Drake Meme: Super Bowl Ad 👎 TikTok Ads 🤌, Cancellation vs. Accountability, and You’ll Die v Soon
(site migrated, initially posted Feb 11, 2022)
🏈 Creators: Drake Will Not Be in the State Farm Super Bowl Ad
😢 Crypto: Accountability vs. Cancellation in Crypto Culture
📅 Product: How to Visualize the ~3,000 Weeks of Life
No Super Bowl Ad for All State, TikTok Instead#
Colin and Samir released a conversation about how State Farm is opting out of a Super Bowl ad and instead spending money on a large TikTok campaign. On the surface, this makes sense, a company who had Drake in their last Super Bowl ad isn’t even doing one now —the story itself is newsworthy, but I have a hypothesis that the reach with 18 - 49 year old people will be larger and cheaper with this strategy. Some light googling shows the 18 - 49 viewership seems to be decreasing for the Super Bowl, and general peak viewerships seems to have been five-ish years ago.
I think “Super Bowl” ads are going to be a category of high-quality campaigns and creatives in the future, but won’t be as tied to actually airing during the game in the future. Let’s see if that pans out. But tying it to creators, massive top tier companies are paying TikTok for huge campaigns, yet, there isn’t a clear cut for the creators themselves - read yesterday’s daily for more info.
Canceling Cancel Canceled Canceler?#
Drama more than news, but it touches an important problem that has to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Balaji retweeted a piece by a pseudonymous writer “indian bronson” — not linking the piece, but I’m sure you can find it. In the piece, indian bronson calls out dame.eth as a hypocrite for pushing for accountability for individuals’ past behavior, while Dame had grown up conservative evangelical who held beliefs counter to their current opinions. Transparently, I’m a fan of dame.eth and the Q&A that Dame regularly holds to answer questions and onboard people to web3 — Dame has been very nice about answering my naïve questions and I appreciate that. It’s obvious how much of a presence and soft power Dame has in the space and it has be wielded carefully. I don’t agree with everything Dame has said and done, but in general I think Dame’s heart is in the right place.
I do believe Twitter is prone to outrage and exaggeration, and everyone who has influence should be extra careful because there is a tendency on the bird app to take opinions to extremes. And I think all three people I’ve talked about so far have portrayed and pushed great ideas in packages or tied with half-baked, unverified claims that detract from the whole thing. I think the way we have discourse, talk about ideas, acknowledge and talk about how we behaved in the past (2005 - 20015 was a raunchy time, admit it, our world views were different) has to happen in an honest and transparent way moving forward so we can avoid the vitriol and work together in more cohesive and honest ways.
You're Dying Soon#
I’m going skiing soon, so I don’t have a great product digest, but I’ll share one of my products! A few years ago, I was all about the quantified self, and loved the idea of measuring your life in weeks, which I initially found on a waitbutwhy post. Seeing your life in weeks makes you realize how finite your life is, which is both scary but makes you appreciate life more.
So I created an interactive way to visualize your life in weeks, you can try it here: https://www.failflow.com/life
