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Out of Scope: Issue 03

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This week’s non-required thinking on reputation, business, and culture from Hirsch Leatherwood.
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Out of Scope: Issue 03

This week’s non-required thinking on reputation, business, and culture

Feb 19, 2021
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Out of Scope: Issue 03

hirschleatherwood.substack.com
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This week, Facebook shares more disinformation (but about itself), the Queen of Tennessee wins our hearts, we relish two bits of well-deserved schadenfreude, and we look back at one particular case of the rich and powerful engaged in awkward dance moves.

📡 ON OUR RADAR

  1. As the pandemic accelerates the future of esports, brands in the space are trying to elevate themselves as entertainment businesses.

  2. The Wing was everything that “millennial pink” promised and more. A space for high-powered #girlbosses to meet, the home base of the #resistance, complete with #aesthetic bookshelves and furniture … but in the end, what was it? This past year’s collapse of the real estate market brought the girl-powered business’s true nature to the surface - an expensive bit of office space (with a hypocrisy problem). Call it a case of all message, no substance - we’re interested to see what comes next for the company now that it’s helmed by IWG.

  3. Dolly Parton knows the importance of the right moment for taking the spotlight. She turned down Tennessee's generous offer to put her on a pedestal (literally) - making her even more deserving of that statue (in our humble opinions).

  4. Is it time for the chief meme officer? The term “Internet meme” was--believe it or not--coined in 1994 and many of the most common memes in use today were already old hat in 2013. Not quite graffiti, not quite jokes, not reliant on any particular platform, it seems that memes, like 30-second commercials were to TV, are a permanent feature of the medium that gave birth to them.

  5. Ding ding! Time for the latest round of think pieces about the evils of social media, in this case hung on the news peg of the Capitol riots and domestic misinformation. A piece we covered in last week’s issue raises the deeper structural problem: an unstable business model reliant on addictive algorithms and spying on users. As long as that’s in place, the old contract between purveyors of information and the free societies that depend on them will remain broken. Google’s agreement to pay News Corp. for links may be a step towards repairing that contract or a one-off solution. Stay tuned.

  6. Facebook is overstating its video views again. They literally have emails from employees asking “How long can we get away with this?”

  7. The only powerpoint presentation that could be described as a blockbuster is Benedict Evans’s annual look at the future of tech (and everything, really). Terms coined in this year’s version, relevant to marketers and comms folk: “Cambrian explosion in online tools,” “e-commerce as logistics,” and “the cookie apocalypse.”

🏆 REPUTATION FAIL OF THE WEEK: Tone-deaf politicians of the Great State of Texas

A faded postcard with a palm tree and a picture of a smiling Ted Cruz that says "Wish you were here. Stay warm, Texas! Your Senator, Ted Cruz." and a large "Greetings from Cancun"
As all good memes go, original artist credit for this masterpiece is lost in the wind.

Most of the US was hit hard by an arctic storm this week, and no one has borne the brunt of it as much as Texas. Gradually, we’ve been learning fun and exciting bits of Texas trivia this week - Texas has its own power grid! - and watching in horror as Texans go without power, heat, and water, trapped inside with frozen roads. Now would be the perfect time to come together across political divides to solve this massive problem, right? According to former Texas Governor Rick Perry, of course not! “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry said. Current Governor Greg Abbott and Rep. Dan Crenshaw had their own spectacular takes as well:

Twitter avatar for @ndrew_lawrence
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew_lawrence
Texas Gov. Abbott blames solar and wind for the blackouts in his state and says "this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America"
Image
2:34 AM ∙ Feb 17, 2021
11,548Likes2,032Retweets
Twitter avatar for @RepDanCrenshaw
Rep. Dan Crenshaw @RepDanCrenshaw
All of this calls into question our ability in Texas to prepare for extreme weather events and plan power accordingly, so we’re not relying on frozen wind turbines to heat our homes during a blizzard.
9:41 PM ∙ Feb 16, 2021
992Likes110Retweets

The Texas Tribune responded to that idea with a short and decisive headline: No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages. An official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas stated, “It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system.”

Plus, Texas Senator Ted Cruz thought now would be a great time to vacation in Cancún! 😎🌴

Twitter avatar for @svershbow
Sophie Vershbow @svershbow
Everyone is so mad at Ted Cruz for going to Cancun during a state-wide weather emergency that we've completely forgotten to dunk on him for flying his whole family to Mexico during a global pandemic.
4:14 PM ∙ Feb 18, 2021
57,058Likes7,213Retweets

Even the right-wing parody site Babylon Bee is piling on.

Twitter avatar for @TheBabylonBee
The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee
Heroic Ted Cruz Travels To Cancun To Lasso The Sun And Bring It Back To Texas
babylonbee.comHeroic Ted Cruz Travels To Cancun To Lasso The Sun And Bring It Back To TexasTed Cruz is being heralded as a hero after he traveled to Cancun in the middle of the worst energy crisis in recent memory in order to lasso the sun and bring it back to Texas.The media quickly condemned Cruz for his trip but apologized when they realized he was actually saving the state by…
6:17 PM ∙ Feb 18, 2021
12,912Likes2,096Retweets

It all comes down to a giant failure to read the room. In any response, putting people first, rather than brand interests, will go much farther. Whether you’re a politician or a corporation, relevant and compassionate messaging matters in a crisis. And the actions you take are sometimes the most important communications of all. As media critic Brian Stelter succinctly put it … Houston, we have a comms problem.

Twitter avatar for @brianstelter
Brian Stelter @brianstelter
A comms crisis on top of multiple other crises:
Twitter avatar for @eramshaw
Emily Ramshaw @eramshaw
What we’re enduring in Texas is catastrophic — and the distribution of basic, factual, timely information from people and agencies in positions of power has been inadequate and incompetent *at best.*
3:28 PM ∙ Feb 17, 2021
91Likes27Retweets

💡ON OUR MINDS

We found a use case!

  • Not dissimilar to how we finally identified a practical scenario for QR codes (we knew they had to be good for something), it seems that virtual reality is finding its place in the future office

  • From WSJ’s Joanna Stern: “Think Zoom but with holograms and real virtual backgrounds. Instead of 2-D video, you turn into a 3-D avatar and interact with others, who see virtual you but hear real you.”

  • Integrate virtual reality with the green screens Obama and Oprah used for their interview in November, and we’ll never have an in-person pitch meeting again.

What a prepared executive looks like

  • One question the mega-billionaire (and world’s best hype man) knew was coming on his book tour: how do you preach global sustainability and justify flying around in a private jet? By investing billions of dollars in companies that are striving to get the world to net-zero emissions.

  • The winning line from Gates: “If I have picked any winners at all, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I or my family is responsible for. The goal isn’t simply for any one person to make up for his or her emissions; it’s to avoid a climate disaster.”

  • Jeff Immelt, another former titan, is still saddled with an anecdote from his GE days about having an empty backup jet follow him around the world on his business travels. You know, just in case. Yet for Gates, Silicon Valley’s lovable uncle, the private jet issue probably won’t stick.

We’ll see you here next week! 👋

HL

===

The fine print:

This newsletter brought to you by big thoughts from people who aren’t afraid to risk their reputations to get them out there.

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Out of Scope: Issue 03

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