The Weekend Wind-Down #38 - November 17, 2024
I hope you're looking forward to the week ahead, here's this week's list.
This week's podcast guest
This week on Before We Get There, I talk with the amazing Abby Ling. Abby is an experienced marketer who currently leads the Singapore branch of a fast-growing international marketing agency. She previously worked in companies like Meta, Ogilvy, and McCann. She also is an active networker and community volunteer for TEDxSingapore and the People’s Association. In our discussion we talked about career planning, setbacks and career breaks, networking tips, challenges for working moms, and much more. Keep a lookout for the episode launch on Thursday!
What I listened to this week
HBR on Leadership released an episode called Why DEI Still Matters. The former CEO of Jamba Juice and his daughter (who co-authored a book together) discuss how many DEI teams at big corporations have seen cuts recently and how not as many companies seem to be promoting DEI initiatives as a few years ago. I could write a whole post about this topic, but the bottom line is that personally I feel that most of the time DEI initiatives are not beneficial for minorities and are more PR for the company and senior leaders to show they are woke. If you work for a company with a good leadership team and good people, it shouldn't need to be a thing. At a previous company, I jumped in join to an "Asian" employee resource group because they hadn't included any of our over 100 team members in Asia. The point I agreed with most was that companies should ensure that everyone has a voice and people are able to speak up if there are issues. But other than that, most of the episode rubbed me the wrong way, even the title.
What I read this week
Still digging into the art of interviewing I read My Remarkable Journey by Larry King. I grew up seeing him on TV, but had no idea about his background and the interesting story he had starting out in radio. I also didn't know that his personal life was incredibly chaotic, having been married 7 times and fathering his youngest child at the age of 66. Putting all that aside it was interesting to read about how he conducted his interviews, he never used prepared questions and focused on asking basic things that his listeners might need to know, he didn't want to try to sound like an expert.
I also read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. This was a super fun and quirky book about a Japanese woman who doesn't fit in with other people, but is perfectly suited to be the model employee at a convenience store. The translation was done beautifully, leaving in some common Japanese words and phrasing that bring the characters to life. I really enjoyed this story, without romance, any crisis, antagonists, or any major events, just the life of a very unusual person, who you would never know about if you interacted with them at their job.
Interesting advertising I saw this week
If you listen to some of the more popular podcasts, you'll be used to hearing ad reads during the show. Quite a few of the companies that do podcast advertising advertise on many of the same shows and run similar ads. You may have heard ads from VPN providers, website-building hosts, grooming subscriptions, supplements, sports betting, etc. From a marketing perspective, I like the idea, people are listening to the podcast because they like the host, and they are less likely to fast forward through an ad read by them than skipping something on YouTube or ignoring a banner ad. The downside is that you are paying to advertise to everyone listening to the podcast, no matter who they are, so you aren't able to be as targeted as on other platforms. But I was super surprised to see something for the first time, a major tech company promoting an AI e-book for CFOs. The podcast is in no way related to tech, finance, or AI, it is a comedy podcast and the guest was Matthew McConaughey. There has been some news about the cost of podcast advertising dropping, so maybe that's why they are testing it out. But with the size of the podcast and guest, the cost must have been in the six figures, which seems like a lot to me to for the handful of CFOs who catch that segment.
That's all for this week!