The sports game divorce: FIFA and EA Sports ⚽️- Optimize your workday with shorter meetings ⏱- The future of search is... 💡- Retail Media new eldorado 💸- Cleantech time is now 🌱
"It’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information." Sari Azout
Episode #62. Hey hey 👋🏼
Your week was busy? Mine as well! Here are 5 great reads you might have missed over the past few days. I hope these key takeaways will help you catch up at have a great(er) Sunday. Get ready! Here is our catch of the week:
The end of a notorious marriage between FIFA and EA Sports (Huddle Up),
Improving your feeling of achievement with shorter internal meetings (Wired Magazine),
The future of search… at last 🙏 (A16z blog),
Retail media, a new eldorado in adtech… (Exchange Wire)
Cleantech is the rising trend in 2022! (Rex Woodbury)
#1. EA x FIFA. This is the end ⚽️
TLDR From this article 👉 FIFA and EA Sports ending one of the most successful partnerships in sports history published on Huddle Up on May 11, 2022.
FIFA will not be an exclusive EA Sports partner anymore. The $150m deal contributed to creating the world’s best-selling sports video game franchise in history generating $20b in sales.
The game has been translated into 18 languages and the franchise deal includes 19000 soccer players, 700 teams, and 100 stadiums.
Since the first release of the game in 1993, the stock price of EA Sports surged more than 2000% while the S&P500 grew 800% in the same period.
In 2024, the partnership will end after 3 decades and FIFA will release its own video game. EA said that they will introduce EA Sports FC starting in 2023 after its partnership with FIFA officially ends this year.
Of course, EA won’t be able to use the FIFA name or even reference the World Cup without a licensing deal. But given they still have over 300 different licensing deals currently in place with individual clubs globally, they should be able to build a pretty compelling video game even without the official FIFA name and logo.
#2. Optimize your workday & be happy 😃
TLDR From this article 👉 The rise of the 15-minute meeting published in Wired Magazine on May 3, 2022.
Remote workers seem to be more exposed to burnout because of digital fatigue as they spend more time in front of their screens and less in real life interactions.
15-minute meetings can significantly reduce the time spent in meetings if you have a proper agenda, a role for each participant, and follow-up meeting notes with clear action owners and deadlines. As a study showed, you can save up to 11 hours per month and improve your annual productivity by +10%.
"Research found that people with blocks of meetings, and blocks of white-space time, would end the day with a greater sense of achievement and satisfaction. The ideal cadence is back-to-back meetings with five- to 10-minute breaks in between, and at least two to three consecutive hours free."
#3. The future of search is…
TLDR From this article 👉 The future of search is boutique written by Sari Azout and published on the blog of a16z on May 2, 2022. Takeaways from our expert Patrick Kervern.
Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer but not questions that require judgment and context. Curation matters.
There is an emergence of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise where people are aggregating content and resources, reviving the curated web in a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information.
The opportunity in search is not to attack Google head-on with a massive, one-size-fits-all horizontal aggregator, but instead to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways.
Scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance. The conversation around curation has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. These entertainment giants offer curation that demands our attention, but they don’t offer curation on demand. The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and toward more goal-oriented interfaces. Boutique search engines are next-level curation.
"All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires curation."—Ben Evans.
A fundamental question remains: If the value proposition is signal over noise, how do you scale the signal? The line between curator, compiler, and cataloguer is thin and there is a naturally invisible asymptote — diminishing returns on more data over time.
As opposed to ad driven business model that turns sites into marketing blogs, subscriptions present an opportunity. Subscription simplifies the network effects to two sides: content as supply and a paying audience as demand. But subscription itself is not a panacea, especially when the use cases are not frequent enough.
Though appealing, a playbook for tokenized business models has not yet emerged.
#4. The retail media eldorado…
TLDR From this article 👉 Retail media: the retailer game plan published in Exchange Wire on May 5, 2022.
One of the hottest 'greenfield' topics in digital advertising in retail media. Even with Amazon making $40bn a year in this field, there are still plenty of opportunities for mid-tier players.
Video ads and live commerce are new retail media tactics that are already being used intensively in APAC; retargeted display ads are no more the only option (where retailers are starting).
The retailer ad stack is essential to embrace this opportunity. SSP/DSP associated with a measurement layer for attribution are key; clean rooms are the one enabler that will allow advertisers and retailers to collaborate and match segments without any data leakage.
#5. Cleantech time is now
TLDR From this article 👉 Building the Sustainable Economy published in Digital Native, the newsletter from Rex Woodbury on May 11, 2022.
10 years ago, the famous VC fund Kleiner Perkins invested nearly $1bn into cleantech but it was obviously not the expected ROI; was it just too soon?
"In 2022, sustainability is finally poised to have its moment—and it’s going to be a long moment. Powered by 1) worsening climate change, 2) growing regulatory pressure, and 3) massive generational behavior changes, sustainability is positioned to be the defining trend of the next 50 years."
2 flavors of startup companies are growing in this new moment of truth.
Companies helping any company (or any individual) to measure their carbon footprint.
Companies helping to offset that footprint pushed to take action because of regulatory pressures as well as pressure from the general public (and employees).
"A 2021 Pew Research report found that 76% of Gen Zs list climate change as among their biggest societal concerns, with 37% listing it as their #1 concern."
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See you next Sunday!