The Weekly Roundup (week of 11.27)
wake up babe new Sean Monahan just dropped...
1. 8Ball — Live Players Pt. 1 from Sean Monahan
The legendary trend analyst behind K-HOLE — the man who notoriously coined the terms “norm-core” and “vibe-shift” is back from his hiatus to bless us with part 1 of a new report. This analysis is a musing on the internet’s impact on the evolution of culture. I imagine this is just setting up something bigger for part two of this series, which will provide more actionable insights.
There are two big complaints about culture. One, that it’s moving too fast. And two, that it’s not moving at all, or as Internet writer Paul Skallas, the Lindy Man, likes to say culture is stuck. Counterintuitively, both takes are correct. Some days you open X, see a post, but then the timeline refreshes and it’s gone forever. The ephemeral, personalized nature of the Internet makes it an anti-culture, unable to build, only able to distract. This frustrates marketers concerned with small c culture: novel political movements, novel sexual identities, novel content, novel Internet personalities. The hair trigger reaction time needed to engage online is not a characteristic of large-scale enterprise. And it frustrates the self-selected avant-garde. Capital-c culture: novel art movements, novel aesthetics, novel products, novel celebrities cannot percolate without due time. For live players who think it’s time to build, the Internet does not provide stable ground. Only the past can do that.
Check out the full report here.
2. The T Predictor: What We’ll Be Obsessing Over in 2024
The NYT asked “46 artists, filmmakers, chefs and other creative people to forecast next year’s cultural trends.” Read here.
3. Advertising Is Dead. Long Live Advertising
If the airline follows through with its latest venture, it would be joining a growing number of companies working to cram even more ads into every nanosecond of people’s lives—a list that includes retailers, streaming services, hotels and delivery apps.
This new market dynamic even has its own slogan: “Everything is an Ad Network,” a catchphrase coined by mobile-marketing guru Eric Seufert.
“Attention is the new oil well of money making, so companies are creating more and more attention mediums,” said ad-industry veteran Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive and AOL chief executive who now leads Flowcode, a direct-to-consumer platform company. “It’s easy money.”
4. Jerry Lorenzo on His Long-Awaited Fear of God x Adidas Collaboration
Jerry Lorenzo finally debuts his new collection with Adidas nearly 3 years after announcing their partnership.
“Late last year, Fear of God announced that Lorenzo was no longer involved with Adidas Basketball. “I really just wanted to clean house and set up a new strategy,” he says of the partnership. “We spent a long time trying to make that work, and it just didn't work.” Though Lorenzo didn’t get into specifics, he hinted that the project was doomed by creative differences. “I'm not going to put out a product,” he says, “that I don't stand behind.” Read here.
The collection will be available on December 3rd in Los Angeles and Brooklyn at an “atmospheric” brand experience.