The marketing activations are too damn big.
+ Finance Guy Vest weather, Eric Adams' Rockaway shorty, and Substack video.
Hello everyone. After reading the third story this month about how Substack is leaning hard into video, I tried out going live this morning. I asked everyone if they’d ever watched live video on Substack before — some had, some didn’t even know it was a feature until they joined my video. Don’t always trust the media, folks. Just kidding.
Today’s letter includes: a timeline of supersized marketing stunts, men in my address book reacting to Finance Guy Vest season’s arrival, the reason I need someone to buy Feed Me, and Eric Adams talked about jumping the subway turnstile to visit his “shorty in Rockaway.”
Yesterday, Glossier celebrated the launch of their new Glossier You fragrance, Fleur, in Astor Place. The shock factor of the all-day event was a larger-than-life bottle of Glossier. This sparked a conversation between me and (Feed Me’s assistant who is a sophomore at Brown) about whether blown-up activations are still fun… or overblown. Below, Julien writes about biking past the giant Yayoi Kusama statue in Paris, marketing tropes, and what all of this is for if not Instagram virality.
Glossier and SKIMS are two recent brands to activate TikTok-bait marketing stunts in New York. Glossier’s was for the launch of their new fragrance, Fleur – they built an oversized bottle in Astor Place (conveniently close to NYU’s campus) and allowed passerby to create flower arrangements and try the scent. SKIMS created a giant blown up Kim Kardashian in a bikini in Times Square last week to coincide with their new swimwear launch. It wasn’t as much of a hit (the top comment reads, “This is so beyond weird.”), but it did bring up IPO chatter once again..
