Grab Bag
AI and Brand Safety, Shoppable Videos, Coffee Mugs on the Oregon Coast, and more! (Issue #172)
It's a collection of smaller topics this week, although there is a substantial piece elsewhere that I'll discuss. (This will make sense in a minute.) Before we get to today's basket of goodies and things worth your attention…
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Moving on...
Me and Louis talking AI, Agents, and Brand Safety
I've known Louis Jones for a dozen years, ever since he kindly agreed to an interview about the state of the American advertising agency that was part of a client project. At the time, Louis was the CEO of Maxus, a GroupM agency. Today, neither the Maxus nameplate nor the GroupM holdco designation are current, probably because who can follow Louis? Louis also chairs the Board of Advisors for Purpose Worldwide, and I'm one of the advisors.
To my great joy, Louis is a reader of The Dispatch. He reached out to invite me to do an interview for the Brand Safety Institute (BSI) about AI in general and how it might impact Brand Safety in particular.
You don't need read the issues that provoked Louis to reach out. However, if you're curious, this was my back-to-back Dispatches about Agentic AI: first, the microfiction "Piercing the AI Wall, a Microfiction" (March 9, 2025), and then the exploration "Agentic AI Will Change Everything" (March 16, 2025).
For those of you wondering "what the heck is Brand Safety?"
It's a concern that advertisers have about the environments where their ads run and who sees those ads. You can get a sense of the spectrum of safety by looking at BSI's Brand Safety Floor + Suitability Framework.
This is an age where most advertisements reach human eyes "programmatically"—which means that where an ad goes is no longer something that humans decide in more than a vestigial sense. Instead, an algorithm or many algorithms decide that Person X on Device Y should see Ad Z because of the data that the different algorithms have about Person X. From the advertiser POV, making sure that your ad doesn't monetize illegal acts or appear next to things that your organization doesn't support is complicated and difficult, hence BSI.
AI is going to make branding harder. This is part of what I wrote about in "Agentic AI Will Change Everything":
For low-consideration purchases in particular, Agentic AI will shorten by a lot the half-life of brand equity (that is, how much awareness we have of a particular product). If my only criteria for laundry detergent is that it comes in powder and is unscented, then I don’t care whether it comes in an orange box, which might be bad for Procter and Gamble, the makers of Tide.
AI will also make Brand Safety harder, which is part of what Louis and I kicked around in that interview.
I hope you'll watch it!
This Economist ($) piece is worthwhile: Can men and women be just friends? The answer, of course, is "yes... depending on the culture in which a man and a woman live." The details are interesting.
Creeps and Assholes: I don't know if he coined the distinction, but—in his classic routine Only the Truth Is Funny—comedian Rick Reynolds was the first person in my experience to talk about how some people are creeps (the folks who go "ewww" or "gross!" at a mean joke) and others are assholes (the folks who laugh uproariously at the same mean joke).
Astrologically speaking, I am an asshole with creep rising because I laughed out loud at this Instagram reel, but then I felt bad about myself for laughing.
In the Washington Post ($), Dana Milbank
…Has a long and interesting Op-Ed about the president's desire for—and decreasing odds of getting—a Nobel Peace Prize. It's worth digging in on this and reading to the end because Milbank shares intriguing numbers about 16 vulnerable GOP House members who are resisting cuts to Medicaid (and wrote a letter to the president about it) because of the negative impact it will have on their districts and reelection hopes:
For example, in the California district of Rep. David Valadao, who organized the letter, 56,940 constituents would lose Medicaid. In the district of Rob Bresnahan (Pennsylvania), 20,499 would lose Medicaid. In the district of Young Kim (California), 15,315. In the district of Mike Lawler (New York), 29,716. In the district of Juan Ciscomani (Arizona), 16,925. In the district of Jen Kiggans (Virginia), 11,911. In the district of Rob Wittman (Virginia), 11,467. In the district of Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa), 13,096. In the district of Don Bacon (Nebraska), 9,236. In the district of Zach Nunn (Iowa), 15,293.
My take: A quick Perplexity check of Don Bacon's 5,829 vote margin of victory in last November's election shows that these are non-trivial, election-swinging numbers. I chose Bacon at random. A similar Perplexity check of David Valdao's 3,132 vote margin of victory, as well as Mariannette Miller-Meeks's 799 vote margin of victory show that in these cases the number of folks losing Medicaid dwarfs the margin of victory for each GOP House Member.
The Republicans have a slender seven seat majority in the House: if Medicaid-dependent voters make the connection between their representatives' actions and their loss of benefits, then that majority is unlikely to survive the mid-terms.
Shopping and Buying Converge
It's not a new idea (Pizza Hut made it possible for Xbox gamers to order a pizza from within EverQuest II as far back as 2005), but Disney is investing in shoppable video in a big way.
This piece from Variety, "Disney Plans Virtual ‘Concession Stand,’ ‘Storefronts’ for Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Streamers," has the story:
Disney hopes to meld streaming and selecting by adding new virtual “storefronts” to its popular broadband venues that will allow viewers to order snacks or pick out products they’ve seen in their favorite shows, all while continuing to keep their binge on. Subscribers will be able to access them by clicking through when prompted by specific interactive ads. The company is the latest to experiment with ways to harness the interactive nature of streaming, which allows viewers to control their experience with a few clicks of their remote.
My two takes:
#1. Shoppable video experiences from any company will live or die on backend logistics and immense clarity on who wants what to be sent where and how soon—these are solvable problems, but the first time somebody orders a grilled cheese with a hamburger patty from Five Guys to be delivered and it comes without the patty (I'm looking at you, GrubHub), it's game over for that customer.
#2. I'm skeptical about how many viewers will connect shopping with lean-back entertainment environments like television. Smartphone-based shopping is different: I've made a dejecting number of impulse purchases on Instagram, for example, perhaps because the phone is already inside my personal space bubble when I see ads there, and also because the algorithm knows me well. If the technology allowed viewers "to control their experience with a few" taps on their smartphones instead of the TV remote controls, then I'd have more confidence.
Finally...
Coffee Mugs on the Coast...
Last week, La Profesora and I celebrated our 30th anniversary by spending a few days at the Oregon Coast in the delightful, somewhat somnolent, town of Manzanita. It would be misleading of me to use the word "beach" to describe the Oregon Coast, as beach might cause readers to infer sunny sands, girls in bikinis, and guys in trunks, dashing in and out of warm ocean water.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in late June, the Oregon Coast is more parkas and wetsuits territory—think Wuthering Heights instead of Beach Blanket Bingo—but it's gorgeous.
At a local coffee shop, we saw mugs eerily similar to my favorite mugs, and in an innovation the shop also sold lids to keep the coffee hot. I bought a mug and two lids on the idea that the lids looked like they might fit my old mugs... and realized upon returning home that the new mug and lids were by Mara Stoneware: the same company that made the two mugs I had purchased on different trips to Skamania Lodge in Washington and the one I stumbled across and immediately purchased at an obscure coffee shop next to Times Square in NYC.
Here is the mug that I use every Sunday as I write The Dispatch, unless I'm traveling, along with the exciting new lid:
I was going to write about how making an analog mug purchase was different and more satisfying than ordering that same mug online because of the physical context, but then, as I started roughing out my notes, I had nagging thoughts—this sounds familiar... did I read something like this? Wait, did I write about this already?
Turns out, the answer is yes. In Analog Lives in a Digital World almost exactly three years ago, I wrote about a different mug purchase and how "what makes things special, memorable, satisfying often has less to do with the things themselves than with the context where we experience them."
It seems that I am consistent both in my taste for Dispatch topics and enthusiasm for coffee mugs. Who knew?
Here's a photo of me and La Profesora at Manzanita:
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.
He is fantastic.