[nonostantement #136] - influencers & coffee / blanding / ai generated humans
Now with MORE funny animals!
Welcome to nonostantement:
a weekly newsletter with not bad, dishonest and memorable stuff found all over the Internet.
Buongiorno! Joele here, sending you nice links from the Internet. I collected them while working at online branding and advertising strategies. Please let me know what you think of this newsletter, you can just reply to this same email :)
Soundtrack? I don’t wanna grow up, Tom Waits. Directed by Jim Jarmusch. That’s all I have to say about it.
If you like this newsletter you can now offer me a virtual coffee to show your support :)
My little experiment – adding a “book a call” link to my websites to encourage informality and ‘serendipity’ and have random call with my contacts, to chat about… anything – will be still open for the next week. I already made 12 calls with awesome people!
You can reserve a slot here and we can have a chat about Online Strategy, Social Media Management, Content Marketing, Influencers, Editorial plans for your social channels… or whatever you want.
Almost time to get up, Newport News, Virginia, US, by Charlie Davidson
#BRANDING
[Video] - A really interesting video about influencers selling their own coffee brands. It’s a coffe review but also a branding/business talk: “Those people [your followers/clients] have to prioritize you as a brand above the product. Because the product itself has no competitive advantages”. One simple phrase that is basically the foundation of a lot of branding projects, especially from BIG brands.
In my browser I have tons of bookmarks that date back twenty years and I was just looking at them the other day. Why all the cool graphic design firm I saved now look the same and plenty of their branding projects have a “bland” look and tone of voice? It looks like it works, sort of.
#SOCIALMEDIA
[Video] - Look, I don’t like T-Pain as an artist, but seeing him on Twitch with such a powerful intro it’s refreshing and fascinating. Video games and esports are huge. Supporting your favourite “creators” through small paid subscriptions is huge. This is something that the majority of brands, senior managers and simple users here in Europe still need to deal with.
So the question would be “How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age?”
There’s still money to be made, but it’s mostly not the creators who are getting rich. I discussed about this a lot with people I met with during last week’s random informal calls I made. We didn’t find a good-for-all type of solutions, but we know a change must me made and we need to at least start discussing the matter.The Instagram subculture of women hunters, “huntstagram”. This is something weird and interesting at the same time. Back in the region I come from (Tuscany) hunting is still a big thing, but it's not something so "glamorous" to think about becoming an influencer…
#PHOTOGRAPHY
1960, Ruby Bridges became the first child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz elementary school. For the first 6 months Marshall's had to walk her to and from school due to lines of protesting parents threatening harm to her. She's now an activist and has gotten a presidential citizens medal
#PEOPLE
[Video] - An impressive animated data-driven documentary about the human cost of the second World War, sizing up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends in recent conflicts.
Scientists just found that Arctic waters are loaded with little bits of jeans, because every time you wash denim, tiny fibers shed and flow into the environment.
During the coronavirus lockdown I could smell the sea breeze from my window in the early mornings, something that never happened in 10 years in Barcelona. Well, seems like air pollution is returning to pre-covid levels so…
#THEDARKSIDE
What happens when a US Sheriff tries to create a cutting-edge intelligence program to stop crime before it happened? That he actually build a system to continuously monitor and harass citizens.
[Video] - Are content farms taking over youtube with fake thumbnails, fake content and dangerous viral videos? A new video from Ann Reardon, debunking the tricks of content farms to make their videos viral.
The Guardian asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for them from scratch, trying to convince us robots come in peace. So, A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?
[Video] - I still didn’t watch documentary “The Social Dilemma” but from the trailer it looks kinda interesting: “We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? As digital platforms increasingly become a lifeline to stay connected, Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.”
A company is marketing “AI Generated Humans” - deepfake models ready to help you conveying online content (even animated!). I would take a photo shooting with a model and then replace her with deepfake simulations of models of all other races to deliver customized content all over the world. Frightening AND fascinating!
That's it for now.
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