Lunar New Year, Tech AA & Life Coaches
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #190 ❤️
This week we’ll be talking Facebook’s stock market win, how not to celebrate Lunar New Year in marketing, and AA for tech addiction.
Plus, (spoiler alert) is Big Tech no longer the pinnacle of the job world (nope) and is social media helping life coaches scam vulnerable people (yes).
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Happy Lunar New Year… Or Not
Lunar New Year 2024 fell this past weekend, and while global brands are trying to get in on the spending surge from east and south-east Asian consumers, their attempts to hit the mark have sometimes ended in a miss.
It’s not enough to simply use red or portray a large family gathering – to get their advertising right companies need to understand the meaning of the holiday and how it’s culturally celebrated.
To add to the complexity of the challenge, Lunar New Year is celebrated across different countries and cultures in a different way – it isn’t only a Chinese holiday, it’s also celebrated in Indonesia, Singapore, and the Korean Peninsula, along with others.
Apple’s 2024 Lunar New Year campaign has been met with positive reviews, with their short film “Little Garlic”, filmed entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which has been described as a heartwarming experience that understands the theme of the celebration, literally speaking their consumers language by releasing the film in Chinese.
In contrast, ads over the years from luxury brands haven’t gone down so well.
Burberry were met with blacklash after their ad featuring a stoic Chinese family came across as “creepy”, not fitting the holiday vibe at all, and Dolce & Gabbana’s 2019 Lunar New Year ad featuring a Chinese model struggling to eat pasta with chopsticks has left lasting damage to their brand in Asian markets for obvious reasons…
Tokenism isn’t going to cut it for Lunar New Year marketing, so dear all brands, please at least show your ads to someone in your target audience before putting them out there…
#2 – Facebook Wins Big
It’s a very happy birthday for Facebook.
On the 20th anniversary of the site’s creation, their stocks rose 20%, which happens to be the most market value any US company has ever gained in a single day, according to Bloomberg. Their Q4 earnings report showed a triple in profits compared to the previous year, and the fastest rate of revenue growth since 2021.
Not bad, considering that this time two years ago Meta were in a completely different situation, recording the largest single day crash in stock market history, wiping out 250 billion dollars in value, not to mention Mark was scaring shareholders by burning money on his Metaverse dream.
Zuck is the one laughing today, however – as the owner of 350 million Meta shares, he added over twenty eight billion dollars to his net worth yesterday, standing to also gain 700 million dollars a year from the dividend. That’s going to pay for a lot of hoodies, real and virtual ones.
Why the big win? For one thing, 2023’s “year of efficiency” – spent reducing expenses by consolidating offices and laying off 22% of workers – while not very popular, seems to have paid off.
Add to that the “comeback” they’ve brought to the online ad industry and their GPT-4 competitor LLaMa which is catching the eye of investors, and Zuckerberg will have plenty of fun money to spend on his Metaverse dreams this year.
#3 - Is Big Tech Losing It’s Glamour?
Speaking of Facebook…
Once the pinnacle of gainful employment, working in big tech may now be more synonymous with layoffs and drama than with green smoothies and that slide in Google HQ.
Up until recently a role in tech among one of the big players like Meta, Alphabet or Amazon was pretty much at the top of the list of most desirable jobs. They offered competitive salaries and lavish perks along with the prospect of being at the forefront of innovation and working in a modern, beanbags-and-table-football type of culture.
Since summer 2022 however, the sector has been full of cuts, layoffs and uncertainty, not to mention drama, from the Twitter-to-X disaster led by Elon Musk to the AI hype that has been driving us up the wall since the beginning of last year.
On the culture side, many tech roles have been cracking down on remote work, from the aforementioned Elon Musk at X to Zoom and Grindr, signalling that the party may be over. And when it comes to salary, a high wage isn’t necessarily much good to you in a sector that was responsible for 23,670 layoffs in the last year alone…
Indeed’s Best Jobs of 2024, measured by salary, flexibility and growth, only featured three tech roles in their top twenty-five, compared to eleven last year.
The nail in the coffin, one ex-tech worker who said they loved their pre-Covid role as a “pampered” employee at a Big Tech campus in New York has left the tech world for… Big Finance, of all places. The end is near.
#4 - The 12 Step Programme Comes To The Tech World
Introducing ITAA, Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, a recovery programme based on the 12-step model used by Alcoholics Anonymous.
Well, we say introducing, it’s been around since 2017, but it’s the first we’ve heard of it, as more and more people are seeking help for internet addiction.
The ITAA deals with types of digital addiction including social media, video streaming, dating sites, pornography, gaming and even online research and online news addictions – alternatively known as “doom scrolling”, something we’ve probably all been suffering from in the past few years…
The BBC interviewed three members, all young women, who shared how their internet addiction impacted their lives.
One of the girls describes becoming addicted to streaming services when she went to university, bingeing all day and night over eating and sleeping, while another described the internet as her “drug of choice” as the stress of starting a new job led her to longer and longer sessions of watching video content, and eventually to losing her job.
While all three members had looked for help during their struggles, their GPs, mental health services and internet research on addiction did little to help them. One of the members described turning up to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and listening to the stories of other addicts who had the same experience as her, except they were addicted to drugs, and she was addicted to YouTube.
While digital addictions aren’t recognised by the NHS or the World Health Organisation, it might not be long. Gaming disorders were officially recognised in 2022 – streaming and YouTube addiction may not be far behind them.
#5 - Are Life Coaches A Scam?
Usually, yes. But that’s not really what makes them newsworthy here. What makes life coaches worth talking about this week is the amount of them that are inundating our social media feeds.
Life coaching may be helpful for plenty of people, it’s not completely without merit, but the propagation of this sort of content on social media and the fact that literally anyone can call themselves a “life coach” and insert a “pay here” link in their Instagram bio leaves people vulnerable to fraudulent practises.
Sure, you can get an accreditation for being a life coach, one of which is sold by the International Coaching Federation, and while that sounds legit, there are no legal standards to enter the profession, and it doesn’t cost much to do.
At the same time, most life coaches charge between seventy-five to two hundred dollars an hour – few jobs exists that promise such a high financial reward with such low requirements to get into the role. Users report spending over 14,000 dollars in the first year of working with a life coach, and over 100,000 in the years that follow.
While these sort of “scams” have always existed, our current form of social media has allowed life coaching to boom out of control.
It’s all too common to see people selling their professional coaching services along with their lifestyles on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, promising that their (very expensive) course is the route to a perfect life, when we all know the key to a perfect life is taking and posting highly posed and filtered photos of the good stuff only…
What can we do? Basically nothing, but take this as a word of warning from us.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
AI Or Not AI?
We aced this week’s BBC Bitesize AI or not AI quiz, which asks you to find which images were created by AI, and which ones are actual images.
We’re not sure what exactly it is, but there is often a tell with the real photos – the light and shadow looks more real.
Also, context helps – for example, one of them was an image of Mr T drinking a cup of tea at a tea party, that one was AI generated….
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