Business
Bullish on Airbnb in a post-Covid world
Airbnb’s strength today and in a post-covid travel world is in it’s flexibility to offering a different kind of travel.
“Airbnb’s “gross daily rate” was pretty flat at the end of last year, hovering around $110. This, too, declined in April. But by June, it had increased to $146, and has since settled to a rate around 20% higher than last year — $128 in September.”
Airbnb in 2020 would be one of the least affected-by-Covid companies on the planet.
“One of my favorite taglines in recent memory was Airbnb’s “Live There,” a campaign it launched in 2017 with the agency TBWA. It’s as cheesy as any earnest brand campaign. But it feels true. A real representation of the Airbnb spirit, something its frequent customers can appreciate. Airbnb-ing isn’t remotely the same as staying in a lame chain hotel in a tourist quarter.”
And he shares an interesting story about why Airbnb probably isn’t the best and biggest travel content creator today:
“In late 2012, Airbnb launched a product called “Neighborhoods”,” he wrote, “which offered users incredibly rich and unique content about individual neighborhoods around the world. Visitors loved it. Almost too much. It turned out the content was so interesting that it distracted visitors from actually booking. When the team removed it from the home page, bookings went up.”
From Dan Frommer’s New Consumer newsletter
Today’s office: Byron Bay Airport.
The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants
“The core functionality of these apps — despite all their fancy technology — is not significantly different than having a servant. What the technology has done is pool the servants, make them available to more people, make it easier to communicate tasks, and — most importantly — make it possible to not think of them as servants at all.”
Someone asked me recently what my personal brand strategy was.
I just see go to places, see cool things, make photos of them, and post the photos online where they get 2-3 likes.
I’m not very good at being strategically cool.
If you see me dancing in an Instagram Reel or on TikTok, know that this is a call for help because I will have been taken hostage and I need to be rescued. Please screenshot this and put it on your fridge as a reminder.
Apple’s underdogs series is marketing at its best.
April 2019: Apple releases “Apple at Work — The Underdogs”
July 2020: Apple release “The whole working-from-home thing — Apple”
Working on story telling at this height would honestly be so cool!
Gary Vaynerchuck’s take on the Apple of today and why he thinks they’re leaving money on the table and should buy Target (the US one) - Listen to the whole podcast.
There are two things in this world that take no skill, spending other people‘s money, and dismissing an idea.
Netflix staffer: so, it’s like Netflix, but you don’t get to choose what you watch, it just shows up automatically.
Netflix execs: wow
Rest of humanity: are you just describing TV?
“Social media encourages the myth that who we are is defined by the opinions we type. But the older I get, the less interested I am in how well people can script their beliefs in front of a computer and the more interested I am in how tenaciously they go about grinding out their moral existence. I’m impressed when someone can get up every single day, determined to be a better human being than he or she was yesterday. Typing out what we “stand for” is easy. But loving well isn’t. I am not down on typing out our opinions—clearly. I’m only down on thinking that typing in and of itself constitutes an ethical life. May we stop thinking that becoming the kind of person we want to be is as easy as typing “me too” at those we agree with and “stupid people” at those we don’t. That’s a distraction from the real work of being human. And I’m ready to work.”
From Love Matters More by Jared Byas
”A crisis doesn’t have to be a negative event. A wedding is a crisis–one ceremony, one day, over and done. All eyes, all attention, all on this moment. That’s why we do it–even though the chronic condition of the marriage itself is always more important.”