Strands of Genius: State of Culture, Signals vs Signaling, Hitch Slaps
Plus: Customer Service Flow Chart
WRITING FROM | Chattanooga, TN
WORKING ON | positioning, proposals, and party planning <3
LOOKING AHEAD
Feb 27 - March 9 | Chattanooga, TN
March 9 - 10 | Rosie in Atlanta, GA
March 10 - April 11 | Chattanooga, TN
April 11 - 15 | Nashville, TN
April 15 - 19 | Chattanooga, TN
April 19 - 26 | Beersheba Springs, TN
April 26 - 30 | Miami, FL
April 30 - May 18 | Worcester Park, UK
May 18 - 20 | Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Well now hello. How are you? It’s March and all that, so 1/6 of ‘24 down, good job! The rest of this year is already ramping up to extreme levels of weirdness, as new forms of technology interact with old forms of power across innumerable new media spaces. What fun for modern media pundits, commercial communication practitioners, well, people in general.
We got back from a delightful wedding in LA. Pretty much everyone has since gotten sick, some with Covid but most with a host of other minor illnesses of wide variety. Perhaps we are all just getting a bit too old for such weekenders but one also has to wonder why everyone seems to keep getting sick nowadays. Regardless, we are back up and writing, and wish you the good cheer and great health.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Sami & Cally and all the wonderful wedding crew, birds, bird feeders, nuthatches, meal worms, tit mice, night vision cameras, raccoons and opossums, gardens, Madison coming to visit, Rosie’s first wheel throwing class, Alex’s birthday, Ashleigh & Matt, overcoming illness, managing stress, Chelsea coming to visit, new recipes, Death and Other Details (Hulu’s writer/show-runner is an old colleague of Faris’!!) & YOU.
:: THE LINKS ::
THE STATE OF CULTURE
This is a wide ranging piece that analyzes the impact of attention economics on the production of cultural products. In essence, the addiction HOOK loop pioneered by digital platforms has spread to the entire media economy, with what this author believes are unfortunate consequences. “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal. They don’t say it openly, but they don’t need to. Just look at what they do. Everything is designed to lock users into an addictive cycle.”
(The Honest Broker)
SIGNALS VS SIGNALING IN ADVERTISING
Some media have signaling power and some media have excellent signals with which to target, and they don’t tend to be the same ones. Faris’ column did numbers (as they say) on LinkedIn and led to a few interesting questions and invitations. “Advertisers that have gone all-in on performance media have essentially abandoned the signaling value of media, in exchange for better signals they use to target it. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, those signals are about to get much, much harder to see.“ (WARC)
WHY HITCH STILL MATTERS
If you have never read or seen him speak, then let us introduce you to the inimitable Christopher Hitchens. This retrospective around a newly published collection of essays is worth reading throughout but the quotes below in particular gives a flavor of his prescience, erudition, irascibility, and way with words. “A defining feature of all of Hitchens’s work, his famous zingers (euphemistically known as “Hitch slaps” among his diehard fans), serve to “slap” the reader out of their complacency and into what often amounts to a trembling mental audit of their own literacy.”
“Writing about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Hitchens scrutinized the folksy, willful ignorance of the American Right:
Want to chat, comment, question, compliment?
:: AND NOW :: CUSTOMER SERVICE FLOW
SIMPLE. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everything was actually like this. A joyful shopping experience and the simple expectation that, should anything go wrong, the company has you covered, and if it doesn’t, you get to share the thing you have bought. No, I can’t remember what this came with. But still. (Rosie chiming in here - it was for a four-pronged hook that you can put in the ground and hang bird feeders from.)
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 in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, 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 :)