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“You learn something every day if you pay attention." - Ray LeBlond
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Proper Tack #59 - 19.04.04

Rich People Buying Things


I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of great stuff lately. This led to some trouble as I tried to cull everything down to a couple long thoughts and a collection of interesting articles for this edition.

So instead I’m going to revert to a format I’ve tried a couple times before.

I have included a whole host of links below with a few sentences of why I found them interesting and what I think you can learn from them. Hopefully you enjoy this little distraction.

If you want to help support Proper Tack, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think would enjoy it and ask them to sign up here.

This entry's header palette is curious collectiOn.


🏈 Keep the Football, I’m Just Here for the Gambling

https://twitter.com/AlbertBreer/status/1113123410215952386
The Alliance of American Football has closed up shop before the end of its first season. Competing with a major sports league for talent and interest was always going to be difficult, but there’s some scuttlebutt that one of the owners was really just in it to get his hands on the gambling technology AAF was building.

Another reporter refuted this claim and also raised the question "why pay $70MM for tech you could create for a fraction of that though?” I have no way of knowing who is right and wrong about the true goals of Tom Dundon, but I can answer the question about cost to produce technology!

Having recently worked with a client tangentially in geo-located gambling space, and knowing a couple people who started companies around sports gambling, the technology itself is more difficult to build than I think people give it credit for. The team is hard to recruit for, the legal hurdles you have to overcome require a whole lot of lawyers, and even once you've done that it takes a a lot of time to build.

That time is the real killer, because you also have to deal with each state individually, their regulations, and any limits they put on the number of licenses they give out. Those arrangements alone are going to be MUCH more valuable than any technology. This is all hypothetical, but let's say that a state like Florida is only going to give out 3 licenses. If the US sports gambling market is $50B/yr, and Florida is 6.5% of the US population, each of those licenses alone could be worth ~$1B in annual revenue.

Keep those biz dev relationships strong, people.
 
 

👔 They’re Coming for Marketing Agencies

https://adage.com/article/agency-news/accenture-interactive-set-buy-droga5/317215/
Well this is interesting. Accenture dropped what sounds like at least $300M on the NYC-based creative shop Droga5. Droga5, if you’re not familiar with them, are responsible for marketing campaigns like IHOP -> IHOB, the Bud Knight/GoT mashup, and even a Mailchimp brand extension.

What’s big news here isn’t just that one of the big name “independent” agencies is getting sold (they had already sold a major stake to talent agency WME), but that it’s Accenture buying them. Traditional agencies have been making a bigger push into the creative world with Accenture leading that pack. But now they’ve snapped up one of the biggest names out there and can bring Droga’s first-class media execution abilities to the table when their team of high-priced suits is chatting with the CMO about which machine-learning AI blockchain technology could predict their customers’ next choice in sock purchases.
 
 

🏎️ Subliminal Advertising in F1

https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/why-is-this-interesting-wednesday-6ce
Proper Tack subscriber Noah Brier took a look at the mysterious organization Project Winnow that has been sponsoring Ferrari's and Ducati’s teams in a couple high end racing series. It turns out Project Winnow is on offshoot of Philip Morris and is in no way at all doing this to market tobacco products, no sir, no how.

note: Noah and his writing partner Colin are largely responsible for my increase in content consumption lately. You should 100% subscribe to their daily newsletter.
 
 

👁️ But Wait, There’s More!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/health/big-tobacco-kool-aid-sugar-obesity.html
Maybe you read that last article and thought to yourself, “Wow, that’s pretty crazy, but it seems like a stretch that cigarette companies would try to subtly influence people with weird projects.” Well, some enterprising researchers went through a trove of communications archived at UCSF and found that tobacco companies explicitly took their learnings of how to market cigarettes to kids, and applied it to sugary beverages like Tang, Kool-Aid, and Capri Sun.
 
 

☀️ Cheap, Renewable Energy

http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-energy-will-be-the-most-disruptive-yet/
What happens when it’s cheaper to build new solar, wind, and storage power systems than it is to operate the existing fossil fuel power plants? Not just cheaper on a per-MWh basis after investing in the infrastructure, but actually cheaper to start something brand new and then run it versus maintaining something old. Think of it like buying a new Honda Civic vs trying to keep your 10 year old Audi (he says from personal experience).

According to Ramez Naam, who has been doing some great work reporting improvements and cost-reductions in renewable energy technologies, we’re pretty close to that tipping point. He points to a handful of utility executives who have already laid out the plans to shift to renewables as “cost savings measures” over the next 5 years, and a report by McKinsey saying that solar and wind power will be cheaper than existing gas and coal basically everywhere by 2030. Let’s just try to keep the damn world together until then.
 
 

📊 Bad Charts From People Who Know Better

https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368
The Economist takes themselves to task for bad data visualization. This stuff is really hard, and honestly assessing your prior work is always going to be a valuable (if painful) experience that helps you get it right next time.

My favorite example of them rethinking a chart and making it just so much better is this collection of polling results on Brexit over a 2-year period.
 

That second one is just so much clearer to understand. It's perfect.


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