TWIS: If you're bad at haggling, you'll end up paying the price

Hi Strat Pack,

So I've been trying to be a more health-conscious human in 2019, and so far it's working out. But I'm still eating garbage lunch because, unlike the rest of you New Years Resolution Sheeple getting into fistfights waiting for a salad, I can't stand waiting in line and therefore just keep end up getting that resoundingly mediocre $6 deli sandwich from Amish Market. 

Let's end on a positive before we jump into this week's updates. Have you been feeling a bit of wanderlust as of late? Who could blame you...it's January in New York. Check out this article about @accidentallywesanderson's instagram account because it starts to get at the insight that Instagram is more than just pretty pictures, and context matters.

Alright guys, stop messing around on Instagram and let's jump right in.

The one thing to read this week
1) Why Do We Obsess Over What’s ‘Relatable’? [New York Times]

In 2007, Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed, wrote “If people don’t share [an artwork] with their friends, it is a failure regardless of the creator, critics or other elites.” 

The advertising industry (and Buzzfeed, obviously) has been more or less operating on that principle ever since.

Relatability is the chief psychological lubricant that glides you thoughtlessly down the curated, endless scroll of your feed.

The French critic and philosopher René Girard suggested that all desire is mimetic, that we like things simply because we observe other people — our friends, Rihanna — liking those same things, too. 

This is how things go viral. This is how we concept and create social strategy. This is why savvy advertisers now have a GIF strategy and why Flash mobs were all the rage in the early 2000s. This is why we're all still talking about the Fiji water girl.

BONUS ARTICLE: The Scourge of Relatability [New Yorker] by Rebecca Mead was referenced in this article and is also a delightfully erudite and blistering clapback to a dumb thing Ira Glass said. Favorite passage:

Relatability—a logism so neo that it’s not even recognized by the 2008 iteration of Microsoft Word with which these words are being written—has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value, even by people who might be expected to have more sophisticated critical tools at their disposal.

2) The Average American Often Can’t Relate to Influencers. This Omaha Agency Wants to Fix That [AdWeek]

In truth, this article is a bit of a puff piece for this influencer agency. But after 2 years of pretty consistent criticism that we liberal elites do not understand the rest of the US, it's good to keep ourselves grounded.

For the most part, the prevailing wisdom is that the more powerful and effective influencer set is based on the coasts—like Los Angeles and New York—or other top 10 markets. This agency saw an opportunity to develop a network of micro-influencers based in unexpected places, like smaller cities and towns. 

On the other hand, I'm glad we're finally getting to the point as an industry where we're diversifying beyond people like this Model who stayed thin thanks to steady diet of ‘tapas and cocaine’ [NY Post] Yeah I'm on a Post kick this week, what do you want. 

3) A McKinsey leader lays out a positive vision of tech’s future [MIT Sloane]

Here's an interesting thought: The U.S. has achieved only 18 percent of its digital potential.

Industries such as health care, construction, manufacturing, and retail have typically been slow to adopt cloud computing, electronic payments, and device connectivity. Amazon is often held up as an example of modernizing the retail industry, but even though it represents nearly 50 percent of online retail in the U.S., the online retail sector only represents 10 percent of all retail nationwide.

BONUS CONTENT: McKinsey Quarterly Five-Fifty's best of 2018. What's Five-Fifty? A quick briefing in five— or a fifty-minute deeper dive. Click through. There's some good stuff here.

4) Keeping an eye on the competition

Guys. It wasn't a great week for Telecom. Except Verizon, where Hans crushed his CES keynote. Let's check in on what our competitors were up to

  • I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone [Motherboard] T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country. Oops. (Good(ish) news: Verizon was the one major carrier not named)

  • A 5G Smartphone Revival? Not So Fast [The Information] So maybe this one affects us too. TL:DR The increasing price tags on smartphones is often blamed for the stagnation in sales of the devices. Faster 5G wireless service isn’t likely to revive smartphone sales inthe near term because the new cellular technology is expected to pressure handset makers to keep prices high.

  • AT&T was widely mocked for issuing software updates that display a “5G E” network logo on a few smartphones. [The Verge]Spoiler alert: They're still running on 4G LTE

    • But wait! There's more! Check out this throwback Thursday article: AT&T Launches Fake 5G Network in Desperate Attempt to Seem Innovative [Gizmodo] It's dated April 2017! 

  • T-Mobile Tweeted a funny video of someone upgrading their phone by putting a "9G" Post-it on the screen [Twitter] The post copy was  "didn’t realize it was this easy, brb updating"

  • Not to be outdone, the cable industry kicked off a marketing campaign for 10G [Ars Technica]. Yes, seriously. It's a campaign for 10Gbps broadband services, even though my poor parents in Connecticut can only average something like 50Mbps.

5) Department of Great Work

  • KFC is giving free Bowl Cuts (in Brooklyn, of course) to promote their new Bowls of food [Creativity Online]

  • Levi's Now Selling Exclusive Disney Denim Through Shoppable AR Lens on Snapchat [Next Reality] (Thanks Daniela!)

  • Forsman & Bodenfors Has Some Thoughts on GS&P Recycling Its Old BMW Ads [AgencySpy] lol.

  • The XX Video starring Millie Bobby Brown and Paris Jackson is also a Calvin Klein Ad [Creativity Online]

6) Platform Roundup

  • The Joy of #Cooking Why are Instagram-famous recipes so impossible to resist? [Grub Street] Read this one! It's good!

  • Amazon is reportedly building a game streaming service to rival Google and Microsoft [The Next Web]

  • Continued Momentum for Audience Network Bidding on Facebook [Facebook] This is more media-led than anything. What's interesting to me is it gives us a peak behind the curtain for how Facebook Inc is planning for the eventual demise of Facebook.com

  • Amazon Dash buttons judged to breach consumer rules in Germany [TechCrunch] And I'm pretty sure they're being discontinued in the US due to lack of hustle...

Wow. That was a lot this week. Thanks for sticking with us.

Jordan Weil