Shut Your Laptop List: Micro-influencing your way back to relevance

If you’ve ever worked in communications, you know there’s always some email you get on a Friday that threatens your ability to shut your laptop and transition into your weekend with peace of mind. Every week, we plan to bring you an email to counteract that. While we can’t save you from every source of weekend angst, the Shut Your Laptop List should help you go into your weekly respite feeling smarter, inspired or (if we’re really killing it) chuckling a little. Let’s go.

Nike yet again ‘leaves no crumbs’ in new anthem about the resilience of refugee athletes (Adweek)

If Nike’s MarComm team knows anything, it’s that consistency matters. Think of one brand — don’t f’ing say Patagonia!!! — that stays truer to message and always looks for ways to connect an underdog story with the notions of perseverance and excellence. We wouldn’t say they make it look easy, but they know how to take an insight, develop meaningful programming (THAT ALIGNS WITH THEIR BRAND PROMISE) and then market the hell out of it. The new “IOC Refugee” spot is no exception to this productive pattern for Nike. And, even better, the team behind the creative is able to capture moving shots and sound that position the company as the storyteller behind narratives that need to be told, rather than a large corporation seeking to exploit individuals. It just works.

A quick sigh of relief in the House of Mouse…maybe (New York Times)

Disney CEO Bob Iger has to be stepping a little lighter in his loafers with the recent news that Nelson Peltz, the head of the loudest activist hedge fund that’s been breathing down the company’s neck for months, has sold his shares in Disney. While this makes Peltz a little fortune, it also effectively signals that he’s finished with mounting multimillion dollar campaigns to sway other shareholders to vote him onto the board or kneecap much of Iger’s ongoing efforts to place Disney securely on a path to sustained profit growth.

Late last year, Peltz, backed by former Marvel Entertainment leader Ike Perlmutter, requested board seats for himself and another Iger rival, in addition to a slew of other demands — many of which mirrored (in some cases) and bastardized (in others) plans that Iger had already rolled out in previous months to right the revenue losses of the Disney+ streaming business, fortify Disney’s parks and set a go-forward plan for the cable and news assets (ESPN, ABC, etc.). Disney’s recent earnings, while cautious, suggest the company’s starting to crack the code on streaming.

Abercrombie shows the power of influencer marketing in its decade-plus turnaround (CNBC)

These days it’s hard to find any good news in retail if your name’s not Shein or Temu, but Abercrombie & Fitch continues to experience unexpected (seriously, who thought they’d really turn it around???) growth produced through tight inventory management, deliberate regional market strategies, creating a foothold in wedding apparel and classic influencer marketing. After much scandal and brand stagnation that earned it the title of “most hated retail brand” in 2016, this is a pretty significant turnaround for the company — the type of evolution that comes from discipline. On the influencer front, Abercrombie seems to have been pretty successful with engaging micro-influencers (or social media users who typically have <3,000 followers) and then taking a hands-off approach to directing those individuals’ actions.

Who knew that Elle was bossin’ up in…real estate? (Robb Report)

Have your authors been living under a rock? 

With one of us having worked in both media and hospitality, it’s whimsical to see a publisher like Elle taking a deeper step into the world of real estate with the imminent opening of a residential building in Miami. Given that the brand owns existing hospitality concepts in Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere, this doesn’t come as the biggest surprise. It’s a further example that many of your favorite media companies are actively (so actively!) looking for brand-adjacent ways to diversify that revenue base while advertising dollars continue to shrink.

Some weekly inspiration: good music (propelled by the TikTok algorithm) can still break through

The OpenAI-ScarJo debacle of the past 2 weeks had all of us wondering about the future of creativity. Is (original) artistry really under threat? With that weighty question on our minds, we couldn’t help but find a bright spot in the success of music artist Tommy Richman. If you haven’t heard 'Million Dollar Baby' please do yourself a favor and stream it now. We love music (in our preferred habitat, DC’s 9:30 Club, like below) and find the recording industry a fascinating category.

It's universally understood that music institutions have been broken and re-broken, with a heavy cost to artists and fans (looking at your Ticketmaster!). So we take note when a pretty fire song finds a way to unexpectedly break through — based on little more than a little grinding and a lot of TikTok replays.

In 2023 Richman moved from Woodbrdige, VA to Los Angeles and within a year connected with Brent Faiyaz (yet another DMV-affiliated artist, Colombia, MD, to be exact) becoming the first artist to be signed by his new label ISO Supremacy. Fast-forward to mid-April '24 where he began releasing snippets of 'Million Dollar Baby' on TikTok. The sound was quickly picked up by a very influential corner of TikTok (dance) driving uses of the sound to 148K. When the full song was released two weeks later it debuted at no.2 on Billboard Charts. Today the song has over 200M streams on Spotify, and continues to dominate TikTok due to two entertaining trends: prom transition hard launches and Black wife/girlfriend effect.

Honestly, his whole discography is fire and we love to see creativity discovered and celebrated. Hope he (and Tinashe, who is finally getting her over-due recognition) gets all the checks.