Coachella Marketing Highlights, Tax Cheating and the Rise of AI Sabotage

Dear Fellow Non-Obvious Thinker,

I’m at a coffee shop in Arizona this week, just a few hours away from the Coachella Music Festival and reading about how this global phenomenon has ridden the wave of social media content to become more than just a big concert in the desert. This week, that’s the lead story as we take a deep dive into some of the marketing from the festival that’s getting the early buzz.

In other stories this week, you read about how an enthusiastic grandson is on a quest to save his family’s chocolate legacy and why AI sabotage may be the next big corporate problem. For media and reading recommendations, this week’s features focus on words and language. Plus, we explore the importance of saving the Internet’s archive, American political pessimism and why more people will likely be cheating on their taxes this year.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

This Week’s New Videos …

Four Brilliant Marketing Stories from the Coachella Festival

It’s the middle of the “​consumer wonderland​” of The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the desert experience drawing over 125,000 visitors annually across two weekends in California that has become a battleground for luxury brands and celebrities to create memorable experiences. The stories coming from the festival this week are offering some fascinating marketing insights and ideas about what sort of ​creator engagement strategies​ and campaigns are working today to capture attention and engagement in a crowded space. Here are a few that stood out for me in over a dozen stories I read this week:

  1.  GAP Leans Into Retro Comfort – The “​GAP Hoodie House​” at Coachella allowed people to design their own products, profess their love of the simple hoodie and offered a comfortable counterpoint to all the quirky (and often uncomfortable) fashion on display in Coachella fashion. It was a perfect reminder of everything people love about their GAP hoodies and was perfectly on brand.

  2.   Dove Solves a Sweaty Problem – Last year a ​viral tweet​ from an influencer suggested that the heat of the desert venue made Coachella the ideal festival for a deodorant sponsor. This year, ​Dove answered the call​. Focused on offering free deodorant and solving a very real problem for concertgoers stood out and captured lots of attention and goodwill. Along with their inventive use of ​vending machines to expose “flattening beauty standards,”​ it was yet another win for a brand that has continually helped rethink beauty standards.

  3.  Public Art Company (PAC) Brings the Spectacle – Even in a digital world, sometimes there is no replacement for creating a beautiful spectacle for people to experience in person. As the official art provider for the festival, PAC built ​several immersive installations​ around the Indio festival grounds to allow people to think about space, interaction and feeling: “each piece is designed to be entered, sat beneath, wandered through, and genuinely felt. We’re curating for the body as much as the eye.”

  4. The Coachella Billboard Phenomenon – This may be hard to believe, but one of the most talked about elements of people trekking to the desert for Coachella this year were ​the billboards they encountered along the way​. In a moment of captivity driving to the festival, Gen Z audiences are paying attention to out-of-home (OOH) marketing and (​according to some surveys​), even trust it significantly more than social media. Most interestingly, apparently every year during Coachella “over one-third of TikTok virality trends have started from or included OOH displays.”

By the way, even if you can’t make it to Indio this year, you haven’t missed all the fun. Check out the YouTube livestreaming schedule for all the events you can still ​watch this coming weekend  and let me know what other marketing initiatives stood out for you.

Skimpflation and Why Hershey Is Quietly Going Back to Using Actual Ingredients in Reese’s PB Cups

Brad Reese is the grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H.B. Reese and apparently has spent much of his adult life going out in public proudly wearing the brand’s orange logos and merch. Earlier this year, he ​called out the Hershey Company​ for allegedly replacing premium ingredients with cheaper substitutes such as compound coatings and “peanut butter creme” instead of traditional milk chocolate and peanut butter. After initially denying the charges, the ​brand recently (and quietly) is making a change​ back to their original ingredients.

For some consumer advocates, this is just the most ​recent example of a phenomenon described as “skimpflation”​ where companies cut back on services and products as a way to maintain or avoid raising prices too much but rather decreasing the value a consumer gets for the same or similar money. This isn’t entirely a new tactic either. According to food science professor Dr. Richard Hartel:

This is “’a typical story that’s told in the food industry about cost reduction.” If you successfully tweak a product recipe for cost, even expert tasters will not be able to tell the new recipe from last year’s. But what if you repeat this process every year for 10 years? If you “looked at your product 10 years ago [compared] with what you have now, that can be a very different product,” says Hartel. “Each year’s shift is imperceptible.”

This slow ​devolving of quality​ seems to have been thwarted in this case by a clearly invested brand fan who also happens to be related to the original product inventor. He cares more than the ordinary person and offered his platform to shame Hershey’s into backing down. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: consumers with singular passion and the platform to have their voices heard are the ultimate instigators of change. No matter how much products change, this conclusion seems to remain true over time.

This Is the Age of AI Sabotage … But How Big of a Problem Is It?

According to a range of new surveys, somewhere between 29% to 44% of employees are admitting to ​finding some ways to sabotage the adoption of AI​ in their roles and companies as a response to their fears of being replaced.

“[There are] many forms of resistance. In some cases, employees said they have ignored guidelines, opted out of AI training, or flat-out refused to use AI tools. In more extreme situations, some admit to having fed sensitive company information to public, unapproved AI tools and even to tampering with performance metrics to make the tech seem less effective.”

There is a delicate balance that seems to be emerging here. While leaders and employers report that they are highly likely to require some level of AI proficiency among their workers (and let go those who lack it), the workers themselves worry that becoming proficient in the tools will also lead to eventual obsolescence for their current roles. As everyone struggles to find the balance, there seems to be a short-term crisis emerging that may result in long-term implications.

At a moment when the utility of AI for business tasks is very much being developed in real time, if this training happens on incomplete or intentionally flawed data or behaviors, those decisions risk derailing the future value of these AI tools themselves. Much like a customer database filled with garbage emails, this corruption of training data can compound over time to make AI impossible to rely on.

What do you think? Is this sabotage an emerging behavior that could lead to long term challenges – or are there effective ways that organizations are managing this issue?

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Word Daily

There is nothing like writing a book about words that will inspire you to do some deep research on word-related media that’s already out there. One of my favorites that I’ve been subscribed to for some time is ​Word Daily​, which offers exactly what the site’s title promises. You can get the app, or the newsletter, or just browse their site. Lots of vocabulary related fun here, but also some thoughtful choices of words that may inspire you to take your own thoughts in new directions. That alone makes it a good choice for my non-obvious media recommendation of the week and a fantastic way to ​palter​ less, go beyond ​jejune​ ideas and ​apostrophize​ your best thinking at the next ​colloquy​ you find yourself attending.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Enough is Enuf

Keeping with the language theme here, if you enjoy dissecting the quirks of the English language, then you’ll appreciate this book from author Gabe Henry that not only looks at why we spell the way that we do … but also why so many efforts across decades to overhaul the language and fix all these inconsistencies have always failed. This is a journey through many well-intentioned efforts to clean up these linguistic frustrations, as well as an examination of what has continually held these cultural corrections back from succeeding even when everyone involved has agreed on their logic. At times infuriating but always entertaining, this buk is an eezy read.

Buy-on-Amazon
Buy-on-Bookshop-

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop? 

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