へ（>_<へ) Nº295 Cruisin' For A Bruisin' 💥🤕

As I was penning this issue, I was lamenting that my friend Jess, author of Offline Matters (which became nofun.tips), stopped writing back in 2021! I thought of Jess' snarky calls for offline mattering when I read this:

"Last week, Meta revealed (in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit) that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period. Bloomberg reports that the app made almost 30% of Meta's entire revenue in the early part of 2022. 96% of Meta's $40.1 billion Q4 2023 revenue came from advertising, and it’s made over a hundred billion dollars a year since 2021, a trend it’s likely to continue based on the fact that the only thing these platforms care about is revenue numbers increasing. Google made $86.3 billion in Q4 2023, with $48 billion of that coming from Google Search and related advertising, up 13% from the previous quarter." – Ed Zitron in his newsletter

We pride ourselves at Twotone for never suggesting digital ads in our strategies. We believe in grassroots growth, editorial acknowledgment, and building community that you simply can't growth hack. That philosophy takes time, is at odds with lofty short-term goals & definitely impossible to guarantee we'll match the vanity metrics that our clients' competitors are touting.

We're not naive and acknowledge a number of the brands we work with paradoxically 'need' to sink sizable sums of cash into Meta's & Google's to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. Or do they?

Much like the hardly-heard-of-any-more idea of a digital detox, what if other success criteria rocked your Board of Directors' socks off? For example, our growth was 'only' x, but we saved y on the ads we didn't buy.

Is that still possible? Sure! At scale? Maybe not. But our client portfolio includes a few inspiring examples of bucking the system. That's why I've been buoyed to my idealism for nearly a decade. Besides, who wants to be a slave to a machine not built for humans:

"[...] the people making the products are not building things for human beings, but to show the markets that they'd continue to grow."

So, I'm banking on a sea change. I bet you'd agree that, as Ed says in his article, "society is turning on tech as a result. Everybody knows how bad the internet is."

So what are we going to do about it? Give that digital detox idea another go, don't green-light that next digital ad campaign, and stick to some screen time limits for starters! Hell, triumphantly show your partner/colleagues/kids your (lack of) screen time & go for a bike ride together!

Let's ride!

As always, thank you for reading,

Jon

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