📓Creativ Brief: Business, Society, and Profit
Consumer Expectations Sink. Signal Gate. Consumer index. High Agency.
A mass upheaval in our society, economy, and culture norms have concerned me lately.
Shifting economic policies, unwinding alliances, and wild demographic swings have created mass economic uncertainty across the globe. That uncertainty has begun to stymie forward looking investment from large businesses and governments and cripple consumer demand.
At South by South West and Games Developer Conference, two of the largest gatherings of technologists and media professionals in the United States, a pessimistic miasma hung in the air like a smothering, imperceivable fog.
Consumer expectations and sentiment, outlined in studies below, have reached historic lows. More people than ever have a negative outlook on their future income prospects and living standards.
Income inequality is at a historical high, surpassing the gilded age of the 1920s. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, just three men, now own more wealth than the bottom 50% of America.
As a merchant, a businessman, our capitalistic system motivates us to generate profits. Yet, the source of those profits has become a distant enigma, obscured from the business classes daily grind. We sit in our skyscrapers, home offices, and zoom calls while forgetting the source of our profits.
People.
And when people have less and less to give, profits become harder and harder to find. When capital becomes more and more concentrated, the capacity to invest in new ventures dwindles. When there are fewer and fewer platforms and channels to market on, marketing becomes more expensive. When a handful of people own an entire economy, there is less business to be had.
Business has favored profits over people, forgetting that people generate the profits we so covetously pursue. What role do we, as the merchant class, have in ensuring ordinary people can participate in the market and buy what we sell?
Are we eating our own tail in our cannibalistic pursuit of profit?
3 Stories Dominating Media and Tech Headlines
Consumer confidence is at the lowest point in the last twelve years, according to new data from the Conference Board. The Consumer Confidence Survey reflects prevailing business conditions and likely developments for the months ahead. It aims to measure consumer expectations based on their short-term outlook for income, business, and employment.
Why it matters: It’s now at 65.2, well below a threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession ahead. Views of current business conditions also weakened. The only exception were households earning more than $125,000 a year, the top 15% of income earners. For the majority of Americans, the future economic outlook looks gloomy.
‘Signal Gate’ is driving the most US downloads of signal ever. The scandal at the Trump administration, in which they accidentally included a reporter in classified Yemeni battle plans, has driven the most downloads in the apps 11 year existence. The number of downloads is in the hundreds of millions, according to an interview with the founder, with Google searches up 1,000%.
Why it matters: Incompetent or not, the Trump administration drives viewership. Signal CEO Jun Harada declined to comment on Trump’s assertion that Signal might be defective and the cause of the breach, citing that “all awareness for Signal is a net positive”. Acknowledge the attention, but decline to give a political opinion. A case study in public relations excellence.
How to balance performance marketing vs. brand building. There are two prevailing yet opposing schools of marketing thought at work. One believes in brand building through the use of great creative. One demands instant measurable ROI on every dollar spent. Neither works in isolation.
Why it matters: In the era of digital marketing, companies are putting too much emphasis on performance marketing while sacrificing their overall brand. Brand acts as a foundation to inform consumers about the product and service value proposition, while performance drives consumers to purchase platforms. A/B testing everything to hell without an overall vision is a race to the marketing bottom.
Creativ Spotlight - Ludeo at GDC
We created fun GIFs, ads and supported the Ludeo team for their GDC 2025 sponsorship. Congratulations to the entire Ludeo team for a great week! Want to instantly play game highlights? Try it now with Lost Castles!
Stat of the Week - Consumer Expectation Index
The recent index, from the non-partisan Washington thinktank the Conference Board, indicates a general pessimism amongst the American consumer.
Expectations Six Months Hence
Consumers’ outlook for business conditions worsened in March.
17.1% of consumers expected business conditions to improve, down from 20.8% in February.
27.3% expected business conditions to worsen, up from 25.5%.
Consumers’ outlook for the labor market outlook also deteriorated.
16.7% of consumers expected more jobs to be available, down from 18.8% in February.
28.5% anticipated fewer jobs, up from 26.6% in February
Consumers were more pessimistic about their income prospects in March.
16.3% of consumers expected their incomes to increase, down from 18.8% in February.
15.5% expected their income to decrease, up from 12.8%.
One Fun Thing - High Agency vs Low Agency
Does life happen to you or do you happen to life? This is the crux of a brilliant concept in an essay High Agency, written by George Mack. The essay covers mindsets to become a doer rather than a receiver of life, with plenty of playful thought examples and anecdotes. I highly recommend this 30 min read. It articulated what I inherently looked for in employees, confidants, and friends.