A song to read by: “New Noise,” by Refused

What I’m reading: “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis

Published this week

— How Dotdash Meredith Helps Advertisers Convert From Cookies to Contextual

— The New York Times Games Advertising Is More Than an Awareness Machine

On my mind

At Adweek, the Super Bowl is the biggest editorial moment of the year, an event so large and of such importance to the marketing community that our coverage of it draws in the entire team regardless of their standard beat.

That is why, if you are reading this newsletter when it is sent, I am not at home in my Brooklyn apartment preparing for the next episode of “True Detective,” but instead in the Adweek offices in Midtown Manhattan.

Tonight is our annual “war room,” when the reporting staff all gathers together to watch the Super Bowl while tracking and reporting on the ads that run during the game. I personally have been assigned any and all coverage related to the DoorDash sweepstakes spot, which is admittedly one of the most original Super Bowl ad concepts I have ever seen.

About half of our staff is covering the game remotely, while another core group is in Las Vegas to report on the insane experiential activations accompanying the game itself. But the remainder is all here, eating chicken wings and pizza, drinking a professional number of beers and stealing furtive glances up at the television screens while typing furiously into our laptops.

So, I figured that rather than compete against the game for your attention, and since I’m here anyway, I would share some images that give a sense of what it looks like when a newsroom treats a football game like an election night. Enjoy!

The week that was

This last week was a bit brutal, as I am working on several more deeply researched pieces that involve talking to just about everyone on the planet. In the meantime, I published two stories that dive a bit deeper into the advertising technology component of my beat, a complex field but one that you really need fluency in if you want to understand the fundamental dynamics at work in the digital advertising economy.

On the social front, the highlights of the week included drinks with a clandestine source on Tuesday, who gave me some good scuttlebutt that ranged across a variety of companies. I am sensing that the foreign ownership of major U.S. publishers will only grow into a larger issue, and fall under greater scrutiny, in the coming years.

On Wednesday, I had the good fortune of going as the +1 of my ex Terry Nguyen to an invitation-only singles mixer hosted by the Byline cofounder Gutes Guterman at the Ace Hotel in Midtown. Terry, who is in fact very seriously partnered, passed herself off as unattached solely to gain access to the open bar and its dense collection of editors with freelance budgets, because in New York, for better or for worse, everything doubles as a networking opportunity.

My intentions were effectively the same, and the crowd did not disappoint. It may not surprise you to hear that many prominent writers are also chronically single. I chatted with the Business Insider reporter Sydney Bradley, Vanity Fair writer Delia Cai, former Nylon editor in chief Alyssa Vignan, the New York Times Cooking duo Becky Hughes and Tanya Sichynsky, and an amenable fellow named Ted whose pierced ear made him, by his own accounting, an outlier among his peers at the Carlyle Group.

By Thursday, coverage efforts for the Super Bowl had begun nakedly dominating the entire newsroom, so my focus went there for the rest of the week (and weekend). That evening, I grabbed dinner at Radio Star with my friend and Discourse Blog cofounder Aleksander Chan.

On Friday, after a day spent largely learning about the legal ins and outs of the DoorDash sweepstakes, I grabbed dinner and drinks at Kafana before hopping over to a birthday party for DKC whisperer Firouz Saghri. There I had the pleasure of hearing all about the process of training to become a fireman from a kind oak tree of a man, as well as chatting with the wonderful Business Insider veteran Walt Hickey (hi, Walt!), who has a great newsletter of his own as well as a new book. 

Saturday I did nothing of note except for watching the phenomenal film “The Taste of Things,” which, I kid you not, is perhaps the best movie I have seen in a very long time. If you are a lover of food films — “Tampopo,” “Babette’s Feast,” “Big Night,” etc. — you will absolutely adore the luxurious cooking scenes. 

But the plot, which involves an absolutely crushing love story starring the inestimable Juliette Binoche, sets the film into another league. Ladies, if you thought Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear” was the ne plus ultra of culinary heartthrobs, you need to do yourself a favor and see this movie. Benoît Magimel, playing Dodin Bouffant, has forgotten more about yearning than Carmie will ever know.

One good rumor

Since the theme of this newsletter (aside from the Super Bowl) seems to be food, here is a juicy rumor: I hear that a very famous food media personality is teaming up with her business partner on a new media venture, which is already in beta for a select group of early guinea pigs. If memory serves it has raised either $1.5 million or $15 million—definitely one of those.

Some good readin’

— Puck has officially launched its sports business vertical, and the timing — the same week that Fox, WBD and Disney announced a forthcoming sports-streaming service — could not have been better. (Puck)

— Another week, another must-read eulogy for the media industry. (The New Yorker)

— I give it 10 years max for this man to end up either dead or in prison. (GQ)