June 2019 assorted links

1. Inside the black (cherry) market of vintage Kool-Aid packet collectors

2. The New York Times asked 21 Democrats the same set of questions about becoming President. Here’s what they said.

3. How the Martin Agency sold Quiznos on the idea of the Spongmonkeys (Exhibit A: The TV spot from 2004)

4. What really happened to Malaysia’s missing airplane

5. Why is this interesting? - The olive oil edition

6. ‘I’m weird, but I get results’: Have you met this wizard on the subway?

7. Two podcasts I’ve been listening to recently are The Shrink Next Door and Adulting (NSFW).

8. Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends Report

   Just want the gist from the 333 slides? Check out these resources -

   • Vox

   • AdWeek

   • The Street

9. Big mood music

   But a more careful look into Spotify’s history shows that the decision to define audiences by their moods was part of a strategic push to grow Spotify’s advertising business in the years leading up to its IPO—and today, Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.

   Indeed, Spotify seeks not just to monitor and mine our mood, but also to manipulate future behavior. “What we’d ultimately like to do is be able to predict people’s behavior through music,” Les Hollander, the Global Head of Audio and Podcast Monetization, said in 2017. “We know that if you’re listening to your chill playlist in the morning, you may be doing yoga, you may be meditating . . . so we’d serve a contextually relevant ad with information and tonality and pace to that particular moment.”

10. 2 years in the making, LinkedIn’s brand refresh aims to make the platform more inviting