💔Why America broke up w/ brands (& hooked up w/ individuals)?

In partnership with

Thanks for a great year, Inbox Hackers, and here’s to an easy week for you with the holiday downtime. What’s on tap today?

A breakdown of an article that dissected how America broke up with brands and fell in love with individuals. Then, I’ve got Monday Marketing News - including a couple tools for you.

Brands Can’t Be Your Friend

That’s the bottom line from the No Mercy / No Malice article where 25-year-old (Ed Elson) fills in for Scott Galloway and does a great job breaking down why America is just not into brands anymore. 

“What I lack in age and wisdom, I make up for in screentime. I spent almost seven hours scrolling the internet yesterday — average for me, below average for my generation. I am a product of the greatest digital transformation in history, and the erosion of traditional brand value is happening downstream of this transformation.” ~Ed Elson 

Ed’s argument is that individuals - I’ll mention the examples in a second - are being chosen by Americans over brands. The reason is — Americans are desperate for a friend. 

And no matter how you shine up a brand, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. It’s not a person and can’t become your buddy.

It’s a business. Worse, each time a big brand is caught lying or doing deceitful stuff to improve its bottom line, all the pigs get a tad uglier. Guilt by association.

“We now spend 70% less time with our friends than we did a decade ago.”

3 Examples of Individuals > Brands

Ed mentions these individuals who are seen as friends to their audience:

#1 Elon Musk: He is advertising for Tesla. For every Tesla sold, the company only spends $4 in advertising! Compare that to Ford and GM, which spend over $500 per vehicle sold.

#2 MrBeast: Sure, he’s getting real close to pig-status the bigger he gets and the more he hangs out with trash like Jake Paul. For now, he’s still a person. As an individual, dude has racked up more viewing hours than any of the top shows on Netflix! 

BTW, the top-performing videos on YouTube feature individuals’ faces on the thumbnail… 

• Not a Swoosh logo 

• Not epic mountain ranges 

• Not a headless suit

#3 Joe Rogan: Hey, I didn’t bring Rogan up this time, Ed did, showing the embarrassing stats for this single podcaster with one producer having triple the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined. And when Ed asked his friends if they preferred Rogan or Abbey Miller as a podcaster, not one of his friends knew who Miller was.

I didn’t either. Turns out, she is an individual. But just a suit podcasting via CNN’s brand. Now, why can’t Americans fall in love with her? 

Because she will say anything her boss (CNN) tells her to.

And if she likes her cushy job, she’s wise to do so. Just don’t expect Americans to be morons and not know this. Her words are not her own. They’re the echoes of a brand. 

People Aren’t Perfect, Brands Pretend to Be

Ed’s focus is on the loneliness factor in America. I’m with him.

“I remind you that more than 1 in 10 Americans today have no close friends. Single-person households now make up 29% of all households — up from 13% in 1960. We are more socially isolated than ever before. These are important facts for businesses to know if they are to understand their customers, but they’re also important facts in and of themselves.”

However, for brands, it’s just as important to note that you can’t just pick an individual, put them in the spotlight, and that’ll make everyone love them and by proxy, love your brand. Doesn’t work like that.

Just take the three people I mentioned above. Not everyone in America loves them. Some folks loathe them. 

But the people who do love those individuals know what they are in love with — a flawed human being, like themselves. 

They know those individuals’ words are thoughts from their own head, not from a talking points memo or a producer in their ear. 

Writer RAG tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes

RAG in just a few lines of code? We’ve launched a predefined RAG tool on our developer platform, making it easy to bring your data into a Knowledge Graph and interact with it with AI. With a single API call, writer LLMs will intelligently call the RAG tool to chat with your data.

Integrated into Writer’s full-stack platform, it eliminates the need for complex vendor RAG setups, making it quick to build scalable, highly accurate AI workflows just by passing a graph ID of your data as a parameter to your RAG tool.

Learn more about our production ready RAG tooling here.

Merry Christmas and thanks for reading Inbox Hacking. Please share it with your people. 

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

Bonus: Add this to your email campaign checklist. Make sure an automation or glitch did not stick a bunch of subscribers on your send list unexpectedly. Software and automation ain’t perfect… in case you’ve not noticed.