Happy Friday Jr. Welcome to The Chaos Coordinator! We are Brain Candy's snarky little sister, delivering carefully curated news happening across the industry (that you should probably care about) right to your inbox, with a hefty dose of irreverence.
In this issue, we dive into:
Junior VCs' Newest Dilemma
Introducing Follows
The Future of Generative AI
Hermès vs. Mason Rothschild
Super Bowl Sunday's Newest Match Up: TikTok vs. Twitter
What's happening in.....
PE/VC
No Market For Young VCs
A declining market = career panic.
As VC firms have slowed deal making, junior VCs are stressing about their careers and how to make a name for themselves in a deal environment drier than the NYC dating scene. For several years, while the venture market was expanding quickly, it was relatively easy for newer VCs to build a track record by making investments and seeing the startups rise in value, as well as go public or get acquired, reports the WSJ. The same cannot be said in today's slowing market. The push to contribute to a firm’s success by sourcing and closing deals is especially high now, says Adam Dawkins, founder of the Emerging Venture Capitalists Association, as firms re-evaluate team sizes due to worries about fundraising. Getting new deals done is harder because the market is contracting, given that venture firms are becoming conservative and founders are reluctant to raise capital in a bearish environment.
The new app, Follow, "hires" fin-fluencers to be your investment managers.
Fans of fintech influencers are getting the chance to invest exactly like their favorites with new tech that allows for automatic syncing between the influencer's portfolio and the fan's. CEO of the new social investment platform, Follow, Manning Field was inspired by his children's interest in fintech influencers and the growing phenomenon of social investing, and citing the desire to help young people start responsibly building their portfolios. So far, 25 influencers popular on Tiktok, Youtube, and Instagram have partnered with the app to offer "subscriptions" ranging from $1.99 to $19.99 monthly. The future of investing is influencer-led and automated: just one more way AI is cutting out the middle man during its 2023 rise to prominence.
Layoff thousands of people and call it Version 1.0.
Besides mass layoffs, our favorite Big Tech giants have found something else in common: the common belief that AI advancement is the future, and it’s time to shift more focus and funding toward machine learning projects, reports Emerging Tech Brew. So far this year, 270+ tech companies have reportedly laid off in aggregate more than 86,000 workers and three of the most influential tech companies—Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta—have said that they’re using the period of downsizing to try and elevate their in-house AI projects. The not-so-gentle giants are aiming to better position themselves to compete in an environment where generative AI, a sector that raised $1.4 billion last year according to Pitchbook data, has sparked more widespread interest and adoption across industries than under-the-desk treadmills.
This Just In: The Metabirkin Does Not Have First Amendment Rights
Hermès’ victory may have set a precedent for IP protections in the NFT world.
In its lawsuit against the creator of unauthorized MetaBirkin NFT collectibles, Hermès has come out on top, successfully proving that the trademark for Birkin handbags had been violated. A Manhattan federal jury decided in favor of Hermès on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg Law. The court awarded the company $133,000 in damages, while noting that digital artist Mason Rothschild’s 100 MetaBirkin NFTs minted on Ethereum did not constitute a protected form of speech via the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, reports Decrypt. The firm filed suit against Rothschild in January 2022 and is not alone in the fight against unauthorized NFT duplications of real-world assets. Last year, Nike filed suit against sneaker reseller StockX for creating unauthorized Nike-branded NFTs as digital claim tickets that buyers could redeem for physical shoes.
The case is seen as a potentially significant early precedent for the NFT world. Read more here.
MARKETING TRENDS
What Do You Mean the Super Bowl Isn't Just About Rihanna and Guac
TikTok and Twitter are headlining a game of their own to win over Super Bowl viewers' second screens.
As marketers, the Super Bowl is..well...our Super Bowl. Not only is this upcoming Sunday a huge marketing opportunity for companies, but it's also an opportunity for those of us who work in the space to analyze campaigns and content, both leading up to and during the game. Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday, Twitter and TikTok are offering marketers incentives to spend ad dollars on their platforms, each seeking to draw uninterested viewers to second screens on game day. Twitter is offering marketers $250,000 in free ad space; TikTok is offering ad credit incentives between 3 to 5% for advertisers spending between $50,000 and $300,000 on Super Bowl campaigns, according to pitches shared with Digiday. While Twitter has traditionally been the platform that marketers turn to for real-time marketing during the Super Bowl, obvious events have led to an advertiser exodus as of late, which encouraged TikTok to hit the ground running. “Twitter has owned the second screen experience during major live events, especially the Super Bowl. That won’t change, at least not this year,” said Noel Cottrell, partner, creative chair at Giant Spoon. “TikTok, is however, starting to work into that space. And in two to three years time, it may be the Super Bowl’s next town square.”
Instead of human social media strategists and creatives, ChatGPT will be the brains behind marketing agency Giant Spoon’s Super Bowl tweets this year. “We’re giving our creative department [Super Bowl Sunday] off and ChatGPT will be generating all of our Super Bowl reaction content,” said Giant Spoon's Noel Cottrell. Read more here.
Neutrogena's latest campaign is a cross between Love Island and the Hype House vibes, and is only on TikTok. Shaking things up has worked out great, too; #hydrohouse got more than 62 million views. Read more about the campaign here.
PHRASE OF THE WEEK
NO CRUMBS LEFT
No crumbs left has to do with colloquial usage of the verb “to eat.” If you leave no crumbs after eating something, you have eaten as much of it as possible – as much if it as there was. It is another way to say that someone completely obliterated (in a good way) an outfit, game, performance, look, etc. To comment “no crumbs left” on something means that person doing it has done it really well. They have excelled. They have left no crumbs.
