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SD#40: Fake content, shorter work week and brands

Written by

Tomas Ausra

October 16, 2022

Hi friends,

Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more.

Our seven ideas this week:


1. (Marketing) The important things in life are nothing at all, ever, to do with retailers and brands

Most of the people who inhabit our world cannot see the existential trees for the branding forest. Too many marketers are so addled about the importance of their brands that they actually thought a statement or a gesture in light of the passing of Elizabeth II was essential activity.

Marketers lost touch long ago with the world of the customer they are meant to understand.

Brands are little things. Enormously central to the marketers in charge of them. Tiny and inconsequential to the customers that pay for everything. Understand that contrast and make it a mantra for better marketing. Escape the befuddled, indoctrinated world of dumb marketers who think the market thinks like them. Think instead like a customer.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
2. (Society) Fake content is becoming the new norm of today that has no solutions

A theory — The Dead Internet Theory — that went viral some years back, posited that the internet is a no man’s land of bots and fakery. It was, of course, a ridiculous overstatement. But then again, maybe not that ridiculous? Maybe it was actually correct, just too early on the scene.

The authors of this paper suggest that 14% of Twitter users are bots as an upper bound. Supposedly 10% — or around 95m — of accounts on Instagram are bot/spam accounts. Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. According to this article, “over 80% of NFTs minted for free on OpenSea are fake, plagiarised or spam”.

What will this technology look like two papers down the line? Given just how far generative text, audio, and image models have advanced in just two years, this proposition should be alarming. If convincing enough, then content manufacturing is an unsolvable problem. People believe fake news and discard truisms, even when the evidence is right there in front of their faces. If people don’t spend the time to critique the source, they will blindly embrace the message. Because of fake news, there’s a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than what we’re used to. We’re on the cusp of breakneck velocity content generation that promises unclear but undoubtedly pernicious consequences.

Curiosities Miscellanea
3. (Psychology) The Zeigarnik effect and the Onvsiankina effect of unfinished tasks

Unfinished tasks can feel overwhelming, leading to procrastination and slowing your progress. On the other hand, the annoyance of having all of these unfinished tasks on your to-do list may motivate you to tackle them at the next opportunity. These contradictory experiences are due to two effects: the Zeigarnik effect and the Ovsiankina effect.

By supporting our short-term memory and encouraging the completion of an activity, unfinished tasks can be useful as a productivity tool. However, it only works if you don’t leave tasks hanging over you for too long.

How can you take advantage of unfinished tasks? (1) Start even if you can’t finish, as you’ll feel more inclined to finish at the earliest opportunity; (2) follow the ten-minute rule, fight procrastination by starting a task for ten minutes; (3) take breaks, it helps to restore motivation and increase creativity; (4) critically appraise your tasks; (5) practise self-compassion, unfinished tasks can cause stress and anxiety, be kind to yourself and practice mindfulness.

Ness Labs
 
4. (Productivity) 88% of companies say that four-day working weeks are working well

A recent survey from the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global found that 78% of leaders at the more than 70 UK companies that shifted to four-day schedules say their transition was good or “seamless.” Only 2% found it challenging. Most (88%) say that four-day schedules are working well.

Nearly all of the participating UK organizations (86%) said they’ll likely keep four-day schedules after the pilots finish in November. Almost half, 49%, said that productivity had improved, while 46% said it has remained stable.

This is amazing news for all of us looking to waste less time on the computer screen and enjoy it somewhere else. 

Fortune
5. (Marketing) Digital marketing should be a way of exploration not efficiency

Marketers often look towards digital marketing and transformation as a tool for efficiency and cost-savings, allowing a brand to trawl for mass data, finely target consumers online, automate the customer experience and drive customer acquisition and sales with minimal waste.

However, Ogilvy UK vice-chairman Rory Sutherland believes this is an oversight. Digital should be viewed as an opportunity to explore, experiment, test and learn.

The danger of digitalisation is it gets hijacked by the efficiency freaks. It’s all about time-saving and not about customer experience. This obsession leads businesses to try and solve a customer’s need with a single correct answer, which sits as an average in the middle of two extremes.

In any organisation, there should be a mixture of automation streamlining where consumers want it, and the complete opposite, which is high touch attention, where nothing else will do.

Meanwhile, another “danger” area for brands is marketers’ obsession with the metrics digital marketing and digital transformation can provide. The very fact that it’s measurable has made people obsess about what you can measure, on the assumption that what you can measure must be important.

Marketing Week 
6. (Psychology) Becoming powerful makes you less empathetic

Research shows that personal power interferes with our ability to empathise. Dacher Keltner, an author and social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted empirical studies showing that people who have power suffer deficits in empathy, the ability to read emotions, and the ability to adapt behaviours to other people. In fact, power can change how the brain functions, according to research from Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

How does it happen? Slowly, and then suddenly. It happens with bad mini-choices, made perhaps on an unconscious level.  It might show up as the subtle act of throwing one’s weight around. Demands for special treatment; isolated decision-making; and getting one’s way. Leaders who are pulled over by the police for speeding or driving drunk become indignant and rail, “Do you know who I am?!” Suddenly the story hits social media and we change our minds about the once-revered personality.

Harvard Business Review
7. (Society) Workers in the UK have seen their real wage fall by roughly 8% year-on-year

Real wages had flatlined for many years in the biggest OECD economies. Just before the pandemic, real wages moved powerfully higher; tightening labour markets gave workers the upper hand in negotiations. The pandemic radically altered the equation, of course.

As economies stabilized and reflated, real wages began to creep higher again. But rampant inflation checked that growth, rising so fast that it has diminished the purchasing power of people’s take-home pay. Workers in the United Kingdom today have seen their real compensation fall by roughly 8% year-on-year.

McKinsey & Company

Fun things to click on:


A list of videos of relaxing music to help you fall asleep. Sometimes it helps to adopt a new perspective, look out a random person’s window through WindowSwap. Dru Riley has put together a list of 100 useful rules for making life more rewarding.


Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

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SD#39: Purpose, sleep, and liminal creativity

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SD#41: Special edition on CRYPTO