April 20, 2022

s11e37: Brand. Intimacy.

0.0 Context Setting

It’s a grey typical morning on April 20, 2022 in Portland, Oregon. People sometimes joke about how terrible the weather is here.

I normally point out that I moved here from London, which is roughly the same latitude and has roughly the same but slightly worse weather: the autumns, winters and springs are about the same in both places (cold, grey, wet), but summer here is off the charts. In some respects, in a bad way, now that we’ve got more Extreme Weather Events.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

MAKE THEM. MAKE THEM LOVE ME.

In the ever escalating war between companies competing to measure what “brands” are doing “better, we’ve progressed from recognition to relationship to affinity to now “intimacy”: MLBM, an agency that “integrate[s] strategy, design and technology expertise to deliver superior outcomes” just released its Brand Intimacy 2022 rankings.

Brand intimacy!

I mean, this feels silly to me and the way my brain deals with things like this is to take them literally. Which means that if you and your brand are experiencing reduced intimacy and you want to do something about it, maybe you can schedule intimacy sessions together to rekindle your brand relationship?

I imagine things like an equivalent to the r/relationships¹ (don’t go there), some sort of r/brandrelationshipadvice where you see posts like:

I (42m) am having trouble with my mobile phone, tablet and computer brand (46,2.73trillion). We’ve been in a relationship for 21 years now and it’s starting to feel like they’re interested in other, younger people and aren’t attentive to my needs– (a tweet, obviously)

Brand intimacy!

It also reminds me of a silly thing from 2017 when I took a Salesforce billboard ad literally:

“We’re Salesforce,” said the billboard. “We help make your customers love you.”²

Thinking Like An AI / ML Model

I had a note from a reader the other day about the consequences of zero-marginal-cost-of-content thanks to creative AI from episode 35.

One current view of the situation is that AI tools help provide inspiration to people doing creative work (as distinct from supplying a mountain of creative work for people who need to use some creative work), some sort of tentacle-y oblique strategies cards but made practical and not abstract. A kind of “AI, makes you think, huh?”

What’s slightly more interesting than that to me is the whole situation where DeepMind’s Alpha Go, which was trained to play Go from scratch, discovered entirely novel strategies that hadn’t occurred to master Go players. Quora (sorry) has a listed of 4 of the generally accepted new strategies and that is interesting to me. That there’s a space/search space that simply hasn’t occurred to human experts, and it doesn’t necessarily matter right now whether that place in the search space was just neglected by accident, neglected out of bias, or neglected most intriguingly because (I’m hand-waving here) we don’t have the brain/cognitive architecture for it.

Related: James Bridle’s new book, Ways of Being, which is out in the UK but not in the US until June.

Time Loops

Time loops caught my attention and I can’t remember why, but I love a good time loop story. I also love learning about writing and becoming a better writer, so I found three blog posts from Joseph Mallozzi³, a screenwriter and producer/showrunner (Stargate SG-1 et al, Dark Matter) about time loop episodes:

• Welcome to my Time Loop Episode MasterClass
• From Window of Opportunity to All The Time In The World
• Joseph Mallozzi’s Top 10 Funnest Episodes!

I’ve played about 45 minutes of Deathloop and there are too many games to play.

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Okay, that’s it for today.

It’s raining now. It wasn’t before. I’ve been told there’s no such thing as bad weather, just unprepared clothing.

How are you doing? Yesterday someone sent me a picture of their GOOD DOG and honestly that was one of the best things that happened all day.

Best,

Dan