2PM - No. 391: Ready or Not

The pandemic propelled businesses into the future. Ready or not.

DTC / WSJ: “Covid has acted like a time machine: it brought 2030 to 2020,” said Loren Padelford, vice president at Shopify Inc. “All those trends, where organizations thought they had more time, got rapidly accelerated.” Merchants using the company’s e-commerce platform shot up more than 20% between January and June to 1.4 million, according to broker Robert W. Baird & Co.

From the Archives: On The Fourth Day of Quarantine - 2003, SARs, and Alibaba's future.

Many of the impediments to online retail adoption that hindered China do not exist in the United States. Our broadband infrastructure is superior and 5G technologies are in early stages of adoption. It is only a matter of consumer education and preference. On the fourth day of quarantine, Alibaba changed how an entire country consumed products and services. It’s time that America begins to do the same.

In what was a breakout year for original content across the creator economy, 2PM produced a number of relevant essays that shaped our discussions. These are the top ten of 2020. A special thank you to all who've helped make 2PM a reliable resource: Hilary Milnes, Andrew Haynes, Andrew Johnson, Joe Klokus, Brad Biehl, and Grace Clarke.

While tech financing booms, DTC brands face a new reality

DTC Brands / Modern Retail: It’s not that venture capital — or the prospect of going public — has disappeared for DTC goods startups. But most companies — especially brands that sell physical goods and have higher margins than, say, a piece of software — can only grow so much, and so a sobering shift is underway.

Editor's Note: Spot on, Digiday. 

Is Substack the media future we want?

The Passion Economy / New Yorker: Whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want. A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest. It is expensive and laborious to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between writers, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, and producers.

What did 2020 do to retail?

Retail / Harvard Business Review: To make sense of the long-term impact of the changes we’ve seen in 2020, HBR spoke with Marc-Andre Kamel, a Paris-based partner who heads the global retail practice at Bain & Co. Here are edited excerpts from that interview.

Instacart looked like a savior. Now stores aren't so sure

eCommerce / Wall Street Journal: Many supermarkets say they aren’t making money through Instacart, largely because the delivery company typically charges them a commission of more than 10% of each order. Some of Instacart’s retailer partners say the service holds too much control over customer interactions and expect it to take an increasing share of money that food makers spend on marketing. All that has put grocers in a bind, as delivery continues to boom and becomes a necessity.

How 2020 killed the Instagram brand

New Media / Digiday: Minimalistic aesthetics are rejected in favor of bright, clashing colors and oversized lettering. Edited photos that evoke a carefree way of life have been replaced by imperfect vignettes from home. And instead of positioning their products as ones that could swing open the gates to a breezy, minimalist lifestyle, brands are increasingly trying to stand for something bigger, centering their social media strategy around busting taboos or reaching customers that have historically been overlooked.

Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

Data / The Intercept: A “February 2016 internal memorandum” sent from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time, reads, “[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41%—that means that more than half the time we’re showing ads to someone other than the advertisers’ intended audience. And it is even worse internationally. … We don’t feel we’re meeting advertisers’ interest accuracy expectations today.”

Dieline's top 50 package designs of 2020

Logistics / Dieline: It has been a no-good, rotten year of epic proportions, and all of the anxiety and turmoil, coupled with our fears around unemployment, getting sick, homeschooling our kids, or navigating a pandemic by our lonesome, has worked us into a frothy mess of epic proportions. While we certainly never want to go back to this particular place, creatives still managed to generate plenty of great work. 

What we lost when we lost box office receipts in 2020

A. Box Office / Fast Company: Ever since Netflix started producing original movies and Amazon became a deep-pocket bidder at film festivals, cinematic success has come to depend on more nebulous factors. We will never know, for instance, whether Triple Frontier or Bird Box would have connected with audiences if people had to leave their houses and pay money to see them; we just have to take Netflix’s word that they were watched by many, many millions of viewers.

How movie theaters can avoid extinction

B. Physical Retail / Quartz: Over the next five years, analysts expect theater owners (whoever they may be) to experiment with the out-of-home viewing experience — far beyond popcorn, soda, and comfy seats. The theater of the future may be a quasi-theme park: indoors, with interactive media experiences instead of rides. You’re not only there to see a movie, but also to engage in other live, in-person events that can’t be recreated at home.

HBO Max's 'Wonder Woman 1984' audience helps fast-track a sequel

C. Streaming Economy / Engadget: Nearly half of all “retail” HBO Max subscribers (that is, people paying $15 per month) watched the superhero movie on opening day, WarnerMedia said. There were also “millions” of bundle customers who used their cable or phone subscriptions to watch. Viewing hours on Christmas Day more than tripled the average in November.

Relevant: the Latest 2PM 🎧: Ep No. 15 with Netflix's Kyle Alex Brett

Chronocentrism is the misconception that the period in which someone is living is paramount, while historical periods pale in comparison. By suggesting an historical importance of the present, it slights the past at the expense of potential lessons derived from it. But a chronocentric mindset overlooks what can be learned from the past, and where we sit now, there is much to be derived from the historical period that precedes our present by exactly one century. It can be summarized with one simple phrase.

The Roaring Twenties weren’t everyone’s. The Roaring Twenties will not be everyone’s.