What I Would Have Tweeted This Week
Issue #4
*Newsflash* i did actually tweet this past week. I didn’t spend any time ON twitter but I did tweet my marathon.
I suppose I did this because I had been focussed on the race for a while and talking to a lot of people inside and outside of work and so felt like I should ‘broadcast’ it. There was definitely a sense of once sending that tweet, thinking, ‘OK, that’s done’. It put an end to a long — roughly sixteen week, give or take a few injuries — program that had been taking up a lot of my headspace.
Of course there is the other reason that people tweet. ‘Look at me I did something you can’t do. Aren’t you envious!?’ Not being on twitter has dramatically reduced my instances of that crappy behavior.
I definitely could have tweeted more about the race. I could have shared my strava stats and fancy 3-d renderings of the race. I would have said something about being in the 3.15 pace pack, which was uncommonly congested because 3.15 is a Boston Marathon Qualifying time (3.17 still gets me in because I AM OLD), and thus led me to squish some sort of wild animal and feel said animals’ (raccoon? squirrel? I dunno, I was going fast!) guts flicker up my leg. I would have used some sort of #roadrace #roadkill gag.
After the race we spent a day and night in Boston. We went to Harvard, to see the squares and the museums. We stayed at a fancy hotel and I went to the Tracksmith store and hung with Matt the Tracksmith CEO for a while. None of those experiences would have been bettered had I tweeted about them.
Part of not being on twitter is the feeling that I might miss out on something. But as explained before I don’t think I miss out on anything positive. The fun stuff tends to resurface on slack, on newsletters or wherever.
So some fun stuff that got through the filter that I would have retweeted this week. Poncho got their trophy from the Webbys, complete with a great title: World’s Best Chatbot’. I’m on a slack channel that aggregates Ponchoapp reviews too. It’s pretty fun.
More betaworks news. Pharrell is now the Chief Creative Officer of Roli. I’m looking forward to having him in the office doing Thursday night demos. Joking aside, that’s a fucking coup — well done team Roli.
Another quality partnership is the new Mr Robot Alexa skill that Earplay launched this week. Earplay went through Voicecamp with us earlier this year. It’s early days for brands and Alexa but slowly but surely these things will work there way into consumers lives and successful businesses will be built around being best in class at doing just that. The naysayers about voice will be proved wrong.
More interesting content comes in the form of Gossamer magazine, launched by our friend David Weiner. It’s a lifestyle magazine for people who happen to smoke weed, rather than be defined by smoking weed. I’d have probably tweeted something about it being a ‘growth industry’, because I’d have thought that was stupid and therefore funny. Safe to say no one is really missing me tweeting that.
While on the growth tip. I would have tweeted congrats to the guys at Red Antler for turning ten years old. I got to know the founders, JB, Emily and Simon well when we partnered on my idea for a ping pong clothing line a few years back. I went to their party last night. What’s interesting is that they have quietly turned into a really great agency that have clients like Casper and Allbirds, clients any big network ad agency would kill for. They’ve got their through working hard, doing the small things well and not making a song and dance about it. The opposite to many ad agencies. They have also turned project work into stable client rosters. Again the opposite of many agencies who having been so used to the gravy train of agency of record relationships that they now profoundly struggle with project work. In the same way that it is easier for a digitally led agency like R/GA to start making TV spots than a TV agency to make digital work it’s easier for small nimble shops to become more steady, than big tanker agencies (BDAs) to become nimble.
Two of the more thoughtful people in the industry; Lindsey Slaby and Gareth Kay, both wrote good articles this week. I saw them on Medium and via email not twitter. Would they have liked me to tweet at them? Say how much I liked the way they were thinking about the industry? Maybe. But it really doesn’t make any difference in the long run. If you take any time to think about it, it’s incredibly narcissistic to think that a talented author is in some sense waiting for you to say ‘good job’.
Staying in adland — I do still really like advertising you know! — I’m not sure if the new logo that 72andsunny designed for the city of LA got any chat on twitter. Cos I’m not on twitter! The design is created to allow creative industries in LA to co-opt the logo. I’m in no way a design theorist but I probably would have said something about people trying to speed things up too much, that artificially creating a canvas for user collaboration rarely works. If these things happen over time — as with the Milton Glaser NY logo then great. But to foster it from day one is — I think — a sign of weakness, not strength.
I saw too much stuff for Stranger Things. I get why Netflix did a lot of marketing, the show is a massive hit. But……there was no marketing for the first season. It was a sleeper hit. That was part of the charm. It was understated and people felt good about telling their friends about this weird show on Netflix. A discovery is so much more fun. I saw all the classic horror movie posters and an AI thing that was kind of cool but really didn’t work that well. As someone in Creative Review said, ‘Lets hope the advertising people didn’t write the actual show.’
I didn’t read anything about the real horrors this week. Nothing on Trump and very little about Harvey Weinstein. I do wonder why people think Harvey Weinstein is a watershed moment rather than someone like Bill Cosby. Is it just because he’s much more powerful? Or that he’s a liberal? The notion of all industries ‘having a Harvey Weinstein’ is not going to go away any time soon. Possibly I would have tweeted something stupid about Terry Richardson being a perv. I mean everybody knew that, he never hid it. Quite the opposite. He had a giant coffee table book with his dick out. We used to have a copy at Dare. It didn’t seem wrong at the time. It seemed like art. Stupid art, but still art.
I saw this thing about Saudi Arabia giving a robot citizenship rights. I’m sure someone on twitter would have made a joke about how it has more rights than Saudi women. Again, pretty stupid.
This week in music I don’t think I found anything stellar. I only saved three songs from my discover weekly playlist — which is low — but it’s all about maintaining the quality of the algorithm.
That would not be a bad mantra for the way you approach all media: try to avoid stupidity and maintain the quality of the algorithm.
More next week. Have a good weekend.
