27th November: Newsletter 11


Industry News

It’s the time of year we’re just on the edge of the ‘top trends for 2025' email bombardment (here you go: the next bit of AI and the impact of the Trump de-regulation drive) - but it’s also Black Friday mania week!

The respective hubs are worth bookmarking as a peak into the collective consumer soul:

As Twitter apparently sheds users to BlueSky, Truth Social, Telegram, Threads or wherever it feels like we’re at an interesting point of internet fragmentation - the centralised digital town square breaking out into digital sixth form common rooms and becoming smaller & nicher.

Time for a lot of “will it scale?” powerplays in meetings, as striking the balance between the rightfully increased data and privacy regulatory scrutiny and hitting the scaling for revenue sweet spot is a delicate one. How many of them will be around in a year?

BlueSky hit 20m users, then the CEO was interviewed and wasn’t sure if the lower age limit was 13 or 18.

Threads has 275 million monthly active users but the daily jumps recently is the big one surely:


The political motivation behind brand messaging has had a hard time in the past few weeks with British heritage brands taking a hammering. If you don't like your customers and try to re-shape what you are and your brand DNA then it might not play out as you hope - a nice pre and post smugness opportunity for Mark Ritson on Burberry's rise and fall.

He also took aim at the well publicised Jaguar re-brand this week - don’t mistake the need to revitalise for the need to re-brand.

The Farmers’ protests in the UK The Revenge of the Barbour.

Revitalise rather than re-brand is the red thread - that mystical new audience needs to find you, value you and understand how you become part of their day to day.

It's the same reason heritage works as a tactic and family businesses that've been operating for 20, 50, 100 years shout about it. You should be confident enough to put your history and your heritage on the line. It's a powerful signal to customers. I think the posh word for it is heuristics.

It was those heuristics, the comforting feeling of knowing that people would look enviously at your casserole dish the next time you invite them in for a cuppa that led to textbook western excess as Police were called to a Le Creuset warehouse sale.

I don't know if Donald is a subscriber, but following my link between WWE and the US election last week, he's appointed Linda McMahon as Education secretary - she also co-founded WWE. In fairness, it’s got a certain amount of heritage and is pretty unashamed about what it is. Good god almighty.

There are robodogs patrolling at Mar-a-Lago...

Sound clever this week


The ultimate in sounding clever is the Ben Evans presentation each year: https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations. The final slide really hammered the message home for me, what thing that blows our minds today will become business as usual and invisible…


Those who get rich in a gold rush are the ones selling the shovels…

All that AI, 'what's next?' and 'what about this?' questions led to me staring at the whiteboard I still use with my team next to our desks. There’s still a lot of human in there and the global whiteboard market is forecasting itself to be worth $520bn by 2032.. I mean they would, wouldn’t they. But nevertheless, balance and thinking about where we are the hype cycle is important!


And finally, ‘God's influencer’ set to be the first millennial saint to be canonized: The teenager has also been labelled "the patron saint of the internet" for his work recording miracles online and running websites for Catholic organisations.

Inspired by that…

Powerplay of the week

Do a VLookup live in a meeting, ideally on a screen share. If it doesn’t work just blame junior people for failing to properly format the data, if it does you’ll likely be canonised in the future for performing an online miracle.

Go well!

AJ

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