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Welcome Back Must Readers 👋
It’s late July and I don’t know about you but I’m questioning where the heck has 2024 gone?
Quick MR Update » Must Reads Purpose has always been to cut through the noise now the minute-by-minute content tsunami we are experiencing and I wanted to take a break to ensure there were great articles, podcasts and videos you consume that you likely hadn’t already and will help you with the so what to make you smarter about the future.
What I cannot promise is the return to the weekly newsletter,
But what I can promise is more exclusive drops to subscribers. Covering the best views, listens and reads available.
Must Reads is back with a 6-minute read so let’s dive in for the first time this year.
I undertook a daily blog challenge (a self-inflicted challenge) and I have managed to blog every day for around three weeks.
» 3 Must-Reads From My New Daily Blog
How To Go Viral While Causing MSHCF - why learning how the internet works and going big and bold in remixing products is key to MSCHF’s successes
How To Nail Your Next Exec Presentation - 13 simple steps to delivering a great presentation
The Importance Of Audio & Owning It - how audio is overlooked and why it should be the centre of your Marketing & Product efforts
🎙️ I also appeared on one more question podcast, listen to find out a few secrets about Marketing & why brands can with a tiny bit of effort beat larger competitors and market leaders.
» The Emoji Game
Who is the famous person?
↩️ Hit reply and tell me your answer and I’ll let you know personally if you got it right
🥤 Sweet Energy: Expect more brands to leverage nostalgia and candy partnerships to reconnect with older users. Remember for older demos - coffee is a status symbol whereas energy drinks are cool for the younger demos. When Prime lost has cool factor (even being hit with an Olympic lawsuit this week) and other energy drinks are pushing being a focus or productivity drink, we might see an explosion of flavours creating different targeting for different generations.
💷 Kill Credit Cards For Micro Loans: When you have a pain point you build solutions to address it, maybe the answer isn’t another form of credit cards…
🎧 How Brat Summer Is Taking Over Music & Fashion - Great going by Charli XCX and her team, turning her new album into a cultural movement and leveraging all Marketing channels available to her including her music video and taking over the boiler room. If you are in Marketing or Growth definitely take your own deep dive on Brat brilliance
 Continuing to come to a screen near you all summer long |
Newsjacking at its best |
Netflix Deeper Dive ↓
📀 Netflix Expansion Issue: Gaming is Netflix’s newest approach to capturing and owning your time and attention, the issue for Netflix it’s costing the consumer more money (away from ad tiers) and their bet isn’t paying off for now. Research is showing its only one game that is remotely popular. The same happened with other brands, but will this large investment be worth the added pain and expense for the consumer I highly doubt it in the short to mid-term.
Netflix is using the classic dominant media company playbook, leverage your own IP and create more media and games around it, even suggesting 80 games based on their IP. They attempted this already with podcasts but maybe this is the way to win in gaming and owning more of your time on multiple devices. LinkedIn (yes LinkedIn), YouTube and Netflix are all competing to be your canonical media company whether that’s through native content, entertainment series or games.
Below is a quote from Netflix’s shareholder letter about the importance of advertising to Netflix moving forward, with the pricing packages going up to be more profitable; the quality of its programming and cultural relevance of programmes are going to be critical for their success and continuing to open our wallets each month.
“Ads fulfil two important strategic priorities for Netflix: first they enable us to offer lower prices to consumers; and second, they create an additional revenue and profit stream for the business.”
🧠 Learn From The Best - One of my favourite things to do is find out how world-class business operators, athletes and chefs work, how I write is a brilliant vodcast and this Shaan Puri episode is a masterclass in storytelling.
🤖 How To Regulate AI Agents: Another thoughtful LinkedIn video from The Atlantic CEO on how we should think about regulating AI Agents, in a world where they have run wild and Microsoft AI CEO believes the internet is a free (yes, free despite the copyrights and TOS) game as training data. If you have a website and want crawlers to stop crawling your content here’s a great piece of advice from friend of Must Read Carl Hendy
😪Ultra Processed Content: There is good content and bad content for your content consumption diet, for me, it is a blend (that’s why you will want films and TV shows to binge on while reading big autobiographies or novels) this is why I started Must Reads, Cal Newport is very thoughtful however I fear content is often given a broad brush tag versus the job it is filling for us. In the near future we will have to tell platforms and algorithms how content makes us feel versus the signals we show (views, long views, swipes etc) to remove bad content calories otherwise platforms are going to struggle to serve the right level of content.
This piece is well worth the read nonetheless.
🪤 Is Disney A Trap? If you have seen anything about Disney in the last few years it has either been about Disney+ and its performance, their legal battles or how it’s falling and Netflix is thriving. It is interesting how being more kid and being a Disney Adult is seen as a negative when maybe it’s a real positive and a break away from real life. Life is about living and having fun…
I’ll leave you with my favourite Instagram post over the last few weeks
Lastly, here are some shows I cannot recommend highly enough - Presumed Innocent & Dark Matter on Apple TV+, Reciever on Netflix, Kin on BBC iPlayer/Netflix & Catfish (Paramount+) - yes this is my guilty pleasure!
🗣️ Want to give me feedback? Tell me you missed me? Or something else? Go on and hit reply and let me know.
Go Well!
Danny