You’ve Got a Friend: With the goal of understanding what friendship is all about, Snapchat commissioned a massive global study around friendship: The Friendship Report. The research shows Gen Z is adjusting their approach to friendship away from the Millennial desire for widespread networks and are looking for more closeness and intimacy with a smaller group, that love plays a stronger role in platonic relationships than we ever knew before, and that communicating with emojis, pictures, and videos can help reduce misunderstanding online. Download the report here.
Beyonce’s Assistant for a Day: This week a Beyonce-themed Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game took over Twitter. See thread here..
Facebook Top Fans Targeting: In the last month Facebook has been enabling a new option for Pages with more than 10,000 Likes to publish content exclusively targeted to “Top Fans.” This feature can be used share exclusive content for your most active and engaged followers. To use this feature, eligible Pages first need to turn on the “Top Fans” badge in Page Settings -> Facebook Badges.
Got Data? The New York Times has a course to teach its reporters data skills, and now they’ve open-sourced it. You can access the Times’ training materials here, including cheat sheets, data sets, and how to use data effectively inside a story’s narrative.
Track This! To promote their Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection browser, Mozilla launched a subversive tool called Track This that opens 100 tabs of websites within a theme (Hypebeast, Filthy Rich, Doomsday, or Influencer) specifically to disrupt your third party tracking cookies. Warning – this will mess with your targeting!!
Patent Watch! New patents filed recently include the ability for Amazon to record you before you say “Alexa” and a pet robot that changes its behavioral characteristics when you change its clothes. Just because a patent is filed doesn’t mean it will come to market, but these two seem very realistic for implementation. Consumers have a hard time knowing when to say “Alexa” in the proper taxonomy, and this robot clothes thing seems perfect for a “smart” Christmas gift this coming season.
The Truckla: I’ll admit I watched the entirety of this 30 minute video from the Simone Giertz (aka queen of sh*tty robots), who transformed a Tesla Model 3 into a pickup truck she calls Truckla. And here’s the commercial as if it were a real product.
GREG SWAN 