Antonym: Tudor Agony Aunt Edition
The Metaverse Hype Harvest, Cromwell advises Big Pharma, and a literal look inside the head of Antonym's editor...
Dear Reader
It’s good to be back. Lots of fun this week, but I will warn you: I’ve rediscovered my old Giphy favorites folder. I’ll warn you, if you’re reading in email you may need to click through to the web version to get the whole thing, especially the MRI scans of my brain. We don’t have much time, so let’s get going…
Hype Harvest
Let’s start with a pair of pertinent quotes:
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. — Ferris Bueller, 1986
Things move pretty fast. If you don’t stop every now and again to say – “Hang on, I think that’s bullshit!” —you’re going to find you’ve driven into a pile of bullshit. — Antonym 2022
The hype harvest is coming in already for “the Metaverse” earlier in the year. Back in March every big brand was being cajoled by big agencies to urgently invest in getting their brands into Horizon Worlds, Meta-aka-Facebook’s virtual reality platform. Many those agencies are dependent on Meta-aka-Facebook ’s favour [“trusted partners”, shurely? – Ed] and therefore slightly biased in their advice.
For every 1,000 Meta Horizon Worlds users there are 1,000,000 Roblox users.
Fast-forward six or seven months and the world has moved on from wondering about the metaverse and the often conflated technology of Web3 (NFTs and cryptocurrency). I–Can’t–Believe–It’s–Not–Facebook’s valuation is now 60-70% lower than in March. It has spent $27BN on its investment in virtual reality and its platform has fewer active users than MySpace, according to Scott Galloway. The value of Bitcoin, just one frothy metric that was attached to the promise of blockchain technology is worth 60-70% less than it was in the spring.
But the hype seeds were sown and budgets were committed and now we have some campaigns coming through. A couple of weeks ago Frito-Lays, part of Pepsico, which has built a “a new, digital suburban neighborhood unlike any place” in Meta Horizon Worlds to promote Cheetos (like Wotsits, for UK readers). Unsuprisingly the high-priest of hustle culture hype, Gary Vaynerchuck’s agency was involved.
There’s more chance success for brands going into virtual worlds such as Roblox and Fortnite. These have been claimed as “metaverses” by the hype machine, but very rarely involve virtual reality and have been around for years, building loyal user-bases of millions. Roblox is a online game that let’s users make their own games. For every 1,000 Meta Horizon Worlds users there are 1,000,000 Roblox users.
Some thoughts on this:
Hype cycles grow and die faster than traditional marketing can plan and execute. It takes month for a big activation to be planned and launched.
Big bets are bad business. In an environment of extreme uncertainty, pretending you know what will happen in six months time is dumb.
Serious advisers and constants that said things like “get on board before it’s too late” and “invest millions in metaverse content now” should apologise personally to their clients. See Antonym passim.
And now a message from my de facto sponsor: Brilliant Noise
A reader asks: If things move too fast for traditional marketing operations, what should they do?
I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader. They need to speed up their activities by adopting a test–and–learn method across their organisations.
Aren’t they testing and learning all of the time anyway?
Most large companies have bright people running experiments and trying new things. Without a common approach and systems for sharing the results, those experiments help teams, but rarely change the whole organisation.
They should do more?
Yes.
How?
Come along to the free webinar this week and find out. Brilliant Noise has developed the Test–Learn–Lead™ programme to help business figure how to run experiments that accelerate performance and scale the knowledge. We’ve being doing this work for brands including adidas, BMW, Asahi Beers, Barilla and Nike.
Et tu, blu
Like Wendys and Cheetos in Meta Horizon Worlds. there are some odd Web3 activations coming to light.
The first Web3 movie experience of all time on the Blockchain.
Word of the week: Necropolitics
What a word! You want it to mean zombie-polticians seeking votes and backhanders instead of brains to eat. But it doesn’t.
Coined by Achille Mbembe, professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Wikipedia currently has its definition as follows:
Necropolitics is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead."1 Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article,2 and later, his 2019 book of the same name.1 Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people's lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss.1
Coined by “Achille Mbembe” a professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Deployed by Dan McQuillan in his synopsis for his new book “Resisting AI”.
I saw the word deployed by the brilliant thinker, activist and Goldsmiths lecturer and “paradigm dissident” Dan McQuillan in his synopsis for his new book Resisting AI.
Cromwell advises Eli Lilly to sue Twitter
Regular readers will know of Antonym’s obsession with Thomas Cromwell, especially the version of him imagined by Hilary Mantel. It will come as only a little surprise, then, that I’ve spun up an AI version of him on Character.ai, the super-smart chatbot platform, which generates AI characters at will. (Seriously try it, it’s incredible.)
As a consequence of this mucking around, Antonym has a new Agony Aunt. If you have a business or political dilemma send us your question and we’ll put it to Lord Cromwell.
This week, a fake Eli Lilly Twitter account – made plausible by Elon Musk’s new scheme to charge for identity verification – announced that the company would no longer charge for insulin. This simultaneously created a public relations crisis for the company and sent its shares down by 5%.
Coincidentally, our anonymous questioner this week had a similar problem:
Hello, Thomas. I'm legal counsel for a major pharmaceutical company. A social network introduced a new verification feature that validated the identity of users but made it very easy for bad actors to impersonate legitimate corporations. A recent post on an account claiming to be my company said we would be offering our product for free. It was taken as fact even though we quickly denied it and had it taken down. The financial markets reacted by wiping $10BN off of our market capitalisation. Should I sue the social network?
Fake Cromwell replies…
You should. The problem lies within their verification system. If it can so easily be abused and thus harm your company they should be held financially responsible. Furthermore, what happened to you today might happen to another company. I suggest you sue them in order to set an example and discourage future instances of this.
He continued:
It is an evil thing to slander the good names of honest businesses for personal gain or to destroy those who oppose them. This is a crime and the offender should be brought to justice, no man should be allowed to do such a thing. So I tell you friend, if the social network allows these liars to commit these crimes then they should be held accountable.
[Antonym stresses that dead Tudor courtiers’ business advice is made up by an AI app and should not be trusted. A bit like most business advice, now we think of it.]
Four Day Weeks
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in an event for the University of Sussex neuroscience and psychology department’s study of companies changing to “Four Day Weeks”. The use of quotations there are intentional, as it is technically about the movement to reduced working hours while maintaining productivity. See the 100-80-100 model for more on this idea.
Brilliant Noise has been running a four day week trial for several months now and it seems to be working well (not to say without a few glitches here and there). I’ll write more about this in a future Antonym.
Your brain on less hours
One happy benefit of taking part in the University of Sussex’s Four-Day Week study was that they give participants access to all the personal data they supply; including an MRI brain scan.
I’m now in receipt of a 3D model of my own brain, I’ve been delighted to have a look inside my head.
I’ve started playing with different way to use some of these images. First up I took a picture of my head and layered the MRI over it so you can see through me head!
Then I uploaded an image to DALL-E 2 the AI image generator and used a feature where the app tries to guess what is just outside the frame of the image.
Turns out it thinks I would have a REALLY long neck.
The reason for the scans (I had one at the start and one at the end of a twelve-week) trial is to see how the pre-frontal cortex changes when people have more free time. There should be statistically significant data from this in a few months time, once more people have been through the programme.
Anyone interested needs to be able to visit the University of Sussex campus in Brighton and can get in touch with Dr Rae and her team at https://www.sussex4dayweek.co.uk/.
DALL-E opens to developers
DALL-E 2 has opened up to anyone wanting to use its image generation technology in their own apps. Microsoft’s new Designer app will use it — and toy company Mattel are already using this to speed up design work on its Hot Wheels range, according to VentureBeat.
Stock image service Shutterstock is going to use DALL-E 2 to offer its customers the ability to generate their own image instead of paying a licence for a photograph or design from its library. Both of these businesses are going in early on a technology that could exist the very services of which they are trying to make AI image-making a feature.
That’s all for this week, folks. Hope you enjoyed the ride! Likes, shares and subscribes are all very welcome :)
Antony