Airbnb & Remote Collaboration
"If the office didn't exist, I like to ask, would we invent it? And if we invented it, what would it be invented for?"F*%#king excellent questionfrom Airbnb CEO Brian Chesney. He has been in the news recently because Airbnb announced surprisinglypositive business results, as well as a newlive and work from anywhere policy.I wish more organizations would try to answer this question, instead of“does hybrid mean 2 or 3 days in the office?”
One benefit of facetime (not FaceTime) is more creativity. Research now backs up what anyone who has spent even a minute on a Zoom-based brainstorm can tell you – videoconferencingdoesn’t work for generating ideas(but isn’t bad for selecting them).Another study backed this up, and researchers recommend turning your cameras off if virtual is the only option.
Snap & Augmented Reality
It’s odd how Snap gets overshadowed by the other social platforms, as it has anamazing historyof product innovations andusage continues to grow. The company recently announced a new (and natural)collaborationwith Cameo, a new program that lets users placeAR overlaysover physical objects / locations, anacquisition for a companythat lets you control virtual objects with your thoughts, and – for shits and giggles –a flying camera.I have a hard time sending a newsletter twice per month!
A big part of the Snap vision is leadership in consumer applications of augmented reality, especially in retail. The company recentlylaunched a new featurefor fashion brands (including Puma) to let users virtually try on merch. Here is a thorough report from the Foresight Factory onAR & the future of shoppingthat is worth a skim.Amazonis investing in this area, as is Meta – which recently authored a Sponsored Post / Propaganda on Vice from the perspective of someone wearing its AR glasses to Coachella for an entire weekend. I suspect they spent much of their time alone.
Navigating the Metaverse
If over half of all content about a topic is trying todefine the topic, there’s a problem. And that’s where we are with the metaverse today. From a marketing perspective, it is interesting to seeSpotifyestablishing a presence in Roblox (12.2 million users in NA, including my daughter). If you’re a retailer interested in how to get started in this space, my friend AJhas a new postthat’s worth a read.
A part of the metaverse milieu that has been in the news lately is NFTs (see ‘NFT Sales are Flatlining’from the WSJ). Peter Yang makes the case thatNFTs are the future of subscriptionsfor creators. Brands are starting to experiment with NFTs as a membership mechanism,including Starbuckswho sees NFTs as a way to “create an expanded, shared-ownership model for loyalty, the offering of unique experiences, community building, storytelling, and customer engagement.” If that means free coffee, I’m in.
Good Reads
On Education: Wavetable has an excellent deck on the future of edutainment (combining tech, education, community, and interactivity). It hits on the importance of connectivity, which may explain why 500k people study along with this gentleman on YouTube.
On Advertising: Collectively has put together an excellent playbook on Influencer Marketing with loads of useful examples, and Google has a new video deconstructing effective digital ads using its ABCD philosophy.
On Advice: I love it when Kevin Kelly pops up in my feeds. Here is his annual list of tips: 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known – it’s super random and amazing. My fave: “You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.”
On Culture: Adam Mastroianni has a fantastic essay on how pop culture has become an oligopoly, along with supporting stats that show how movies, TV, and music are now dominated by familiar remakes / cinematic universes, and the number of new popular artists continues to decrease.
