Dry January vs Veganuary

Weekend Update:

Some Must Reads sprung up on Friday & over night, so I have your Saturday or Sunday morning covered, grab a ☕️ and get ready:

Dry Jan or Veganuary Updates continued into week 2 of January…Over 4m people taking on not drinking in 🇬🇧 alone (a stat suggests 60% has broken already) and “The Hangary” heard this a lot this week aka people taking on going Vegan in January is seeing over 700k attempting it, good luck to all those taking part.

Did you see Elon Musk’s dance and strip…here is the Microsoft dad dance moment

—Thanks to those who entered and contacted me. The books were snapped up quickly! —

I read a lot in the Christmas break and a lot of listening to great books, I love paying it forward with books so as promised I am going to give away two books (don’t worry they will be brand new). 📚 First is Creative Blindness by Dave Trott, it’s the best read in months. 📚 Second is Who you are is what you do by Ben Horowitz, it is a great business book on culture and how to learn from history.

Anyways, why you are here…⤵

😍 The Must-Reads Of The Week 😍

  1. 💯 How to create the right company culture for mental health & improves results ⏯ Videos ⏯

  2. ⏯ Simon Sinek why there needs to be bias and a navigator 

  3. ⏯ Why Amazon and Google are in the oil business 💰Business💰

  4. Presidential Budget: Imagine spending $15 million to come up in Google search results

  5. Black Hat: How disinformation PR firms are reshaping what we see & believe 

  6. Peer To Peer: Many brands are late to the game but peer to peer is shaping everything we do and brands are struggling to make themselves relevant enough  

  7. Communication is 🔑: Guidances from basecamp internal communications doc, there are some I completely disagree with but the majority is applicable to most workplaces - A good quote - “Communication often interrupts, so good communication is often about saying the right thing at the right time in the right way with the fewest side effects.”

  8. Gifting Problems: The economics of 19% unused gift cards 

  9. Fight to win “voice”: CES was this week and it’s usually the opportunity for brands to share their upcoming cool stuff…as you expect they did -𝔾) Google Assistant has 500million users and wants you to say hey google read this page" 𝔸) Alexa is coming to a new car near you and pay as you go 😘 CES was also the year that sextech took over

  10. 🧠 The behavioural economics you need to know 🧠

  11. Yes Please: Fancy a 6 hour 4 day work week? 🇫🇮 and Scandinavia is leading the way with addressing the work-life balance issues we are experiencing in the always-on business world. The new mid 30’s Finnish leaders are really driving this issue forward and will be great to see how this impact productivity.

  12. Agency: How a talent agency has flipped the live streaming wars and pitted Twitch, Mixer, YouTube and Facebook against each other…for the artist & 💰 Facebook’s footprint in gaming increased massively, while Twitch decreased by 7%, live streaming and gaming is going to be a blood bath (and potentially expensive for fans of streamers with exclusive streaming and ppv likely coming)

  13. 7 trends that Marketing are going to be hit with this year👏 Friends of the newsletters shares 👏

  14. Venture Capital legend Paul Graham on the pros and cons of being a parent(Shared by podcast and Marketing ⭐️Beth Gladstone) What is so unusual about this post is PG is someone who you wouldn’t expect to write this or really break down why it has pros and cons

  15. WTAF: I presented the RIP to the CMO role late last year and appears that the CMTO chief marketing technology officer is actually a thing…go figure (kindly shared via friend of the newsletter Mr Peter Abraham)🤷‍♂️Social Media Updates 🤷‍♀️𝕋) Collab House: Popular read from this week How TikTok stars are coping previous formulas in making video stars - it is something that has been happening for years, but these younger generations are taking this super seriously and understand they are there to work. 𝕀) Instagram growth is slowing for the first time This highlights two things 1) The Netflix issue of being in as many homes or phones as you can at home and 2) When you build a simple app and it becomes bloated with features and full of ads and doesn’t really benefit your time spent, growth will slow. 𝔽) “Social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.”I try not to share so many articles on Facebook but they dominate the media, one of their most Senior Exec Boz shared his 2500 words internal memo (it’s obviously leaked) and then shared on his Facebook, it is fascinating to read. Facebook also hid their paid for sponsored content with Teen Vogue then denied it…and got caught - let’s be honest a company that is fighting deep fakes but allowing politicians to lie on ads is a confused company…Last week prioritisation aka scheduling your day and week ahead was the most-read story of the week. Let’s see what next week has in store 👀

👏You Made It To The End 👏

Have a great weekend!

Danny Denhard - About Me: 19 years in Marketing, Product, Business Leadership and Growth. I recently presented RIP to the CMO role presentation and write this weekly Must Reads Newsletter.

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Disclaimer: All views & recommendations are my own until you click through on the stories.This week’s gifs are from Tumblr & Giphy

About Must Reads - This is your hand-curated weekly newsletter by me (Danny Denhard), covering Marketing, Growth, Business, Culture, Product & sometimes as a treat I throw in a few weird and wonderful reads, that will make you think. I add commentary to a number of stories to add some personality and flavour to your Friday's or whenever you open your email.