Social broadcasting 📺, new shopping channels 🛍️, and the return of smoking 🚬. Accidental Insights Midsummer Edition 🌼 is now in your inbox.
Today's e-mail is out on Wednesday, since many of you work half a day tomorrow due to Midsummer.
Hello and welcome to this week’s newsletter.
I hope you enjoy this issue as much as I enjoyed putting it together. This week, there is some really interesting stuff. I’m most excited about the social media content since it challenges some beliefs many withhold.
INSIGHT DOWNLOAD
The most interesting things I’ve read, seen, thought about, or debated the last two weeks. High and low.
🐶 Pet power. Young people are getting pets because the road to a family is too complicated, at least according to new research. The latest luxury crazes among Americans are “dog rooms” and “pet spas”. Smart companies are turning this into profit: Helio Co-working has opened a hub for office dogs. An Indian startup has hired a Golden Retriever as “Chief Happiness Officer”. In China, adidas Originals has dropped its first-ever pet collection. Fiumicino Airport in Rome has opened a luxury dog hotel where you can leave your four-legged bff when catching flights, not feelings.
🎨 A deeper look into creative effectiveness. Effie, System1, and Mark Ritson have conducted probably the biggest global assessment of creative effectiveness ever based on the Effie Database (which is global as opposed to Binet and Fields ' UK-based research) and also tested the work in System1’s testing solutions. This has led to “The Creative Stack - 5 ways creativity can multiply profit 21x.” They will launch it during an event called “The Creative Dividend,” the premise is that 40+% of marketers under value creativity’s role in multiplying profit and have therefore launched. I’m not in Cannes, but if you want to get the report, they launch it at 5 PM tomorrow on the Rotunda Stage.
🤖 Physical AI. AI for most people is still so abstract it’s often portrayed as a chatbox or sometimes even this emoji ✨. But we are now entering the physical AI. The sole reason for OpenAI’s collaboration with Jony Ive is to develop some sort of screen-free physical AI product (unclear exactly what). China is the global leader in developing AI robots and has been so for a while. They can do everything from policing the streets to providing exciting boxing matches. Mattel (which owns Barbie) is now collaborating with OpenAI to develop AI-based toys.
📱 Social media habits of social media users. Sprout has done a survey on the habits and preferences of 2000 social media users. TLDR: the biggest reason for using social media is “my friends/family uses it”, the smallest was “I want to follow/interact with brands in a new way”. 60% claim social media has improved their mental health. They want brands to be honest and inspirational, but also to interact and/or post original content. They don’t want brands to interact with influencers or jump on viral memes. 76% claim social media has influenced their purchases in the past six months. What does this mean? If they are going to hang out with brands instead of friends on social media, they want brands to be themselves and more human. Not jump on every meme or trend there is.
💪🏻 Male beauty extremism. This newsletter has written about Looksmaxxing earlier and can now report that Looksmaxxing GPT has racked up 700k conversations. Men in DC are spending money on plastic surgery to better their chins and jawlines (in the US, chin implants rose 26 percent from 2022 to 2023). It has been a lot of speculations about whether Elon Musk has put himself under the knife. Young men’s hunt for looking masculine has also coined a new type of eating disorder – muscularity-oriented disordered eating, or “Mode”. An eating disorder not based on eating less, but eating to become lean. It’s usually expressed through “obsessive macronutrient tracking, rigid dieting, overuse of protein supplements, constant muscle checking, and, in some cases, steroid use.” It’s not always healthy and beautiful in the world of health and beauty.
⚽️ F.C. LVMH. The French luxury giants’ bet on sports is a real and big bet. First, they sponsored the Paris Olympics, then started sponsoring F1 (they even managed to get F1 to switch its time partner from Rolex to Tag Heuer). Their latest move is sponsoring Real Madrid, making Louis Vuitton the club’s sponsor for travel and formal wear with a collection designed by Pharrell Williams. IMHO, I think this development in the sports industry is super interesting (Coco Gauff’s Miu Miu x New Balance sneakers were the thing that excited me most with Roland Garros), but I really feel that both Swedish fashion brands and Swedish sports organisations are missing out. Step your game up, now.
📺 Social broadcast. Dazed has written an article about the shift in social media being less about social. This is underpinned by Mark Zuckerberg claiming that “Social Media is over” (The article contains a bunch of great links for anyone who wants to dive deeper into the future of social media). Marketing Week reports that creator content is set to take over professionally produced content in terms of media revenue. I think we all can agree that social media isn’t that social anymore; it’s the new broadcast media.
📊 Auditing, but fun. For most Swedes, a revisortyp (“typical auditor”) is the definition of a boring person. That might be changing. Deloitte (one of the big four auditing firms) lets its employees spend $1000 on Lego to boost their well-being. EY (the biggest of the big four auditing firms) believes AI can make accounting hot again by making it more fun.
👩🏻🌾 New rules of nostalgia. There is much about “Gen Z’s new favourite nostalgia right now. Apparently, they have become bored with Y2K and are now heading for the 80s. Also, millennial culture is cool again – if millennials equal JNCO jeans, wired headphones, and SATC. Also, Gen Z is obsessed with 2000s era music and TV – such as Gossip Girl, Skins, and SATC (again!). It doesn’t stop there. Gen Z is gravitating towards “nostalgia hunk,” which is people from the peak of the 2010s teen media (Logan Lerman, Josh Hutcherson, and Dylan O’Brien). So, three of the last four decades are trending right now. One could almost start to think that Gen Z isn’t a group of people who think, do, and like exactly the same things, but rather a diverse generation who has access to pick and mix from all of pop culture that has ever been created up until now.
👔 Death of the middle manager. I spent six years of my career in middle management, and that was one of the most developing and fun times in my working life. However, the middle management dream might be ending. Middle managers are getting fired at a fast pace right now. Even some middle managers think it’s right since focus on middle management creates too much silos.
💋 Indirect competition in the dating market. Major dating apps have been souring for a while – Tinder and Bumble are suffering. However, Hinge is not performing as badly. The big competition seems to be indirect rather than direct. Savvy Gen Z wants to meet in contexts related to shared interests rather than a digitalized meat market (a long shot is someone who designed a dating site based on browser history 😱). Celebrities, on the other hand, seem to find each other on Instagram instead.
🧠 How to build a brand for LLMs. An HBR article shares interesting findings around “share of model”. As mentioned earlier in this newsletter, earned media and brand strength are the two core drivers for share-of-model. However, not all types of brand strength. Some brands only exist in the minds of consumers, but not the material LLMs get trained on (those are called “High Street Heroes”. Also, there is the opposite – “AI Pioneers,” which are brands known in the AI world but not by regular people. What we all strive for is to build “cyborgs”. Brands that are famous in the minds of consumers and on LLM models. The two target audiences are different, and to win the battle for the share-of-model, brands must become famous for usage occasions (like category entry points for EB evangelists) and provide proof of expertise. Apparently, LLMs aren’t that emotional, yet. If the article is too long, this summary by a connections planner at Meta is really good.
🛍️ Shop differently. While Google is losing search traffic to ChatGPT they’re winning shopping traffic from Amazon among Gen Z, turning Google into a stronger shopping platform. Reddit just announced that they are becoming a shopping destination by adding DPA (Dynamic Product Ads). Last newsletter I wrote about Roblox becoming a shopping platform. Where will you sell your product tomorrow?
🚬 Smoking hot? NYT writes that smoking is back in pop culture – from movies, to TV shows, to music – Lorde and Addison Rae are mentioning smoking in their latest singles. The Daily Mail blames the comeback on Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX. Last November BBC wrote that celebs are glamourising smoking again (Rosalia gifted Charli XCX a bouquet of cigarettes on her birthday, if you remember). The @cigfluencers account on Instagram has almost 70k followers, and now How To Spend It reports that “cigarette cases are hot again”. Also, this Monday, Bacchanale at Ringvägen posted a story that romanticizes smoking. My take is that cigarettes have shifted from something binary (either you smoke or don’t smoke) to something a lot of people do but not so often. I base this on the observation that I very seldom see someone (or hear about someone) taking a smoke break during the day, but anytime I go to a party or a bar, people line up outside to share cigarettes. Reminder: smoking is still dangerous and linked to cancer.
📖 Highbrow lifestyle. Brands breaking into high-brow culture is becoming an ongoing saga in Accidental Insights. FRAME has done a collab with Sotheby’s and SSENSE’s new “Heat” campaign features poems by poet Matt Starr. On the sportswear end of lifestyle brands, someone launched a running brand called Literary Sport.
OUTBOUND INSIGHTS
📄 AirMail on The Wicked Witches of Etsy
📄 Dirt on the popularity of Japanese isekai stories as an escape from your crappy job.
🎧 BOF interview with Emily Oberg on world building.
📄 Daniel Langer on luxury’s shift from heritage-led to client-value-led storytelling.
BEYOND INSIGHTS
Stuff that’s relevant for anyone in marketing. Hence, exciting job openings, new third places to freelance work, or random gossip.
💼 Netflix is hiring a Marketing Production Manager, Nordics.
🛬 The ultra wealthy are ditching the Côte d’Azur for the Nordics this summer.
💼 Valtech Radon is looking for a client director
💼 Chimi is hunting a head of design
🛬 The Arlanda Express platform now has a carpet to make people feel calmer
Hope you enjoyed this issue. As always, this Substack defies gatekeeping, so please share this with your friends, enemies, colleagues, competitors, clients, and consultants.
Happy Midsummer!