I’m preparing for something like my 20th trip to Cannes. We have a series of events there.
On Thursday, June 25 at 1pm, I’ll be joined by People Inc CEO Neil Vogel and Axios senior media correspondent Sara Fischer for our annual state of media conversation/happy hour at the People Inc villa. Register
Today’s conversations:
Rachel Karten on the need to the end of the follower model and why social media is becoming more about entertainment programming.
Ana Andjelic discusses the new marketers of status and why luxury is still about performing wealth despite the quiet luxury trend.
TechCrunch has long been known for newsletters like Mobility and StrictlyVC, but behind the scenes, slow workflows imposed by rigid tools held them back. After moving to beehiiv, everything changed, Mobility grew 14% in two months, StrictlyVC grew 4%, and editors could publish faster, experiment freely, and cut through dev bottlenecks. Cleaner segmentation improved deliverability and analytics, while new revenue levers, from sponsorships to paid options, opened up. With beehiiv, TechCrunch quickly turned its newsletters into a smarter engine for reach, retention, and revenue.
Social media is changing. TikTok changed social media forever, obliterating the follower model in favor of algorithmic sorting, and shifting the emphasis from participation to consumption. RIP Join the Conversation™.
"A lot of brands specifically are living in that old era where they're like, our followers want to see our content, we want to show them what we think they want to see,” Link in Bio’s Rachel Karten told me on The Rebooting Show. “That's just not how you get reach anymore."
Rachel joined me to discuss the changing role of social media marketing as it becomes closer to media programming. In a newsletter last fall on “post-social media,” Rachel laid out the rules of the “new social,” where followers are irrelevant and the algorithm rewards a “more shots on goal” approach.
Other topics we discussed:
The rise of social in marketing orgs. A former head of social at Bon Appetit, Rachel started a newsletter for a specific job: social media managers. She brings professional expertise to her work – and empathy for social media managers who, like many new professional roles, feel underappreciated and misunderstood. And now, they’re more critical. “The ideas are coming from the people who are scrolling every day, living on the internet."
The practitioner media model. LinkInBio has grown to 110,000 subscribers with a model driven by subscriptions and complemented with ads. Rachel complements that with consulting work that keeps her engaged in the field as a practitioner. “There are lots of reporters who write about social media, but what helps me is that I actually do it too."
Brands as entertainment studios. Brands used to think of social media in terms of dry “content pillars,” and now it’s about characters, storylines and loglines. "What's our show? What would the logline be for our social media strategy? What are we going to be known for on social media instead of trying to use your social media like a website and be everything to everyone?"
Consideration span is the new attention span. Rather thang focus on shortened attention spans, brands need to focus on compressed consideration spans. The feed rewards immediate hooks that draw people into a story. "Those few seconds where we're considering if we want to watch something are so important,” Rachel said.
Entertainment vs community. Social media is bifurcating as the TikTokification of platforms turns them into mostly passive content consumption vehicles while smaller community surfaces emerge. Brands cannot have one strategy for both. "I think about it as like opt in, opt out,” Rachel said. “There are people who aren't opted in, they're just scrolling for entertainment. How will your brand show up there? And it can be very different than the surface where people have opted in."
This week, we continued the discussion over the Pope’s so-called AI encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. While this humanist point of view is critical, we come to the conclusion that in the near term the direction of the AI project is dependent less on Anthropic’s latest gangbusters ARR numbers and more by the actual productivity companies are seeing. On that front, the jury is out, as tokenmaxxing gives way to ROImaxxing.
Microsoft is putting limits on its token consumption, Uber blew through its token budget in a few months, and Salesforce is spending $400 million on Anthropic. This spending is currently far ahead of the productivity gains these companies are realizing. As Astro would observe: Ruh-roh.
Or perhaps narrative is all that matters. The SpaceX IPO aims for a $1.5 trillion valuation that cannot be justified based on spreadsheets, no matter if it somehow came up with its total addressable market as $26 trillion, or the size of the entire current U.S. economy. At some point, these are more spiritual exercises than logical capital allocations of expected returns. AB’s discounted cash-flow model isn’t needed. Faith is required.
Narratives need heroes and villains. Elon gets to play that same role for different groups. AI accelertionists have a problem: They’re seen as the bad guys who are looking to put people out of work and plunk datacenters next to people’s neighborhoods while AI wreaks havoc on the education of people’s children. The response: Blame the Chinese Communist Party.
Much of the concern over AI comes back to jobs. Tech advances have historically never led to mass job losses. AI’s boosters are exasperated in repeating this mantra, but look, AI’s leading lights have been the loudest voices in warning of impending doom. Mainstream economists, for once, have not been the hysterics. We discuss how tech’s loudest voices are covering for their own bad hiring decisions by pinning it all on HR. Go figure.
Ana Andjelic, brand executive and author of The Sociology of Business, joined PvA this week to discuss the new markers of status. The luxury industry fascinates me because providing goods and services to rich people will become a larger share of the economy as the number of very rich Americans increases. There are already 400,000 American households with a net worth over $30 million. Of all the unknowns of the AI age, I am making a safe bet that it will lead to a greater concentration of wealth – SpaceX is in line to mint 4,000 millionaires and 400 centi-millionaires.
Ana doesn’t buy into the notion of “quiet luxury.” After all, look at “rich face,” super yachts, collecting athletes in an entourage. My idea of the ultra-high net worth adding a philosopher to their entourages isn’t widely shared. Ultimately, new status symbols emerge to demarcate the very rich, at least in their own minds.
Plus: Why the Jonny Ive-designed Ferrari Luce was panned and the rise of Chinese luxury.
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