No. 382: The Business of Media Subculture

Breaking the fourth wall: The business of media subculture

New Media / Jarrod Dicker: The relationship between creator and consumers is more valuable than its transactional currency (ie. content). In this era of media, the content is not the only product. The content is a key part of the value in that it’s the tool for consistency but the creator and the community are the product. The true value is the connection between consumer and creator acquired through a variety of access points that eventually develop a consumer benefit. As the business moves from content is value to creator is value we should shift the business opportunities that support it as well.

Whether or not media is your specialty, this is a worthwhile preview of how the digital industries are changing and how creators are leading that change. Jarrod Dicker is a VP of Commercial at the Washington Post. He's an Executive Member and a well-respected thinker who has a place in 2PM's Polymathic. 

Breaking the fourth wall. For 2PM Inc., Polymathic is one of the ways we develop the subculture that Dicker (and Hunter Walk) so eloquently described. The community's highest valued executives are the ones who contribute by creating. There's quite a bit of that in Polymathic and it makes 2PM's Monday Letter better. Subculture is developed through other means, of course. The goal has always been to forge a greater 2PM community. We do this through member dinners and other collaborative events. Our next in person dinner is scheduled for November 10th after nearly nine months without. 

Like Hunter Walk recently explained: "I’m of the belief that “Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” will be one of the dominating themes for media this decade." [1] Dicker develops the thought a bit further and we are developing it in practice. 

2PM Data: Is email becoming a higher quality channel than it once was? Or are we just sending more mail. This is the percentage of email as SPAM between 2014 and 2020. 

TikTok is a sleeping eCommerce giant

eCommerce / Quartz: Marketers say TikTok—which still faces a potential ban in the US—presents a massive opportunity for businesses to build awareness for their brands as the app begins introducing a second monetization model: eCommerce. Today, TikTok makes money exclusively through advertising on the platform. But by the first half of 2021, it’s expected to integrate the buying and selling of consumer products into the app experience itself, harnessing the purchasing power of its growing Millennial and Gen Z audience.

This ace engineer powered Amazon through the COVID crisis

eCommerce / Fortune: A sudden surge of orders, including panic-buying of staples like bulk foods and toilet paper, brought chaos to Amazon’s operational web. And since most employees in that network couldn’t work from home (it’s hard to deliver a package or drive a forklift from your living room) the company suddenly became responsible for the safety of hundreds of thousands of essential workers—many of them at risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus. Both of those challenges landed squarely on the desk of an executive who had been at Amazon for less than a year. Alicia Boler Davis joined Amazon in April 2019 as vice president of global customer fulfillment.

Once meccas of retail therapy, now homes to elder Americans

A. Retail Real Estate / New York Times: The large plots of suburban real estate on which our malls once thrived are now in a transitional moment of great uncertainty, as we’ve discussed. Among the prospective avenues for potential repurposing, one to note is senior housing. Examples already exist, and they offer much of what is desired (for all pertinent parties). The retirement mecca could be a model.

With gyms just reopening, Equinox is taking a big bet on eCommerce

B. Real Estate / Glossy: Notably, Walters said that she’s looking at eCommerce both as a revenue driver and an incubator for testing those new brands. Equinox has 105 clubs across the country, including 35 in New York City alone, all of which have retail stores within them. Committing to stocking a brand in every single gym takes a lot of inventory and a lot of risk, especially since products are bought on a standard wholesale model. Stocking a brand online, however, is a lower barrier to entry. If a brand starts to sell online really well, meaning that its sales outweigh the costs for stocking it in brick-and-mortar with margins to spare, the Equinox team will work to bring it in-store.

Member Practical: The Apparel Antidote

Member Practical / 2PM: Welcome to Practical No. 2, the second in a 2PM Member series of features on individual people and what they can teach industrialists about building in the new digital economy. Sometimes, the hardest part of the journey is navigating from Zero to One. Here, we will cover how they accomplished it. Practical will become a part of The Study, the leading resource for operator insights.

Why even the pandemic couldn't kill fast fashion

Consumer Psychology / New Statesman: Impulsivity is often driven by our sense of control, explains Nightingale. Not everyone can become an impulsive spender – you need the “perfect storm” of psychological and environmental factors – but if you are predisposed to this behaviour, the loss of fundamental control during the pandemic (from both “mortality salience” and practical restrictions) might cause more impulsiveness. It is this emotion that leads people to make frivolous purchases, such as on fast fashion, and it is an urge that is not necessarily quelled by the fact that, with nowhere to go, there is little practical need for new clothes.

Burger King dares customers to visit abandoned rival locations

Advertising / Mobile Marketer: Burger King this week is running a Halloween promotion that offers free food to mobile customers who visit "BK Scary Places" — namely, the abandoned restaurant locations of rivals including McDonald's and Wendy's. BK App users who have opted into push notifications will receive an alert that directs them to those locations to receive a code for a free Whopper for pickup or delivery, per a press release.

Editor's Note: this wasn't well thought out. Here's a thread explaining why. 

Facebook tries to reposition itself as a gaming platform with its big bet on cloud gaming

Streaming Economy / Protocol: The initial goal for the new cloud service is to let users instantly play full mobile-quality games within Facebook without having to download them from an app store. And along with instant gameplay comes instant marketing: Now, a Facebook ad for a video game may sometimes let users actually play the game itself.

The fourth tax quarter is typically a productive one for profit-hungry retailers and the industrial complex that supports these businesses, including packaging companies, third-party logistics, and branding and design agencies. The Black Friday sales holiday has grown bigger, more promotional, and much longer in kind. A holiday sales event that once began on the day following Thanksgiving, Black Friday became a week, a month, and then a season. Retail executives have begun to note this shift in consumer-driven media.

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