#and consuming something fully disregards any value it has as art and turns it into something to be viewed once

[neptunesenceladus]

help i’m having deep thoughts at 12am i should be asleep

[cowpokeomens]

Ayfuckingo, who’s stealing work👀👀👀 (Who thinks stealing someone’s hard ass work is fun? Wtf)

Yknow I thought abt deleting this ask and my post but I’m feeling feisty and fed up today, actually! This is not directly specifically at you anon 🫶 anyways read at your own risk lol

I’m not dropping names because I’m not a gossip blog, but I think the tendency of certain celebrated “authors” to dip into other people’s creative endeavors for their own work is gross and completely diminishes the whole point of fandoms. Like, this is supposed to be a community. Instead it’s turned into a competition that literally no one wants to be a part of where people say “oh yay, another _____ AU!” Instead of “wow, that’s awfully hyper specific and pretty flagrantly rips off of soemthing I’ve seen before?”

I think we, as members of fandom, have become soooooo wrapped up in the culture of needing to “consume content” that we disregard artistic integrity. We don’t care that the idea is stolen because we love the idea so much. I’m not talking about tropes (ie; enemies to lovers, grumpy!character x sunshine!character, fake dating) I’m talking about the actual creative thought that goes into making a fic. I understand loving someone’s creativity; I’m an artist, and I am constantly absorbing and thinking about art from other people. It’s inevitable that some ideas will trickle into your own work. But there comes a point where there is a clear difference between “inspired” and stolen.

I’m not trying to say this as some kind of writing authority - there are SO MANY talented and hardworking writers on this platform who make beautiful work leagues better than my stupid horny rambles. And like I said, I’m not naming names- the plagiarizers are fully aware of what they’re doing. But the way in which y’all treat fic is really disappointing sometimes. It’s not all about the next update, y’all. This is someone’s art. It’s not just a “good idea” in public domain for you to pluck and use in your own work as you please. It is someone’s art.

I just can’t help but feel like it circles back to a deeply ingrained need to devalue artists. If there was any respect for author’s and their work, this wouldn’t even need to be a conversation. Don’t fucking steal from people. Why do you value the work of an author so little that you feel it’s okay to take something they’ve worked incredibly hard on? Obviously you like it enough to try and pass it off as your own, so why steal at all? There’s a reblog button, you can add comments to let them know how much you love it. What are you gaining?

I’m coming from the position of an artist, not just a fic writer. This has nothing to do with my writing personally (as far as I’m aware, no one is trying to pass off my ideas as their own.) But as an artist, I cannot put into words how saddening and downright violating it is to have someone look at a thing you made, something you put your experiences and thoughts and emotions into, and think “it’s completely fine for me to take this idea and run with it.” That is insurmountably shitty.

Y’all are too damn smart to not notice. I think too highly of y’all as readers and creators to chalk it up to misunderstanding. You probably already had a fic in mind as you were reading this! I think we, as a community, really need to work on our intentionality and integrity with regards to art making. Stealing ideas is not conducive to making art or maintaining any semblance of community in fandom. Anyways this was long, I apologize for nothing, byeeeeeeeeee

[newstfionline]

How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All

By Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, April 18, 2017

As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild.

It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating between two quantum states. Amazon’s price for a one-ounce jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you looked. Nearly a year later, as Thanksgiving 2016 approached, the price again began whipsawing between two different points, this time $3.36 and $4.69.

We live in the age of the variable airfare, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird computer glitch? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. “It’s most likely a strategy to get more data and test the right price,” Guru Hariharan explained, after I had sketched the pattern on a whiteboard.

The right price--the one that will extract the most profit from consumers’ wallets--has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. It’s also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price--and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. (Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers’ spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)

It may come as a surprise that, in buying a seasonal pie ingredient, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping hath wrought. Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers--in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction--are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.

They have ample means to do so: the immense data trail you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart or swipe your rewards card at a store register, top economists and data scientists capable of turning this information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unparalleled in the history of economics.” In mid-March, Amazon alone had 59 listings for economists on its job site, and a website dedicated to recruiting them.

Not coincidentally, quaint pricing practices--an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices”--are yielding to far more exotic strategies.

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted how sophisticated these algorithms have become,” says Robert Dolan, a marketing professor at Harvard. “I certainly didn’t.” The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones Google recommends may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be, one study found. For shoppers, that means price--not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor--may become an increasingly unknowable thing. “Many moons ago, there used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the simplest of questions--what’s the true price of pumpkin-pie spice?--is subject to a Heisenberg level of uncertainty.

Which raises a bigger question: Could the internet, whose transparency was supposed to empower consumers, be doing the opposite?

If the marketplace was a war between buyers and sellers, the 19th-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote, then price was a truce. And the practice of setting a fixed price for a good or a service--which took hold in the 1860s--meant, in effect, a cessation of the perpetual state of hostility known as haggling.

As in any truce, each party surrendered something in this bargain. Buyers were forced to accept, or not accept, the one price imposed by the price tag (an invention credited to the retail pioneer John Wanamaker). What retailers ceded--the ability to exploit customers’ varying willingness to pay--was arguably greater, as the extra money some people would have paid could no longer be captured as profit. But they made the bargain anyway, for a combination of moral and practical reasons.

The Quakers--including a New York merchant named Rowland H. Macy--had never believed in setting different prices for different people. Wanamaker, a Presbyterian operating in Quaker Philadelphia, opened his Grand Depot under the principle of “One price to all; no favoritism.” Other merchants saw the practical benefits of Macy’s and Wanamaker’s prix fixe policies. As they staffed up their new department stores, it was expensive to train hundreds of clerks in the art of haggling. Fixed prices offered a measure of predictability to bookkeeping, sped up the sales process, and made possible the proliferation of printed retail ads highlighting a given price for a given good.

Companies like General Motors found an up-front way of recovering some of the lost profit. In the 1920s, GM aligned its various car brands into a finely graduated price hierarchy: “Chevrolet for the hoi polloi,” Fortune magazine put it, “Pontiac … for the poor but proud, Oldsmobile for the comfortable but discreet, Buick for the striving, Cadillac for the rich.” The policy--”a car for every purse and purpose,” GM called it--was a means of customer sorting, but the customers did the sorting themselves. It kept the truce.

Customers, meanwhile, could recover some of their lost agency by clipping coupons--their chance to get a deal denied to casual shoppers. The new supermarket chains of the 1940s made coupons a staple of American life. What the big grocers knew--and what behavioral economists would later prove in detail--is that while consumers liked the assurance the truce afforded (that they would not be fleeced), they also retained the instinct to best their neighbors. They loved deals so much that, to make sense of their behavior, economists were forced to distinguish between two types of value: acquisition value (the perceived worth of a new car to the buyer) and transaction value (the feeling that one lost or won the negotiation at the dealership).

The idea that there was a legitimate “list price,” and that consumers would occasionally be offered a discount on this price--these were the terms of the truce. And the truce remained largely intact up to the turn of the present century. The reigning retail superpower, Walmart, enforced “everyday low prices” that did not shift around.

But in the 1990s, the internet began to erode the terms of the long peace. Savvy consumers could visit a Best Buy to eyeball merchandise they intended to buy elsewhere for a cheaper price, an exercise that became known as “showrooming.” In 1999, a Seattle-based digital bookseller called Amazon.com started expanding into a Grand Depot of its own.

The era of internet retailing had arrived, and with it, the resumption of hostilities.

In retrospect, retailers were slow to mobilize. Even as other corporate functions--logistics, sales-force management--were being given the “moneyball” treatment in the early 2000s with powerful predictive software (and even as airlines had fully weaponized airfares), retail pricing remained more art than science. In part, this was a function of internal company hierarchy. Prices were traditionally the purview of the second-most-powerful figure in a retail organization: the head merchant, whose intuitive knack for knowing what to sell, and for how much, was the source of a deep-seated mythos that she was not keen to dispel.

Two developments, though, loosened the head merchant’s hold.

The first was the arrival of data. Thomas Nagle was teaching economics at the University of Chicago in the early 1980s when, he recalls, the university acquired the data from the grocery chain Jewel’s newly installed checkout scanners. “Everyone was thrilled,” says Nagle, now a senior adviser specializing in pricing at Deloitte. “We’d been relying on all these contrived surveys: ‘Given these options at these prices, what would you do?’ But the real world is not a controlled experiment.”

The Jewel data overturned a lot of what he’d been teaching. For instance, he’d professed that ending prices with .99 or .98, instead of just rounding up to the next dollar, did not boost sales. The practice was merely an artifact, the existing literature said, of an age when owners wanted to force cashiers to open the register to make change, in order to prevent them from pocketing the money from a sale. “It turned out,” Nagle recollects, “that ending prices in .99 wasn’t big for cars and other big-ticket items where you pay a lot of attention. But in the grocery store, the effect was huge!”

The effect, now known as “left-digit bias,” had not shown up in lab experiments, because participants, presented with a limited number of decisions, were able to approach every hypothetical purchase like a math problem. But of course in real life, Nagle admits, “if you did that, it would take you all day to go to the grocery store.” Disregarding the digits to the right side of the decimal point lets you get home and make dinner.

By the early 2000s, the amount of data collected on retailers’ internet servers had become so massive that it started exerting a gravitational pull. That’s what triggered the second development: the arrival, en masse, of the practitioners of the dismal science.

This was, in some ways, a curious stampede. For decades, academic economists had generally been as indifferent to corporations as corporations were to them. (Indeed, most of their models barely acknowledged the existence of corporations at all.)

But that began to change in 2001, when the Berkeley economist Hal Varian--highly regarded for the 1999 book Information Rules--ran into Eric Schmidt. Varian knew him but, he says, was unaware that Schmidt had become the CEO of a little company called Google. Varian agreed to spend a sabbatical year at Google, figuring he’d write a book about the start-up experience.

At the time, the few serious economists who worked in industry focused on macroeconomic issues like, say, how demand for consumer durables might change in the next year. Varian, however, was immediately invited to look at a Google project that (he recalls Schmidt telling him) “might make us a little money”: the auction system that became Google AdWords. Varian never left.

Others followed. “eBay was Disneyland,” says Steve Tadelis, a Berkeley economist who went to work there for a time in 2011 and is currently on leave at Amazon. “You know, pricing, people, behavior, reputation”--the things that have always set economists aglow--plus the chance “to experiment at a scale that’s unparalleled.”

At first, the newcomers were mostly mining existing data for insights. At eBay, for instance, Tadelis used a log of buyer clicks to estimate how much money one hour of bargain-hunting saved shoppers. (Roughly $15 was the answer.)

Then economists realized that they could go a step further and design experiments that produced data. Carefully controlled experiments not only attempted to divine the shape of a demand curve--which shows just how much of a product people will buy as you keep raising the price, allowing retailers to find the optimal, profit-maximizing figure. They tried to map how the curve changed hour to hour. (Online purchases peak during weekday office hours, so retailers are commonly advised to raise prices in the morning and lower them in the early evening.)

By the mid-2000s, some economists began wondering whether Big Data could discern every individual’s own personal demand curve--thereby turning the classroom hypothetical of “perfect price discrimination” (a price that’s calibrated precisely to the maximum that you will pay) into an actual possibility.

As this new world began to take shape, the initial consumer experience of online shopping--so simple! and such deals!--was losing some of its sheen.

It’s not that consumers hadn’t benefited from the lower prices available online. They had. But some of the deals weren’t nearly as good as they seemed to be. And for some people, glee began to give way to a vague suspicion that maybe they were getting ripped off. In 2007, a California man named Marc Ecenbarger thought he had scored when he found a patio set--list price $999--selling on Overstock.com for $449.99. He bought two, unpacked them, then discovered--courtesy of a price tag left on the packaging--that Walmart’s normal price for the set was $247. His fury was profound. He complained to Overstock, which offered to refund him the cost of the furniture.

But his experience was later used as evidence in a case brought by consumer-protection attorneys against Overstock for false advertising, along with internal emails in which an Overstock employee claimed it was commonly known that list prices were “egregiously overstated.”

In 2014, a California judge ordered Overstock to pay $6.8 million in civil penalties. (Overstock has appealed the decision.) The past year has seen a wave of similar lawsuits over phony list prices, reports Bonnie Patten, the executive director of TruthinAdvertising.org. In 2016, Amazon began to drop most mentions of “list price,” and in some cases added a new reference point: its own past price.

This could be seen as the final stage of decay of the old one-price system. What’s replacing it is something that most closely resembles high-frequency trading on Wall Street. Prices are never “set” to begin with in this new world. They can fluctuate hour to hour and even minute to minute--a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has put something in his Amazon cart and been alerted to price changes while it sat there. A website called camelcamelcamel.com even tracks Amazon prices for specific products and alerts consumers when a price drops below a preset threshold. The price history for any given item--Classic Twister, for example--looks almost exactly like a stock chart. And as with financial markets, flash glitches happen. In 2011, Peter A. Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly (paperback edition) was briefly available on Amazon for $23,698,655.93, thanks to an algorithmic price war between two third-party sellers that had run amok.

[lucyariablog]

The ABCs of Connecting With Generation Z

It’s time to put away your avocado toast jokes and shore up your social consciousness, folks. Generation Z consumers have arrived, and they are forcing companies to rethink the terms of marketing relationships.

Born between 1995 and 2012 (though the precise years vary depending on the source), the post-millennial generation has begun to cross the threshold of adulthood and is poised to take over the workforce and the marketplace in the next few years. We’ve all heard the stories about how challenging it will be to forge strong bonds with this distracted and discerning demographic; industry pundits cite perceived short attention spans, disinterest in brand messaging, and general disregard for impersonal experiences as compelling reasons for marketers to regroup and refine their content strategies.

But how many of these broad characterizations are accurate – and which of this generation’s confirmed traits should content marketers focus on in their outreach efforts? Let’s take a look.

It’s their party (and they’ll buy if they want to)

Here’s what the generational research and anecdotal observations are telling us: Born with one foot firmly in the digital age and the other rooted in old-school values, members of this pivotal demographic group expect greater transparency, accountability, and personal validation from every online experience they choose to engage in.

Gen Z expects greater transparency & personal validation from every online experience, says @joderama. Click To Tweet

Why? Well, it should come as no surprise that a demographic colloquially called the “iGeneration” expects to see their personal needs and interests reflected in the experiences marketers create to engage them.

Further, if their high usage of social networks like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch are any indication, social status and community mean a lot to them; they are more likely to seek content opportunities endorsed by their idols and influential peers (or which enable some form of collaboration with them). Need proof? Just 24 hours after Taylor Swift urged her 112 million-strong Instagram fan base to vote for Democrats in the mid-term elections, nonpartisan voter advocacy group Vote.org registered a whopping 65,000 new voters. Now that’s the power of persuasion.

Of course, the right branded content can still make it onto their radar; any extra effort it may take to produce and position such experiences is worth it, considering how much economic power this audience segment wields in the marketplace. According to Barkley’s Gen Z Insights Center, Gen Z already has up to $143 billion in direct buying power with the potential to impact more than $665 billion in family spending. Furthermore, this group is projected to make up 40% of consumers by 2020.

Gen Z is projected to make up to 40% of consumers by 2020 via @barkleyus. Click To Tweet

What will make a content experience more likely to click with these smart, savvy, and socially responsible digital natives? Read on for some helpful perspectives and ideas.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Content Distribution Essentials That Win Eyeballs

What to expect when you’re connecting

In his recent Content Marketing World presentation on the subject of Generation Z, FutureCast President Jeff Fromm characterized this demographic group as “old souls in young bodies.” While they are digital, social, and mobile to the core, he says, their values are more strongly aligned with their baby boomer counterparts than those of the generation that came directly before them (millennials).

For example, though they don’t remember a time when all the world’s information wasn’t available to them in exchange for a little personal information, they have seen firsthand what can happen when you disclose private data without a thorough understanding of how that data might be used – or misused (Cambridge Analytica and the Equifax data breach are two examples that come to mind). As a result, they may be more reluctant to swap personal details for access to brand content unless your brand provides full transparency on what they are signing up for and what the risks and benefits are.

A 2017 Salesforce report, Trends in Customer Trust, supports this assumption, finding that among millennials and Gen Z 91% are more likely to trust companies with their personal information if they receive a clear explanation on how its use will deliver a better experience.

Consider: Marketers should cultivate a reputation of reliability they can trade on before expecting Gen Z to engage with and take action on content – a goal that Robert Rose has succinctly summarized: “You must win every moment of trust to win the moment of truth.”

You must win every moment of trust to win the moment of truth, says @Robert_Rose. Click To Tweet

Trust exists on a time clock

In his CMWorld presentation, however, Jeff, the man who wrote the book on marketing to Gen Z (literally) reminded marketers that any initial trust earned with this audience may be fickle and fleeting. Calling it “the trust trap,” he contends that brands can’t give lip service to the concept of trust; they need to build it over time, demonstrate their worthiness of it in tangible ways, and continually reinforce its worth to make a lasting impact on Gen Z’s perceptions and purchase behaviors.

One Gen Z favorite mastering the art of sustaining a value proposition is Ben and Jerry’s. Take its YouTube channel, for example. Among its videos that introduce new ice cream flavors, dairy-free products, and special recipes, entire playlists are devoted to raising awareness of important issues like marriage equality, climate justice, and getting a second chance in life – all of which feed fans’ love of ice cream while speaking to the credo that Ben and Jerry’s is a brand that’s “made of something more.”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: If Your Content Doesn’t Have This, the Majority Won’t Trust It [Research]

Let’s get “phygital”

Despite being raised in an environment of unprecedented digital connectivity, Generation Z is no stranger to feeling alone in the world. In fact, according to a 2018 research report conducted by Cigna, it may be the loneliest of all generations, with more than 50% reportedly experiencing feelings of social isolation.

But while their millennial brethren turn to online social networking to fulfill their need for human interaction, those in Gen Z may be more interested in filling that void with a new content construct: unique and differentiated experiences that bridge their physical and digital worlds.

Taking a “phygital” approach to customer engagement might just be the answer to marketers’ prayers when it comes to creating meaningful, content-driven experiences craved by Gen Z audiences. For example, Marketing Week recently offered a glimpse of how retailers like Caspar and Nike are delivering on shoppers’ heightened expectations for customized service by launching pop-up stores and augmented reality features that merge the benefits of their online and offline shopping environments.

Read: Marketing Lifehacks for Engaging Generation Z

Consider: According to cultural mythologist John Bucher, those in Gen Z likely gravitate toward these blended experiences because they allow them to experience something that’s hard to come by in their world: a chance to live in the “now.”

In his presentation on immersive storytelling at Content Marketing World, John asserted that the pressures of today’s tech-driven, always-on lifestyles have disrupted the natural sense of time and place. Because people have become conditioned to constantly monitor multiple sources of informational input at once, they are losing the ability to fully experience or process any one of them in isolation, or, in Bucher’s words: “We don’t hold space for the full realm of human emotion anymore.”

However, by creating immersive, multisensory, and mixed-reality content experiences – such as VR-powered video games, pop-up museums, escape rooms, and micro-theme parks – brands can counteract this detachment by removing external distractions while consumers are participating: “You put on a VR headset and you have no choice but to be fully present in the moment.”

Brands counteract detachment by creating immersive, multisensory content experiences, says @joderama. Click To Tweet

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How Brands Use Pop-Up Experiences to Make a Lasting Impression

How Content Can Ring Up a Better Retail Experience

So shines a good deed in a weary world

Beyond data transparency, message consistency, and experience tactility, another quality Gen Z values in brand affinity decisions is a commitment to social causes like environmental protection, equal rights, and philanthropy. According to the aforementioned Trends in Trust data, 54% of consumers say demonstrated social responsibility strengthens their trust in a company.

Yet, according to Jeff, contributing to meaningful causes may earn Gen Z’s respect, but it may not be enough to earn their long-term business. As he sees it, the purpose space is so crowded that brands need to take their commitment to social responsibility to the next level – a concept he refers to as “purpose plus.”

Brands need to take social responsibility to next level – purpose plus – to attract Gen Z, says @JeffFromm. Click To Tweet

Consider: Naturally, content is an excellent technique for discussing important social issues that align with your brand’s core values. And its potential impact can increase exponentially when your business is willing to take a strong stance in support of those issues.

Nike’s Just Do It campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick is a perfect example of this practice in action (Patagonia’s Bears Ears documentary is another). The brand risked alienating its more socially conservative customers, but the decision to align its content with its core values seems to have paid off (at least, so far): According to MarketWatch, after a brief initial dip, Nike’s online sales skyrocketed, and the company’s stock valuation experienced a surge, as well.

Read: 3 Purpose-Driven Marketing Lessons From Innovative Brands

Clear the path to personal growth

Even if they aren’t completely accurate, some of the commonly held stereotypes about Gen Z’s engagement preferences may be rooted in reality (affinity for avocado, notwithstanding). And though a recent Forbes article cautions against generational reductionism (i.e., subscribing to broad behavioral stereotypes that are based on decontextualized data points) on the whole, it also offers some insights that may help marketers craft the authentic, personally resonant content experiences Gen Z seems to crave.

One interesting point the article raises is, “Generation Z has come of age in the shadow of millennials who prize hyper-competence (or at least the appearance of it), which … has manifested in a strong desire to learn.” The article goes on to explain that, more than the preceding generation, this group seeks opportunities to add or sharpen their skills.

Members of Gen Z seek opportunities to add or sharpen their skills via @Forbes. @joderama Click To Tweet

With this in mind, marketers may want to emphasize educational content – like product demos, online training courses, or process tutorials – that rewards their curiosity and helps them level up their competency in a relevant area of interest.

For example, through its Today at Apple program, the ubiquitous tech brand offers in-depth technical training sessions at its 495 retail stores. While these 30- to 90-minute classes are primarily focused on Mac-centric topics – like how to edit video using Apple’s proprietary tool sets – the skills participants learn can be applied to their broader life goals – like furthering a career in design or programming or impressing their friends with pro-quality videos on social media.

Read: Education as a Marketing Strategy: 8 Brands Doing Online Classes and More

Content conclusion

One thing about Gen Z – or any other generation – is that the best way to learn who they are and what content experiences they want brands to provide is to spend some time engaging with them on a personal level. Deploying an audience survey through email; sparking a community discussion on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter; organizing a focus group; or even just asking Gen Z coworkers for their ideas and opinions are a few ways you can gain valuable, real-world insights to inform your content efforts.

Before you think about adding your brand’s voice to the constant stream of conversations already whizzing across their screens, make sure you put in the time to listen to what Gen Z consumers have to say for themselves.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/10/connecting-generation-z/