The Connection Newsletter 81 - IG Ads, Miss Americana, Disney+

The Connection Newsletter #81 - The pilgrimage of the TikTok star. The network dominating cable television. Lessons from Disney+

February 03, 2020

Hello!This is edition #81 of The Connection, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Thanks for having me in your inbox. I wrote a new article: Running Our First Instagram Ads For A Family-Owned Restaurant, about tests I ran to promote the restaurant in the surrounding Albany area. I also published a pickleball article about picking your first pickleball paddle. You’ll learn which paddle is best for you, where to buy it, and how much you should plan to spend. Finally, the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana landed on Netflix this weekend. If you’re already a Taylor fan, you’ll dig it, of course, but I don’t think it’s going to draw any casuals deeper into the Taylorsphere. In my opinion, Benjamin Lee’s 2-star review in The Guardian fairly described where it hit and missed.Favorite scene: Taylor’s reaction to Reputation’s Grammy snub. “This is fine. I just need to make a better record.”Let’s jump into this week’s articles:

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  Technology, Business, & TicToc 

. Starbucks has been my “coworking office” of choice ever since I started working remotely 6 years ago. When they first rolled-out mobile ordering, I remember watching the line of disgruntled customers forced to wait an extra 3 minutes for their latte grow comically large.  

Today at most Starbucks I visit (I’m at one as I type this) the mobile order, walk-ins, and drive-through all work together seamlessly. 

The person credited with this transformation? Roz Brewer, COO of Starbucks, who joined in 2017. This is a terrific profile of how she led the transformation. 

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. Young adults and tweens with aspirations to become TikTok stars are flocking to Los Angeles en masse to launch their careers. Working together, they’re renting houses (called “collab houses” or “content houses”) where they can focus on producing videos 24-7.  

Favorite quote

:

“If someone slips up constantly, they’ll not be a part of this team anymore. You can’t come and stay with us for a week and not make any videos, it’s not going to work. This whole house is designed for productivity. If you want to party, there’s hundreds of houses that throw parties in L.A. every weekend. We don’t want to be that. This house is about creating something big, and you can’t do that if you’re going out on the weekends.”

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. As the American Express owned Resy tries to continue stealing market share from incumbent OpenTable, simply being able to make a reservation is no longer enough. They’ve expanded into other plays besides booking software: think events, content marketing, and loyalty programs. 

Subscribe

: If you’re interested in restaurant + technology news, check out

. 

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. A college applicant to Standard is 41x more likely to get admitted (4.8 acceptance rate) than become a Chick-fil-A operator. Zach Crockett of The Hustle did a terrific job breaking down the economics of the fast-food franchise model. 

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. Tommy Griffith explains in detail the 7-year journey of turning his side project, Clickminded SEO training, into a 6-figure lifestyle business. 

Hot take

: Frankly, these 0 to 6-figures stories are usually not good. This one is.

The World of Television

. One of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions was bingeing Hallmark movies the following day. In 2019, their programming block called Countdown to Christmas

made Hallmark the No. 1 cable network among women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four.

The Hallmark movie and programming formula has been so successful that Netflix, Ion, Freeform, and OWN have started following suit.

Let’s repeat that

: Netflix is copying… The Hallmark Channel.

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. Meryl Streep and Martin Scorsese might hate Rotten Tomatoes, but no one can ignore the impact it’s had on the film industry. Studios will hold screenings for critics as close to release dates as possible, to delay a “rotten” score, while disputing ratings with the site’s curators. 

Rotten Tomatoes is a powerhouse. Even more interesting, that in a world where you can’t look at a screen without smacking into an “algorithmic feed,” Rotten Tomatoes still relies on human curators to determine if a review is good (“fresh”) or bad (“rotten”). 

Did you know

? Rotten Tomatoes was founded in 1998 by Berkeley post-grads who wanted to rate Jackie Chan movies.

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. Matthew Ball’s analysis of the technology and television landscape is one I always look forward to. To summarize some of the top takeaways: 

  1. Clarity of Messaging Matters. Although most consumers know the Disney+ brand, Disney went out of its way to *constantly* communicate and reiterate exactly what it would offer consumers.

  2. Marketing Matters. For Everyone. Everyone knows Disney. They still invested at least $250MM from Sept to 2019 EOY... just for US+Canada. In 2020 year they’re expected to spend another $350MM+ globally. 

  3. Subscribers Matter More than ARPU. In Disney’s mind, growth in the streaming space and grabbing as much market share is the only thing that matters. To do it, they'll anchor their product near the bottom of the market, and even cannibalize their own home video arm. 

If you liked this

: You should also read Matthew Ball’s

. 

Question: Are you subscribed to Disney+? What do you think of the service? 

I’d love to hear what you think.

Thanks for reading!

Last thing: Is there anything I can help you with?

 If there's any way I can help out, please let me know. Or if we just haven't chatted in a while, I'd love to hear from you. Just reply directly to this email. 

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