Ben Guttmann
As we wrap up the year during list season, it’s time again to clear my notebook of a few stories that I found interesting, but never had the chance to develop into bigger ideas. If you like these quick hits, check out the format that inspired it: podcast 99% Invisible’s annual mini-stories episodes.
Marketers and copyeditors don’t always see eye-to-eye – lots of good advertising is bad English, and vice-versa. (” Got milk?” famously pissed off a lot of grammar nerds.)
You can add numbers to the list of offensives. APA style says you should spell out numbers below 10 or at the start of a sentence, and AP says the same. The Chicago Style Manual says go up to 100, and MLA says “simple” numbers should be written out.
But, research tells us something different. According to a study earlier this year in the Journal of Consumer Research, digits are almost always the way to go. The authors dub this the “number format effect.”
Across multiple studies, they found that digits can improve click-through rates of an ad by nearly 2X, and respondents said the digits both felt more “right” and were more precise, than words.
So, when it comes to ads, signs, emails, and other informal formats: words be damned. Use digits.
Believe it or not, Apple Vision Pro was released this year. The first units went on sale just ten months ago, on February 2.
It’s the biggest new release from the biggest consumer company in the world – but when was the last time you thought about this product?
I still wouldn’t write Apple off here. This product is probably more of an open-beta than it is a full-fledged consumer-ready platform right now. It’s priced at $3,500 after all, which puts it firmly out of reach for most consumers, even as a birthday-and-Christmas-combined splurge.
But yeah, I didn’t expect it to set the world on fire, but I didn’t expect it to disappear from our collective consciousness this quickly, either.
I wrote a draft of something back during spring training but never put a whole piece together about this. But if you even remotely follow sports, you probably heard about the embarrassment that was the new official jersey for Major League Baseball.
It was bad. In a slew of viral videos and photos, the league’s new uniforms looked like the replica ones you buy for a little kid at Kohl’s. The names are misaligned, the lettering is smaller, the embroidery has been replaced with screenprinting, and the fabric is thinner.
By the way, that thin fabric also applies to the pants. Pants that are supposed to be covering up certain things but aren’t doing so. Those photos went viral, too.
This fiasco was the result of new Nike designs being manufactured by Fanatics. Supposedly, these are the “most tested” uniforms ever worn on the field, but the players and fans weren’t having it. Thankfully, after a summer of sweat-stained wardrobes, MLB is reverting back to their old threads for next season.
This whole ordeal made me think of one word: “enshittification.” Coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow, this describes how things (mostly online services in his initial take) tend to get less user-friendly, lower quality, and just generally shittier over time. Too many companies are chasing short-term profits while sacrificing everything else – and a strong brand, a loyal fanbase, can only cover up the defects for so long.
If there’s one trend that will shape the next two or three decades, it’s this: solar energy has gotten very cheap, very quickly.
2023 was a record-breaking year for solar installation. And this year is on track to blow past those numbers by 29%. The prices for solar power have fallen by 89% since 2010. These are early PC/internet/iPhone-type curves.
I’ve come around to the idea that we should embrace energy abundance instead of focusing singularly on energy efficiency. Energy should be so cheap and so clean that we should be able to use a ton of it to power all the things we dream up. The sun continuously sends us 173,000 terawatts of energy, and it’s not stopping for the next couple of billion years. If we can harness even a tiny fraction of that power cleanly, why should we be so stingy with it?
