Market-making, marketing, and vibes (Spam Mail #20)

Hi there,

Apple’s new iOS App Tracking Transparency feature launched with a stunning stat - 96% of US users opted out of app tracking. If this isn’t a compelling argument that there’s a significant disconnect between companies and what customers actually want, I don’t know what is.

If I were to give a theme to this week’s newsletter it’s the disconnect between marketing objectives and what we actually seek from online experiences.

See you next time.

💩 Cool Shit

OGI (Search Engine) - A search engine to find fun, non-commercial things on the web. It’s like a wonderful gift to help find even more cool shit.

Degree Confluence Project - A fascinating project aiming to capture photos at every latitude and longitude intersection on the planet.

Harmony of the Spheres - A “digital music instrument”. Create harmonies by creating the solar system.

Memegine - A very handy meme search engine.

TwoTone - Create music using your datasets. This is far more exciting than it sounds.

This Button Does Nothing - And yet, you still want to click it.

Museum of Annoying Experiences - A fun concept and even more beautiful execution. Explore a 3D animated museum looking back on the moments today that create awful customer experiences.

The Hiring Chain - A wonderful website experience for a wonderful purpose. The ‘hold and drag to start’ interaction at the beginning is just delightful.

💎 Word gems

Market-Making on the Internet (Stratechery / Ben Thompson)

Ben Thompson uses Twitter’s acquisition of Scroll to analyze market-making on the web, which predominantly ends up looking like ‘middle-men’.

This [Scroll] is a great example of market-making in action: Twitter is taking its user base, which no one publication could realistically reach or monetize on its own, and re-distributing their subscription fee across publications that no one user could ever support individually.

Modern Marketing Myopia: is marketing losing perspective? (Tom Roach)

There are so many truths in this piece - from the addiction to data to a focus on short term thinking. Tom Roach argues that while marketing’s primary responsibility is “influencing saleability”, too much focus is on the sale itself.

Having modern marketing myopia means not lifting your head up to look out at the real worlds and lives of real people. It means a blindness to or lack of curiosity for the real human stories behind the data. It means seeing numbers in spreadsheets as ends in themselves, not as signals and proxies for the behaviours, thoughts and feelings of living, breathing people. It means not even questioning whether the data actually represents real humans or real activity, despite the vast amount of ad fraud happening today. It means overstating the value of information immediately in front of us and understating the value of information that’s harder or slower to get hold of, including qualitative, ethnographic, brand or econometric data. It means not looking ahead by defining a north star for your brand or a compelling vision of the future. It means not thinking about how to enable that future by investing in the right people and training, especially in marketing’s history and fundamentals.

TikTok and the Vibes Revival (The New Yorker / Kyle Chayka)

Kyle Chayka’s article is all vibes, diving into what we are all really seeking from online experiences.

Peli Grietzer, a young literary scholar who has theorized about social-media-era vibes, told me recently that “vibes-talk is becoming more and more a native language for us all.” He added a caveat: “Not sure which ‘we’ that is—maybe just the very online.” Exhausted by the Internet of personalities and expressed individuality, constantly measured and sorted by likes, we perhaps find comfort in turning our gaze outward. There is a self-effacement that takes place in embracing this new language, a sense that you are not “the main character” of a situation, as another TikTok meme might describe it, but a replaceable observer. “No thoughts, just vibes,” one online mantra goes, and after a year of constant anxiety it has a certain appeal.

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