TWIS: I love jokes about the eyes. The cornea the better!

Hi Strat Pack!

We're coming out of the gate hot in 2019 with these zingers! 

Guys. BIG news. Fearless Leader (...and 2020 presidential candidate?) Andrew Mario Cuomo cancelled the L train shutdown that was previously scheduled to begin on my sister's birthday, April 27th. Apparently the Canarsie tunnel--which was flooded with 7 million gallons of highly corrosive saltwater during Hurricane Sandy--is going to be just fine! Phew!

It shouldn't be all that surprising that there wasn't a ton of breaking news between Christmas and New Year's, so this week I've tried to pull up some thought pieces you may have missed. 

Ok, stop messing around reminiscing about the past and an easy commute to work. Let's jump right in.

The one thing to read this week
1) How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. [New York Mag]

How much of the internet is fake? As it turns out, a lot. Studies suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake.

This article is everything. I'm just going to give you the  sub-headings: The metrics are fake. The people are fake. The businesses are fake. The content is fake. Our politics are fake.  We ourselves are fake. 

READ THIS. We work in digital advertising.

2) What Happens When People and Companies Are Both Just ‘Brands’? [New York Times, May 2018]

“Brand is everything, and everything is brand.” according to Advertising for Humanity founder Dan Pallotta, in a 2011 article for Harvard Business Review. People now act like companies, carefully monitoring the meanings we project into the world. This is a really interesting, really well-written thought piece about how important branding has become for both corporations and people.

(An aside: Internetting with Amanda Hess is some of the best internet-based content that the Times puts out and if you're unfamiliar, check it out here)

Even the most cynical internet users speak semiseriously about our posts being “on brand” or “off brand.” There is no refuge from the logic of the brand — and if there is, some up-and-coming strategist will soon enough bolster her own brand by colonizing it. 

Kill 'em with kindness
3) Chick-fil-A is beating every competitor by training workers to say 'please' and 'thank you' [Business Insider, October 2016)

While small pleasantries are easy to dismiss in the multi-billion dollar restaurant business, these little things have played a key role in setting Chick-fil-A apart from the competition.

Superior customer service drives higher sales per unit, contributing to the chain's ability to generate greater revenue than chains such as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Domino's with more than twice as many US locations.

Food for thought, especially when it comes to Customer Service & Retail. Pun intended?

4) Lie to me and tell me you understand teenagers.

Here are two articles from the Atlantic, both from July, both talking about things that those goddamn teenagers who won't get off my lawn are doing on the internet. Oh who am I kidding, teenagers don't go on laws anymore, they just play fortnight.

  • How Twitter Became Home to the Teen Status Update [The Atlantic]

Local Twitter has more to do with what you tweet than where you live. Local Twitter teens are townie-like in the sense that their world mostly revolves around life in their hometown, though most will probably grow up and eventually leave for college. According to teens, some local Twitter tells include tweeting generic Drake lyrics, posting about suburban life goals, following only people you know in real life, and sharing updates about big school events like prom or homecoming. Local tweeters’ taste is basic—some people use the term “bare-minimum Twitter” to describe the genre—and their tweets are often stolen or regurgitated from big meme accounts

And I was just getting used to the idea of a finsta. Look. I did a pretty mediocre job of summarizing this article so please actually read it.

Have you heard of a flop account? Me neither. But according to Taylor Lorenz (who loves to start sentences "According to teens...") The accounts post photos, videos, and screenshots of articles, memes, things, and people considered a “flop,” or, essentially, a fail. A flop could be a famous YouTuber saying something racist, someone being rude or awful in person, a homophobic comment, or anything that the teen who posted it deems wrong or unacceptable. Some of the teens who run a given account know one another in real life; more likely, they met online.

According to teens, flop accounts began as a way to make fun of celebrities and popular YouTubers, but sometime over the past year they’ve morphed into something more substantive: a crucial way to share and discuss opinions online.

“Content [on flop accounts] is centralized around things that we think are factually or morally wrong, and it’s how we critique them,” said Taylor, a 15-year-old in Illinois who is an admin on a flop account. “Today, for instance, I posted a flop that was this lady making fun of someone for being homeless. That’s a horrible thing to do.”

The fucking Atlantic Monthly. Founded in 1857. How the hell do they have their fingers on the pulse of teenage internet antics. 

Share prices be Damned! (this is funny because AAPL is at a 52 week low)
5) The App Store created 164 new million-dollar publishers in 2018, twice that of Google Play [TechCrunch]

To me, what's much more interesting is not the number of apps that hit the million dollar revenue mark, but the difference in what Android users vs Apple users are paying for. On Google Play, the majority (65 percent) of new million-dollar publishers were games, compared with just 33 percent on the iOS App Store. 

2019 is shaping up to be a 'charts at the bottom' type of year. Let's see if we can keep it up. 

More next week

Jordan Weil