Raffi's Round Up - w/c 31st March 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from a beautiful spring day in London! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to see an emergent trend on socials, read this one)
I’m increasingly interested in the private underworlds that are being created on social media..
For me, I love watching videos of different plane interiors (very random, I know) and different NBA play designs. For others, it’s going inside the prestigious walls of the top colleges in America:
A TikTok about the food at the Yale cafeteria? A YouTube post about your first day at Harvard? A new class of social media influencer is taking their followers inside the Ivy League.
The full piece is here.
TWO (if you want to see AI pushing on (round 2), play aroundwith this one)
My co-founder introduced me to Lovable and I was obsessed immediately. One of those tools that is hard to describe (written prompt to code tooling, in essence) but has to be tried.
Go check it out here (and see me playing around below!)
THREE (if you want to get into the institution —> individual phenomenon, read this one)
Doug Shapiro’s first paragraph puts it neatly:
A shift is underway across media. It’s happening on YouTube and Reels, Roblox and Fortnite, Soundcloud and Spotify and here, on Substack. On these platforms—across video, gaming, music and journalism—consumers are redirecting their time and attention to non-institutional, non-corporate content. Call it user generated, social, short form, independent, creator, whatever you like.
Henry Winter is a prime example… Let go by The Times because of reported £400k annual salary… and now he has 11,000 followers paying £50 a year… you do the maths!
FOUR (if you want to see how friendship is evolving, read this one)
It seems to be something a lot of my American friends are talking about, as political beliefs become more polemic.
Put more crisply, by Adam Singer, “many have become deeply pathologized on adherence to specific political allegiance and life optimization, with friendship an unwitting casualty.”
The full piece is here.
FIVE (if you want a MBA in an article, look at this one)
Having never done a MBA, I’m well placed to say that this feels like a baby degree in ~5k words: the inside look at Apple TV’s strategy with a thought-through plan of attack at the end.
But now with expectations and strategy seemingly reset within Apple, they have a path forward here. In my mind, it looks something like this… 1. You do a handful of tentpole films a year. But you have to be good at picking these. And you have to put real Hollywood marketing muscle behind them. F1 will be the first real test of this strategy this summer, and it looks great.
For 2, 3, 4, 5… read on!
