The Weekly Roundup (week of 2.12)
Everyone catch that halftime show with Usher? I bet you saw the memes.
1. The Bad Nostalgia of Super Bowl Ads
A great piece from
about the deteriorating quality of Super Bowl ads. This one is paywalled but I implore you to get a subscription to 8ball, at least do a free trial to get a taste. The basic gist of the article is that the advertising from this year was a blatant attempt to simply clout bomb us all with as many celebrities as possible, who sometimes let out mildly funny one-liners. The issue with these ads is that they all blend into one another, there’s no inherent idea in any of them. Which mega celebrity did which ad? It’s a conservative, risk-free approach from ad agencies afraid of… I’m not sure. “Like most industries facing structural decline, conservative plays have become the norm. It seems this year and last year and maybe even the year before (I don’t actually remember) only one formula was allowed. There are no ideas in the ads, just random celebrities next to logos.” Ironically, Super Bowl LVIII had its highest ratings ever, clocking in at about 123.4 million viewers-“rivaling the telecast of the moon landing in scale.” This was the biggest opportunity of the year (arguably the biggest opportunity in recent memory) for advertisers, and for the most part, they blew it. Sean makes a great point in his piece, advertisers have mostly all but forgotten that ads are memes. You have to have a core idea that can easily replicate itself. This year, we had Ryan Reynald’s firm Maximum Effort place Jake from State Farm next to Donna Kelce, using a Swiftian allusion to boost the brand. The NFL also saw itself replicated in memes and earned media because of its incessant coverage and association with Taylor Swift and changed its official IG bio to shout out the pop singer and her fans. What the NFL accomplished, with the help of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, was a barrage of self-replicating memes that permeated throughout the minds of Americans. Travis Kelce’s dumb tweets from years ago resurfaced and served as hilarious cultural fodder in our feeds for months on end, even showing themselves months after the initial wave took form. Maybe someone will take notes, and figure it out for next year’s Super Bowl, which could just as easily surpass 2024’s numbers. Read Sean’s article here.
2. Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
“Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.” Read here.
3. What happens when TikTok is your Marketing Department
Marketing experts say that puts The Pink Stuff in a precarious spot. When the fortunes of a formerly unknown product are made by social media, they are at the mercy of forces that can be monitored but not managed.
“The goal should be loyalty, not virality,” said Marina Cooley, a professor in the practice of marketing at Emory University. “Virality is dangerous because it’s fleeting, there’s no stickiness to it. People are excited by the first interaction and then look for the next viral thing.”
4. The Lure of Divorce
This isn’t related to marketing, or any specific fashion theme, however, I do want to include it because I think it talks about a very modern problem reflecting the mood of the culture. I found it to be very well written. It’s an essay from a Brooklyn writer who self-sabotaged her marriage and filed for divorce due to the competitive nature of her relationship with her husband, also a writer. She attributes the main cause of the divorce to the fact that his writing is considered to be more prestigious, and that he’s basically more successful. It gave off heavy, “Culture of Narcissism” vibes. It’s great writing. Though I can’t sympathize with the author very much and feel for her husband more than anything, I found it to be a very useful thought experiment and even contemplated similar insecurities with my girlfriend and our careers after we both read it. Take a look.