#14 The Unbearable Thrill of Youth
The times, they are a-changin'
Dear lovers, haters, and everyone in between,
Welcome back, and welcome period. Quite a few new faces since last week.
As we leave gift guide season, we’re in prime 2024-in-review season, leading up to 2025 predictions. Although I’m sharing my top 10 below, let’s keep in mind that it’s not a one-size-fits-all and that culture is not monolithic, okay?
💋Esther
PS: Every time you share Oblique Forecasting with a friend an angel gets its wings.
💰 What I’m investing in
👪Generational divide. I said what I said.
As a millennial, I have a specific relationship with the Internet and by extension media, culture and advertising. By now we know this is the generation who grew up both without and with the Internet. I, of course, couldn’t be who I am today without almost unlimited access to the family computer, but I also grew up worshipping magazines and ripping out Dior ads and Miss Vogue editorials to plaster my walls with.
Growing up in that era meant finding niches and tastemakers among my peers on social media like MySpace and later Tumblr, while still consuming mainstream culture through classic (read: anything but the Internet) channels. That conventional culture was curated by the establishment, aka older generations: Gen X and Baby Boomers.
Gen X had a similar experience (minus the Internet, but they had zines and pirate radios) and I might be projecting but I’m sure Baby Boomers did as well. Before their generation took over, they had no choice but to consume a digest of what older people assumed they wanted.
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Being a brand founder or a key player in the media today requires an understanding of a changing paradigm. Regardless of what generation you belong to.
Younger generations shaping up today’s culture and consumer trends – Gen Z today, Gen Alpha tomorrow – have grown up in a different universe. Coming of age with Instagram, YouTube and now TikTok meant seeing people their age onscreen, sharing for the sake of sharing at first, then building empires or at least attempting to, without fearing cringe. See: Emma Chamberlain, Alix Earle, Charli D'Amelio.
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Consuming content for them, by them has changed the game and instead of seeing older people’s success as aspirational, they’re horrified by any association with millennials.
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Instead of keeping up with a top-down culture, we need to conquer and divide. This brings us back to: generational divide.
If I were to leave you with 3 rules for approaching Gen Z however:
Authenticity & relatability
They can smell bullshit from a mile away. Although it’s hard to fathom for generations who care about their digital footprint (we’re so scared of our Google search results!), they love transparency and raw shit, openly talking about mental health struggles, which makes them masters of building in public. Showing the process instead of keeping everything private until the final result is presentable.
Organic social media
It’s been noted that the trend cycle moves at approx. the pace of a tornado these days. Getting approval from the higher-ups for creating content that adheres to the latest fad makes it already passé and too highly produced (aka fake, please refer to my first point). Short-form and responsive is key. See: TikTok videos in response to comments. Although Kamala Harris missed the mark in addressing a lot of issues, Kamala HQ’s use of TikTok was brilliant.
Real causes
Don’t call them woke. Social and environmental impact matter, and they’ll respond well to content aligning organically with their concerns. Keywords: sustainability, mental health, diversity.
🔮 2025 Predictions
📈 Bullish news
How Glossier Got Its Glow Back [Inc]
TikTok Shop's Black Friday Drove $100 Million In US Sales And Users Viewed Over 30,000 Livestreams [Business Insider]
Mass Men’s Brand Harry’s Introduces $250 Fragrance [BOF]. My thoughts: the bottle looks so so bad 🏇; the price point doesn’t make any sense?!
Alex Cooper (Call Her Daddy) is launching a hangover drink called Unwell Hydration. ‘On the brand side, “PRIME for the hotties” sounds good until you look at the dwindling sales numbers for celebrity RTDs (PRIME is in the negatives) the “celebrity” can only take it so far.’ [Snaxshot] On the other hand: she has trademarks filed for vodka brands.
The New Business of Breakups [The New Yorker]
People spent more than $28B on destination weddings in 2023, up $7B from the year before. [The Cut] The industry is expected to top $100B by 2028.
Ramdane Touhami (Officine Universelle Buly, Cire Trudon) is partnering with Zara to design their cafes in Spain.
📉 Bearish news
What it takes to be "financially successful" by generation [Axios]. Financial services company Empower surveyed more than 2,200 Americans in September, and the Gen Z respondents — born between 1997 and 2012 — said they would need to make more than $587,000 a year to be "financially successful." That's roughly three times to six times what any other age group said they would need.
OpenAI explores advertising as it steps up revenue drive [FT]. AI chatbots cost a fortune to run and remain available for free. The company raised $6.6B in an October funding round, but it's also losing billions of dollars per year.
Building LLMs is probably not going to be a brilliant business [Cal Paterson]. Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be The Future. Maybe they are, but that doesn't mean that building them is going to be a profitable business.
Tesla loses bid to restore Elon Musk’s record $56bn pay package [FT] 🎻
Billionaires underperform the S&P 500 [Axios]
The NYC Report
⚽ A message from systemarosa:
We are popping up in New York City next weekend from Friday 12/13 through Sunday 12/15 at Tangerine, 616 Lorimer St in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A careful selection is the key to winning this holiday season, so come get goated with us. A new collection will be available in store before it goes live on our site. Don't miss your chance to see it up close and get first dibs.
Thank you for the shout out cherie!!! Come come come New Yorkers!