Thing newsletter after a bit of a pause, and this is another take on the subject of his book Filterworld, which we have recommend many times in this newsletter.
Incredible Collection of Presidential Condolence Cards (4min read)
I haven’t posted something from the Inconspicuous Consumption newsletter for a while, but this one is great - a collection of correspondence from US presidents that belonged to Rose Wesolowicz of Detroit, who wrote to pretty much every President and politician in her lifetime. A reminder that in the end, regardless of our status or power, we’re all human.
Sony Relaunches Iconic Walkman Headphones (You Know You Want Them)
I had to include these, as I got such a strong Proustian rush when I clicked the link. For $60, you can have a USB C version of the iconic orange foam Walkman headphones from the 1980s. Go get your credit card now!
📣 Inside our podcast A World With (5min read) 📣
Season two of our podcast A World With has just launched, and our Editor Isabella Pierce and Audio Wizard Chris Mitchell were interviewed by Podcast Rex about the ideas and structures of the format. Lots of great insights here!
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Noah Brier ran his awesome Brxnd.ai conference in NYC this week. That’s probably the conference I most wish I could attend right now, as it looks like the smartest place to learn and share ideas about what AI can really do, and healthily balances optimism and pragmatism. Noah’s post a few weeks ago on Linkedin shares a 40yr old article from Herbert Simon giving advice that still rings true today - “don’t buy a computer (or AI) until you are sure you know what you intend to do with it”.
Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!
Have a great weekend!
Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team
B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
