Strands of Genius: Silent Auction Keynote, Ticket Scalping & Taking The Plastic Out of Cleaning Products
plus our thoughts on: The Social Dilemma, and a reminder to consider your media diet
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | Remote training on insights & briefs; Challenger brand keynote
LOOKING AHEAD
Sept 28 - Oct 21: Nashville, TN
Oct 21 - 29: TBD
Oct 29 - Nov 16: Athens, GA
Nov 16 - 23: St. Petersburg, FL
Nov 24-Dec 3: Beersheba Springs, TN
Dec 3 - 10: TBD
Dec 10 - Jan 16: Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
After six months of running the School of Stolen Genius, we’ve (finally) hired a designer and we’re excited to be in the final stages of finalizing our design schema. Last week, we launched a Slack workspace (though we prefer playspace) for our members, and already love the global representation. We’re looking forward to connecting with more of you there, and hope that despite the distance, we can spark some community. Instead of seeing each other once a year, we can have, you know, a healthy long distance relationship ;)
Are you an active user on Slack?
If so, we want to hear from you! Hit reply and let us know :)
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
365 Ginger Sparkling Water [why does no other brand make this flavor?], Slack, our ELCs (we’ve decided that’s pronounced elks, btw), cheese plates, especially those with La Tur and Winnimere cheeses on ‘em, Lauren, Erin&Eric, Madison&Paulie, fire pit hangs, back gardens, sweet potato gnocchi, massage chairs, Korean food on a patio, The Boys, Upload (both Amazon Prime), Lovecraft Country, The Vow (HBO), and hot tea giving you a hug from the inside.
THE SCHOOL OF STOLEN GENIUS PRESENTS
Big Shifts in Consumer Behavior | Presentation & Community Meetup
Our next community meetup is Thursday, October 8th at 12p ET / 5p GMT. David Morrissey who leads the strategy department over at Camp King will be talking about some of the big shifts in consumer behavior in 2020. We got a sneak peek of the content over on LinkedIn, and it's some great thinking. Come lunch & learn with us :)
If you’re not a member of the School of Stolen Genius, but would like to join us — hit reply and let us know. We’ll give the first five folks the ZOOM deets.
:: THE LINKS ::
HELP US RAISE MONEY FOR CHARITY WITH OUR SILENT-AUCTION KEYNOTE
We're participating in a charity auction for Eagle's Nest Foundation, who are the folks behind The Outdoor Academy -- a seriously transformative experience in my life. I (Rosie) got to spend a semester of my sophomore year of high school living and learning based out of a summer camp, learning how to chop wood and keep a wood burning stove alive, learning French while hiking the Appalachian Trail, with white water canoeing & Appalachian basket weaving as my electives. Embracing my inner hippie ;) They’ve just opened an auction which supports scholarships for their program, the OA, and the summer camp. The minimum bid is only $500 for a remote keynote from the two of us, so there’s a savings of up to $4,500 in it for you… You’ll get to pick from any of our talks, and we’ll hang around for a Q&A after. The auction closes October 17th. (ENF)
SINNERS, SCALPERS & THE SEARCH FOR GOD: ONE MAN’S DESCENT INTO THE UNDERWORLD OF SPORTS
An almost unbelievable story about a Mormon who finds himself in the business of brokering & scalping tickets to the worlds’ biggest games. As someone who is not so into sports, I read through this excitement and thrill, uncovering a side to sports that I hadn’t even considered. (SB Nation)
TAKING THE PLASTIC OUT OF CLEANING PRODUCTS
Algramo is a startup that’s aiming to tackle refillable cleaning products by big brands. As we know, the smaller size the product, the more you’re paying for packaging -- It’s why you save money buying in bulk. But to buy in bulk, you have to have the space to store the quite literally bulky items (ba dum cha!) and the funds to afford to buy for the future. Algramo, which means ‘by the gram’ in Spanish, offers an automated dispensing platform, with BYORP -- Bring your own reusable packaging. With kiosks in several locations in NYC offering hand sanitizer, bleach, liquid and soap and multi-surface cleaner, the startup has gotten even more press during pandemic times. There are no registers, as you use RFID and a virtual wallet -- but also because some of the supply chain constraints (like running out of pumps for soap) are eliminated. (Grist)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: THE SOCIAL DILEMMA ::
Yes, yes, we finally watched it. And we were… hmmmm… surprised. Not surprised about the content — this is the stuff that we’ve been banging on about for years. More surprised that, well, it’s been such a surprise to others.
Rosie googled “what were the key learnings from The Social Dilemma” because was curious to see — When exposed to the information marketers have known for years, what would be their key takeaways?
That spending too much time on social media is bad for our mental health? Surely this is something we didn’t need the documentary to tell us. But it does. You are what you eat, and it’s important to consider your media diet.
That social media can negatively affect kids’ health? The apps weren’t designed to protect and nurture children, just as Oreo ads aren’t designed to keep kids in touch with how much sugar are in Oreos, just as magazine models don’t come with a label saying “these body shapes and sizes are abnormal and possibly malnourished.” All communication is an attempt at persuasion. (Yes, even this).
(And of course the documentary itself, which sacrifices nuance for persuasiveness and diversity for wealthy white men who used to work for technology companies but now think they might be bad. It is also worth considering Facebook’s just published rebuttal of the film, in both the content of what it says and the subtext of its unprecedented existence.)
That if you’re not paying for a service you’re the product? I remember having a conversation about this with my sorority sisters while in college, when Gmail was gaining traction back in 2005 — and it’s one of those quotes that made it into nearly every tech conference for several years, one that still pops up occasionally. These apps are powered by attention, and attention is ripe for exploitation, if not manipulation. That’s just how media works. But now there is data and machine learning.
Here’s the thing — Even if these conversations aren’t new, they’re still important.
As the documentary reminds us, just because we’re aware of the way human attention is being exploited doesn’t make us not susceptible to it.
The next month is going to see powerful forces battling for our attention, the results of which matter far more than market share growth and quarterly results.
We will see how persuasion, politics, and the powerful play chess and it will both capture and utilize our attention. The game will be played back to us in real time in the palm of our hands. That information will be curated by intermediaries who assemble the bits we are most likely to engage with. Their business model is predicated on capturing our attention and demonstrating that is has a reliable effect on our future behavior to sell it to their customers. Seeing it played back to us impacts the game because the audience is a player, or at least thinks it is. It might be the battlefield. What a social dilemma.
“The film works best as a wake-up call to a mass audience that something is very wrong with the basic structure of social media, and that it’s infecting society at large as a result. It’s the sort of film that people knowledgeable about the tech industry’s workings will criticize, and find frustrating — and, in some cases, recommend to their less-informed friends and relatives anyway. As a polemic, it’s powerful, provided you can get past the LOL-inducing cheesiness of the staged dramatizations, which depict a hapless family haunted by push notifications.” - Will Oremus
:: AND NOW… A REMINDER TO CONSIDER YOUR MEDIA DIET ::
It’s hard to believe that this media pyramid - and the accompanying series - is two and a half years old.
PART ONE: YOU ARE THE MEDIA YOU EAT - A CASE FOR A BALANCED MEDIA DIET
PART TWO: HOW TO BALANCE YOUR MEDIA DIET — NUTRITIONAL MEDIA
PART THREE: WHY WE LIKE THINGS THAT ARE BAD FOR US — THE CHEESECAKE THEORY
BONUS PART FOUR: HOW TO BALANCE YOUR MEDIA PLANS
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)