Culture vs. Violence, AI Authors & VR Fails
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #131 ❤️
We really had to fight to not do a full Twitter episode this week because Musk is truly going wild over there, but we’ve managed cherry picked only a couple highlights from the plethora of madness he’s treated us to this week over at Twitter HQ, namely our predictions coming true and his attempt to completely transform a company culture through sheer violence.
What’s more, we touch on the cuts across the tech world, AI trying to steal my job, and the best review of the Meta Quest Pro.
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Fake Twitter Ads – We Called It
Not to say we told you so, but last week we literally told you so.
Twitter apparently suspended their paid blue tick verification labels last week as many users started making fake and parody accounts after subscribing.
The one that got the most attention was a tweet from someone pretending to be the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly saying “Insulin is free now”
McDonald's, Nintendo, and defense company Lockheed Martin were also among the companies who were impersonated by fake verified accounts, with the fake Lockheed Martin tweeting that they would be suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia until human rights breaches were investigated.
While the political activism nature of these tweets is pretty interesting, some of them are as juvenile as you would expect (check out the twitter handle of the blue check verified BP account that tweeted about killing the planet for a nice mix of the two).
The fallout from this in the immediate future is that advertising giant GroupM has dubbed Twitter “high-risk” for ads since the Musk takeover, and is warning clients against buying promotions on the site.
They happen to be the world leaders in buying ads for media, working with a range of big companies including Google, Coca-Cola, and Unilever and are the third such corporation to suggest clients spend their ad budget elsewhere...
#2 - Musk Doubles Down on Boss Behaviour
Speaking of ad issues, according to Musk firing everyone in a pretty terrible way was NOT his fault, he had to do it because of the mean activist groups putting pressure on advertisers and causing a “massive drop in revenue”. As usual, Musk against the world, right?
However, while his “Musk vs. the World” ideology may help him run things at Tesla and Starlink, he may need to be careful bringing that attitude over to Twitter.
This week he gave employees until Thursday to click a button agreeing to work “hardcore” – i.e. “long hours at high intensity” or pack their bags, in addition to scrapping remote work which was promised to them indefinitely in 2020. My way or the highway.
While we’ve long documented his attitude to work as a boss, take a second to imagine he isn’t Elon Musk – how would you take it if your boss fired a load of people and then demanded you work long hours at high intensity for the future of the company?
As explained in the video linked below from The Verge, employees at Tesla and SpaceX believe in a higher purpose and trust that Musk is the only one who can deliver this purpose as a leader. They were hired knowing what the company culture was and subscribing to the company values - they genuinely believe in the mission of these companies and are willing to put up with grinding conditions to be a part of it.
However, while Musk seems to want to change Twitter from just another social network to the embodiment of radical democracy, putting it up there ideologically with the goals of Tesla and Starlink in terms of higher purpose, the current employees may not agree with this vision of things.
What Musk is doing right now is imposing a completely different and new set of values and purpose to global employees that were hired on the basis of something else, and asking for their complete devotion… after showing them that they are expendable.
#3 - Amazon (And Everyone Else) Join The Party
Apparently Amazon layoffs are also on the horizon, as slowing sales mean they’re planning to cut 3% of office staff, around 10,000 people.
Like “Meta”, Amazon have admitted to over hiring during the pandemic, and unfortunately for them as we’ve been allowed to leave our houses, sales have apparently dropped. Shocking.
They’re now joining their Facebook pals, along with WhatsApp, who will be cutting a whopping 13% of their overall workforce this year.
Overall, this means US-based tech companies are on track to drop 28,000 jobs this year, doubling last year.
Google, the holy grail of tech pay, is also under pressure from major investor, billionaire Christopher Hohn to make “aggressive” cuts to staff and pay. Writing to Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, saying that they have too many staff, and they’re paid too much. Watch out everyone….
#4 - Will AI Be Writing This Newsletter Soon?
The note-taking app Notion has begun testing on a new feature called Notion AI, which can write your content for you.
The CEO, Ivan Zhao, claims that this new feature has the power to change the way people do their jobs. All you have to do is tell the app what you want, for example a blog post on a certain topic, a recruitment email, a meeting agenda, or even an ad.
There is now an alpha version of the app available to test, and one of the writers at The Verge was the first person to test it out. They published the results and to be honest they are scarily good.
While the ad it was asked to write was directionally correct but factually wrong in some places, the advertising email advertising The Verge website was pretty spot on.
Zhao is convinced that now is the moment that generative AI goes from “a nifty science project to a useful consumer tool”. He says the underlying tech is ready, and that next year is THE year.
When it comes to AI we’ve been hearing that a lot, watch this space… again….
#5 - Meta Quest Pro Review – It’s A Flop….
We imagine Mark Zuckerberg is currently throwing darts at a picture of the guy that wrote the review of the new Meta Quest Pro that gave us the scathing phrase “Meta’s $1,499 headset is better at showcasing VR’s weaknesses than its new strengths”. Yeah, ouch.
As we have bemoaned many a time in this newsletter, Z man is betting the entire future of his company on the metaverse, from his rebrand to Meta to the 10 billion dollars spent on its AR and VR development group, Reality Labs, despite pressure to reduce it and focus on the core ad business of Facebook.
So there’s a lot riding on this new headset to be good, which apparently, it is not.
Described as a product “seemingly launched without plan or purpose” that highlights the weaknesses of VR and to top it off suffers from “irredeemably bad software”, the review notes that if this is the roadmap for where Meta is going, it’s not a fun place to be, and if they continue along this road, the metaverse is dead in the water…
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Brewdog are in hot beer water after launching a literal ad campaign on how against the Qatar World Cup they are, only to be snapped selling their beer in Qatar and planning to show the matches in their bars.
While their response that just because FIFA are corrupt doesn’t mean fans should have to miss out on good beer and watching football isn’t a terrible one, should they have stuck to their guns 100% and gone total boycott?
To find out more on how we can help you ensure your company culture doesn't take the same hit that Twitter’s has, or how we can help you with digital solutions to your business challenges, check out our case studies.