catty

Friday was my last day at @thirdweb! I joined the team when it was 4 engineers in a discord server, and it’s been the most blessed experience going from 0 to one of the biggest development tools in web3. We built one of the best growth teams in the industry and I've been lucky enough to work with the best creative talent in tech. Forever grateful for @FurqanR, @jakeloo and @StevenBartlett for betting on me and building such a generational company. This is my 10th year in startups so I’m going to take a few weeks off to enjoy the summer in NYC before diving into my own thing. (if you wanna catch up, grab coffee or hear about what im doing next shoot me a dm!) ✌️

a new home for pathetic PATHETIC.COM

another fun shoot day in the coolest office in nyc, with the coolest team few brands are building hardware as thoughtfully as @sandbar, their attention to detail is unmatched and it's a pleasure to contribute to what they're building can’t wait to get my hands on stream! – at Manchester, England

there's been a trend of tech and tech adjacent people criticising Instagram as if it's somehow more damaging than other social networks skill issue - every social network is a choose your own adventure. they seem to be hanging to this idea that IG is still just photos of dan bilzerian and kim kardashian stick to stories and DM's, and it's the only platform that will make you feel truly connected to your friends it's also the world's greatest directory of interesting, creative people - if used correctly you can literally build a creative career from zero, change your whole life etc (in the same way X can do the same for writers and builders) that being said, the reels tab is crack, but every social network now has an optional short-form video slop feed. just avoid it. because of this reputation, IG is one of the biggest consumer marketing opportunities that most tech brands completely miss. they over-index on X despite it having low cultural impact outside of insiders and early adopters. the opportunity for low-cost reach on IG with strong creative and distribution for consumer tech is insane right now. – at Manhattan, NY

The most interesting companies being built right now aren't tech companies. They're ad agencies. If, like me, you want to be creative but you're not talented enough to write a hit song or a blockbuster movie, you have to settle for working in media or advertising. Both industries have their advantages. Ad agencies are cheap to start, generate revenue from day one, and let you sell expertise and creative execution. They're also slow to scale, people intensive, and trade on relatively low multiples. Media companies have a much higher ceiling, wield valuable influence, and compound quickly once you find meme market fit. They're more of a moonshot though, and consumer media is a graveyard (see Buzzfeed, Vice, etc). What if there was a secret third thing? Why not both? Meet the media studio. There's a group of emerging media brands/ad agency hybrids who built an audience or a format first: a meme page, a curation account, a show, a newsletter - creator-led or faceless. Once the media gains traction, they launch a creative services team selling brands the knowledge and creativity that comes from building an audience. Revenue is split between selling ads on their own media and creative services, with the two endlessly feeding each other. In a world where the currency of brand building is attention, agencies who can prove they know how to capture attention, with an audience they own, have a huge advantage over agencies selling ideas and promises. Distribution vs creative is a never ending debate. The studios with both have a massive advantage. Owning media also means you can test ideas for free with much lower stakes than working with a brand. As a result, agencies can shortcut virality by pitching an idea they've already proven has market fit. No more moonshots. Finally, media feeds the new business funnel, far more effectively than cold outreach or handshaking ever will. Content can be reverse engineered to land in the slacks of the brands you want to work with - and the execs picking agencies today are more aware of the new media landscape than they used to be. Here's a few of my favourite media studios around today:  ★ welcomejpeg: a moodboard page with a direct line to underground youth culture, who've put on sold out parties for artists/brands  ★ Danger Testing: "dropping apps like songs" - an app product studio that recently partnered with Ramp on a web app launch  ★ Gymnasium: a next-gen television studio with tens of millions of views on owned formats - behind Figma's "Source Material" ★ SAINT: a culture aggregator that recently partnered with eBay on a mini-series  ★ PATHETIC: yours truly, a meme page and creative studio working with tech's biggest brands on social shows, content, viral apps, campaigns and memes.

as tech discovers creative direction, it has revealed how masculine the industry is this ad is objectively good - but the concept is basically "what does an 8 year old boy think 'powerful' means" most tech brand building today ignores 50% of the population - anthropic realised this and ran campaigns positioning claude as a girly pop lifestyle accessory arguably this was done to soften AI's public image, but nonetheless it's a strong case study in scaling a tech brand beyond an 18-34 male audience – at Manchester, England

the best thing about building a creative studio is the amazing people I get to meet @btravisNYC is one of those! we've been working together to craft @sandbar's voice on social for the past few months we shared the feeling that most AI hardware marketing today conveys an alien, idealistic and sometimes deliberately dystopian version of life which is designed to reach early adopters and basically no one else for this shoot we captured brooke as she started her day like any other, getting the kids ready and preparing her to do list; unscripted we focused on how new form factors can help you push work forward and deal with daily life without pulling out a phone and interrupting your connection with a loved one. new tech that enhances connection is much more exciting than tech that replaces it. showcasing the former is the key to building AI products that people will love and get behind. stream does all of this whilst looking and feeling great to wear - a true pleasure to helo bring this brand to life

Software engineers spent the last 20 years getting rich from tech. Creatives are next. For most of those 20 years, the most valuable marketers in tech were technical. If you were great at programmatic, SEO, paid social and product-led growth you were in high demand: measurable tactics that rewarded people who understood data. The roles brands hired for reflected it: media buyers, performance marketers, demand gen managers and growth 'engineers'. Two things ended this era. First, paid marketing platforms now run on algorithms so good that the skills stopped being scarce. Ten years ago a great Facebook paid specialist could command one of the highest salaries at any brand or agency. Now ad buying is a commodity, most of those specialists have moved into other roles, and the only thing left that makes a measurable difference is the creative itself. Second, AI made products cheaper and faster to build. When anyone can ship your product, the moat moves from the product to the brand. Now tech brands are playing catch-up: hiring creative and brand people who can tell stories, build campaigns and create formats that capture attention. The demand appeared almost overnight. Marketing teams are expected to produce the cultural output of a major fashion or entertainment brand with a fraction of the headcount. Many brands think the solution is a Creative Director, ideally poached from a creative industry - they're quickly learning the role is at best vague and at worst dying. The day to day also varies wildly: an ad agency creative director ponders and makes decks, a fashion creative director is cutting fabric and casting. Neither maps onto a B2B software company. New roles and teams are appearing as tech reimagines what a creative marketer looks like. Creative producers Creative experimentation Forward deployed creatives people who sit with customers, understand their needs and build solutions with the product. These roles all seek a unicorn: a creative who also understands product marketing, the tech consumer, and the niche tactics and platforms that work in B2B and developer marketing. This demand has been building for 2-3 years but i've really felt it peak this summer. If you're one of those unicorns, know your worth! – at Hoboken, NJ

Ten years ago today I moved to NYC. My first 18 months were a haze of sublets, roommates and tuesday nights at up and down. It took every fiber of my being not to quit and move back home, but something told me to stick it out. Around year three something clicked and I realised I couldn't be anywhere else. So I decided to become insufferable and make this city my whole personality. It was the first place I was truly exposed to audacity. I'll never forget meeting the heir to Dolce & Gabbana at a pool party, who told me all about his philanthropy, his lavish lifestyle and his impending fortune. He turned out not to be the heir to Dolce & Gabbana. He was trying to steal my friend's credit card. That was the moment I realised I could be anyone I wanted, so I dyed my hair silver and started calling myself "catty." In all seriousness, building a life here is my biggest achievement and the thing that has shaped me most. As brits we learn to be modest, self-deprecating, and to quietly suppress our ambitions. This city dragged me out of myself and taught me to think bigger. It's also one of the few cities in the world where a made up company like PATHETIC.COM could exist. Here's to 10 more. ✌️ – at Manhattan, NY

We've spent the last couple of months working with the brilliant team at @sandbar, translating their brand, product and vision into content. There's never been a more exciting time to be building new hardware, and Sandbar have built something special with Stream. @minafahmi told us about his vision to shoot a demo inspired by Giedi Prime in Dune 2 - within 3 days we'd booked the crew, studio and steadicam, and devised a demo we could shoot in one sweeping take. We spent 4 hours rigging lights and 4 hours shooting a 1 minute technical demo. When something needs to be seen it's worth going all in. – at Manhattan, NY

it feels increasingly obvious we're entering the post apple era of hardware for the first time ever the iphone no longer feels like a luxury product. luxury used to be signalled by physical goods: the louis bag, the cartier bracelet, the iphone. luxury is now signalled by the way we spend our time: how much we're offline, how little we need to be informed, how much time we can afford to spend in the gym new hardware is reflecting this - innovating backwards to allow for more intentional use of technology it's cooler to not know what happened at the oscars than ever before. the iphone used to be a sleek sexy progressive tool for artists. now it feels like a fast food casino in you're pocket, sucking away time that could be spent becoming more interesting. I begrudgingly upgraded my iphone 14 recently after destroying the camera lens during a blurry night in puerto rico. I couldn't believe how ugly the new iphone 17's were. it was the first time buying a new phone felt like a necessary business expense, rather than something to be excited about. unboxing the new iphone used to feel like christmas morning, now I couldn't care less about what the iphone 23 max pro will look like (because I already know.) the most interesting innovation in hardware is either happening with new AI form factors or with dumb phones - either way reducing screen time is the end goal. the big winners here are the art directors. @nothing's brand identity is good enough to make me want to buy the product from their campaign shots alone. it's a long time since i've felt that way about hardware. more please.

platforms must kill fake UGC or die themselves. every generation of marketers finds a new way to cheat social platforms with undisclosed ads and algorithm hacks. I know because i've done it. at my first agency we acquired hundreds of the biggest twitter accounts, meme pages and viral content accounts with massive followings. we'd activate hundreds of accounts simultaneously and create what we called a 'thunderclap'. it would flood the timeline and manufacture the appearance of organic virality. twitter suspended all of them overnight. no warning and killed that entire section of the business. all our ads were disclosed, but ultimately twitter saw it as damaging to the platform - which on reflection I agree with. the same thing recently happened with infofi. a wave of tools and platforms that were paying people crypto to tweet about products. it turned a chunk of the timeline into a pay-per-post marketplace where nobody was disclosing that they were being compensated. X restricted API access and killed it fake UGC farms on reels and tiktok present a whole new problem. the thunderclap was detectable because it was coordinated, hundreds of accounts posting the same thing at the same time. infofi plugged into x's API, so x could just turn off the tap. AI-generated UGC doesn't have either of those vulnerabilities. there's no API to revoke. there's no coordination pattern to flag. it's individual accounts posting what looks like a real person talking to camera about a product they love. the AI is good enough now that you genuinely cannot tell the difference between a real creator and a synthetic one. one option is requiring content to be signed with cryptographic proof at the moment of creation, verified through the device camera, timestamped, tied to a real identity. i've seen a few people exploring this but nothing solid yet. we're bleeding towards a dead internet - pretty bleak but im curious to see how platforms attack this. – at Hoboken, NJ

what is the US's biggest cultural export right now? the super bowl confirmed a feeling i've had that the US is culturally drifting. growing up in the UK, it was the most culturally aspirational place on earth. we all consumed american music, movies, dumb college films, video games. when i moved to NYC in 2016 it was hip hop and hypebeast. kanye, drake, kendrick at the peak of their powers. i felt like i was at the center of the universe. (last october, for the first time in 35 years, there wasn't a single rap song in the billboard hot 100's top 40. nothing has replaced it.) and then last night's super (slop) bowl: - millennial ad slop. nostalgic celebrity punchlines, lazy writing, nothing memorable. - confusing AI ads wildly overestimating the public's awareness and understanding of them (crypto bowl all over again.) - a confusing game in the middle, completely inaccessible to anyone outside of NFL fans. bad bunny was the only real highlight - but even that came with exhausting, pre-loaded discourse. it feels like the US's main export right now is politics and tech. in art, the business models suck and inflation means no one can afford to suffer for their art anymore. wealth in this country has mostly flowed to swagless, morally ambiguous tech lords who spend their money on property and more tech. and everything else is politics - sports, music, film, the halftime show, all loaded with political diversion. maybe related: there's a trend on tiktok, "chinamaxxing" - americans adopting chinese cultural habits: hot water, tai chi, rice cookers, slippers indoors. looking (ironically) to china for lifestyle cues because brand US isn't offering enough. the argument against this is that great art is still being made, it's just harder to find. algorithms mean culture happens to us rather than we participate in it. the US is just v noisy, and the gold is getting buried. (caveat: i love the US and it's given me everything) – at Brooklyn, NY

this ad was tacky, camp and 10x more memorable than the millennial awesomesauce celebrity slop that everyone else produced real ones know