What does forward progress look like (when the world’s in retrograde)?
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I always hate when months pass between seeing people you’ve started to get close to. I wish I could properly express how much I miss prepping these and getting into a good rhythm as a Substack writer.
The best I can do is say something simple and true. I’ve missed building with you. To those hyping me up on Twitter over the last few months: it’s cool to be back. Make sure you tell ya friends.
Lemme quickly catch you all up on some of what you missed.
I helped organize a letter where over 600 professionals took the ad industry to task and gave a list of reasonable demands. And co-founded an advocacy group for Black talent in marketing.
It also helped launch Allyship & Action: a summit series that calls white leadership to make more anti-racist corporate structures. I moderated a panel with all-white leadership! (Brave af.) We have a great event called The State of Equity that’ll be live on YouTube next Thursday and Friday.
On the work end, Aerialist worked with marketing consulting cloud We Are Rosie to launch The Rosie Report: an editorial hub built ‘from the future of work.’ Think of it as The Players Tribune, but for and from independent consultants and freelancers.
I had the privilege of being Adweek’s first guest editor, leading a mini-hub of stories called “Black is the Future.” We decided to focus less on the DE&I problems ailing the ad world and focus on all the tangible solutions that already exist when Black talent is truly valued. Our issues are deemed essential to a business’s growth.
There are a few appearances on podcasts and panels. If worth your time, I’ll leave them all at the end of another issue. Again, for all those riding with me from that first issue to now, thanks for sticking around. Looking forward to being a regular part of your inbox in the future.
To be real with you, so much of that time felt like an endless backslide. Helping launch something that could help change an industry that made a home for me. Figuring out what it means to lead, truly, and effectively be a leader. Running my own company, even if I had to push that to the backseat. Then navigating and honoring my own personal growth, especially as a Black man: healing and growing and a whole bunch of shit that isn’t the main topic of this newsletter.
Summer was chaotic, and it took friends and family, self-care, and group bonding to get me through, and I’m thankful. But you know what has had the most surprising impact on my well-being and progress? Horoscopes.
Now more than ever, in unprecedented times, hearing what the stars have to say has become common practice. And it’s not just the Astro Poets pulling up every so often with memeable content and weekly outlooks by your zodiac sign.
Astrologers like Chani Nicholas (whose book You Were Born for This was my 2nd birthday gift to self), Dayna Lynn Nuckolls (bka The People’s Oracle), and others have pulled up the scene more frequently to give the Twitter TL the planetary low-down. Nadine Jane, a former designer, turned her Instagram into an aesthetically pleasing home to unpack your celestial makeup.
Nothing’s forced me to care more about whatever the hell trines and squares—how close planets align with each other— or the 5ish retrogrades (planetary transits that appear to move in reverse) do-si-doing throughout 2021 mean for my daily life and our daily discourse than this moment. Who’ll argue against Mercury retrograde when Twitter shut down for over an hour this weekend—and where would we go to argue? Probably not here.
Some can say it’s all confirmation bias, but people genuinely want to believe that the chaos leading to the end of this year (or, more pressing, Election Day) leads to something. And some people want to believe, putting the “Big Three” astrology apps Co-Star, The Pattern, and Sanctuary in prime position to profit from all our digital stargazing.
Co-Star, long known for terrorizing your phone notifications, now takes donations for deeper dives into your chart. Sanctuary pairs you with astrologers for a flat fee or monthly rate. And the Pattern just as early as last week put a paywall between you and the patterns about you worth digging deeper into. The appetite’s there, and when that happens, free becomes short for freemium.
It’s all interesting; at a younger point in my life, the work wife at my college job would pull up issues of Cosmo or Elle at the cash register to tell me (a Taurus) about our monthly outlook. Maybe it’s just me, but if men, especially us straight men, are buying into the discourse (and meditation and overall spirituality) online more, where is the buy-in from GQ or Esquire?
Maybe we don’t fuck around obsessing with make-believe. Absolutely not our shit at all.
Just throwing it out there, tons more women care about fantasy football than we give credit for. Maybe some magazine editor should tell men “astrology is much easier than you think,” the way the NFL tried to do for women years back. Or, maybe I’ll grow out of this growing trust of the universe’s plan for us. I digress.
Anyway: retrogrades. We’ve been dealt with so many blows this year: to our confidence, our livelihoods, our loved ones, our jobs. Somehow, there’s still things giving us reason to smile, an excuse to lift our spirits. As someone who’s had his spirit shaken so much and still worries about the world he’s walking into when this pandemic passes, there’s been so much to look at and take pride in.
And so have you. It may not feel like it sometimes, but your wins are just as important as all the loss. Those shouldn’t go unnoticed.
Brands making the mark:
Let’s go Somewhere Good. Ever since Naj Austin announced the launch of a community space centering people of color, I’d felt that new ground was being broken for Black, Brown, and indigenous creatives and entrepreneurs. So much congregating over the last decade was a digital feat, migrating from platform to platform. Few, if any, welcoming spaces existed IRL. A physical haven, Ethel’s Club was being built out in Brooklyn—we needed that.
Fast forward to less than a month ago, and Austin, who’s deftly gotten her staff through a pandemic that shuttered EC’s first location temporarily (their shop has since reopened), is now creating Somewhere Good: a community-centered ‘social playground’ for POC. The platform goes live in January, and I’ll be endlessly curious about how far she can go—and how the tech press will cover her growing presence in coworking, community, and disrupting how we think about the company we keep.
TikTok’s aiming for timeless territory. I’ve never downloaded the app, even though friend-vangelists have been screaming its praises. One almost doesn’t need to: you’ll always know when someone shares a clip from the video creation platform. the hovering watermarks and minute-long clips do enough heavy lifting.
TikTok’s seemingly dodged a few bullets from the Trump administration over the summer. In the process, it’s further embedded itself in the American consciousness. And not just for virality’s sake—credit Jalaiah Harmon, Sarah Cooper, Nathan Apodaca for getting us all through the year.
Content’s cool, but the extensive TikTok brand reach in the US is the true coup. It sponsored a Nascar Xfinity Series car in late September, days after its mammoth deal with Oracle. The substance of that deal still feels weird—this past weekend, The Verge reported Oracle’s Larry Ellison donated $250k to Senator Lindsey Graham’s campaign hours before the deal closed. But the style half of the announcement, a strategic partnership with Wal-Mart that will further empower TikTok creators—and take the storied retailer into a proper digital future it hadn’t quite cracked. Also: we’re getting some golden brand spots—way to flip the whole “don’t make ads, make TikToks” pitch to marketers on its head. Just make TikToks your ads.
Yes: Charli D’Amelio may be the next reality show star in the making. But the way TikTok has literally given anyone a chance to break the internet could make it the great normalizer. Its rewards are being reaped a minute at a time.
McDonald’s Hype-y Meals—I’m lovin’ ‘em. Consider me quirked when the Golden Arches announced its collaboration with Travis Scott, who’s found a way to switch up from rapper’s fave rapper to brand collaborator smooth like a Sicko Mode transition. We didn’t just get a meal in his likeness (with a Sprite on the side)—fans were treated to a whole custom drop of merch worth getting in line for—thank god for e-commerce in a pandemic; the lines would wrap a few blocks.
I was wrong to think they, and new-ish partner agency Wieden + Kennedy and others had a one-off stunt in mind. Soon a new mystery figure was in play, and I realized McDonald’s is fucking committing.
Revealing J. Balvin, the reggaeton star who’s ‘Mi Gente’ drew Beyoncé’s and mainstream pop’s attention, and reminding me how good a brand can be when it just takes a chance on the culture of the now (hypebeast drops and immersive collaborations) without fear of losing its universal appeal. It’s brilliant, reminds me fondly of the time Kith and Cap’n Crunch left me brokenhearted in my fave bit of young ad kid FOMO and needs to be the exception that makes new rules.
Content to keep an eye on:
Megan Thee Thought-Leader. Black women have been the pulse of the last 12 months. Regina King upper-echelon performance in Watchmen. Breonna Taylor’s growing legacy. The WNBA’s consistent pressure for social justice. Kamala’s historic nomination and immediate impact. For only better, music has been defined by the Houston rapper stealing the show on her own terms. I’m not the biggest rap purist, but this new era where Cardi B, Saweetie, Doja, and Megan all exist has opened up necessary conversations for a genre that’s long seen female rappers as the token to major rap cliques. Just look at what WAP has done, solely making us forget BDE was ever a thing.
It’s her NY Times opinion piece for me, though.
After a show-stopping performance to debut SNL’s 45th season that called out the Kentucky AG that has done everything but arrest the murderers of Taylor, a Louisville first responder, she penned a piece (with a visual to match her trademark ferocity) that firmly set her place in this world.
Indie stages take to the screens. Let’s all acknowledge the festival season that could’ve been. The live event space was fully primed for a 2020 even bigger than 2019 was. (Remember how 00s R&B fans were gonna get that Lovers and Friends fest in California?) But here we are.
For many indie concert venues, the straits have never been direr to navigate. This last week, NIVA, a collective of concert halls across the US, did what I think was pivotal for their own survival and future of live music: launching Save Our Stages, a three-day event bringing 35 perennial headliners to 25 venues across the country.
The star power spoke for itself—Foo Fighters, Brittany Howard (of Alabama Shakes fame), The Lumineers, Demi Lovato, among others—but the collective effort feels like a beacon for much bigger things down the line.
New York gets the subway map we need and deserve. Also filed among things I’ve missed: subway rides (I live with two high-risk parents in the Rockaways, where a long-enough commute is a norm). It’s been tough going these last few months not taking the ‘A’ train, but now I know when I get to my station, we’ll have a proper map to look at.
Who’d have thunk it? I’m into this project that Work + Co put together for this and the redesigned Curbed for getting that exclusive. Huge shame that it had to be pro-bono because to honor the best of two iconic maps in one interactive experience is something worth paying top dollar for.
Honorary mentions:
Broadway extends its shutdown through June 2021 (Playbill), the bitter paired with Tony Award sweetness: Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play and Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill musical grabbed record nominations. Theatre will be back, I promise. Good things take time.
Not a Substack, but already an awesome newsletter: The Filament, tackling DE&I issues in the tech space, went live last week. Been following Micah Singleton’s work in The Verge and other outlets, and great to see him take on something necessary for Silicon Valley, something the ad world could sorely use.
Do you know how new Spider-Man Miles Morales wears Jordans in the Oscar-winning film Into the Spider-Verse? That makes Jordans as superhero gear canon. Maybe not: for his PS5 debut, the bi-racial webcrawler is rocking with the Three Stripes. Polygon’s Patricia Hernandez gets a shout-out for writing the article true New Yorker comic nerds needed to read. Shout-out to you.
My favorite thing on the internet this week
The obvious answer to this should be Dwyane Wade, NBA’s favorite dad, enjoying a sunset, taking a long walk on the beach, and crashing Ryan Basch’s marriage proposal.
However, I’ll go with this new find: a new restaurant opening (in this pandemic—for a chipmunk. Is nature healing? Will that restaurant become a nationwide chain? I have no idea, but I needed a double-dose of wholesome, and maybe you do, too.
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Addendum, or a shortlist of podcasts and one article I appeared on these last few months.
Adweek had me guest-host an episode of its 200-episode-strong flagship pod, Yeah, That’s Probably an Ad, back in June. It was my third time on the podcast, but at that moment, with my 600 & Rising co-founder Nathan Young, it was maybe the most important. Cool shit.
My fellow City College alum Fran Kilinski had me as one of the first guests of his cool show, The Potentiation. Some talk about the industry's representation, much more talk about our shared love for baseball and basketball gossip.
The Overthinkers hosts Rachel Mercer and Shann Biglione brought me onto their show to talk about my favorite pain point: how the hell we can build a sustainable media ecosystem.
TBWA\ New York CEO Rob Schwartz brought me on to the legendary Disruptor Series podcast to peel back my industry trajectory that led to the here and now. It took us three-ish tries, but it was good to tell my story.
(The one article) The Girl Mob EIC, Yari Blanco, highlighted me for her platform’s “Men We Love” section for August. I love the mission of TGM, empowering women of color everywhere, and sweet to share a birthday with a low-key icon like her.
Lots to say, and maybe a little less next time. But it’s good to be back, finished, and back in your inboxes. Talk soon, and take care.