headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.

To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.

During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.

the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.

Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?

Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.

The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.

"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.

Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.

A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this.

it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.

what is the future of branding in the age of slop? The provocation for this particular stream of thought was a Tiktok video by brand strategist Eugene about branding in the era of brainrot. This video declares that the age of brands as stories has ended. There are no more ninety second spots that tell a tale, he argues, now there’s only vibe, something more like sentiment or affect – what's picked up in a crowded feed, two or three seconds between footage of catastrophic climate change and a monkey who’s learned to do makeup tutorials. He gives the example of a Twitch stream: it may be too hectic to read the individual posts, but you can monitor the sentiment. You can catch the vibe.

New things – brands, products, trends – are increasingly defined in relational terms to such an extent that they become devoid of any unique story, character, or essence.

Moodboarding as a practice is maxed out. It’s become a nearly absurdist consumer hobby, and it’s part and parcel of our algorithmic reality, targeted yet vague. Similarly, slop can’t be meaningfully curated because there are too many actors, algorithms, and microtrends being expressed simultaneously, in too many automated iterations.

When the brand is a person, an entity with a personality. The idea is that you can hone this personality in order to define your organization better and make more money out in the world. “All organizations have an identity whether they control it or not. A corporate identity programme harnesses and manages this identity in the corporate interest,” Wally Olins wrote.

Brand as story is the other conventional frame that’s been very popular, as mentioned in the Tiktok that kicked this off. This one is all about using things like narrative structure and the hero’s journey to structure the way a brand shows up and communicates, and also using stories as branding opportunities. Brand “lore” is an updated subset of brand as story.

These stories tend to coalesce around a charismatic founder (Tesla and Elon), a social cause (Patagonia and the environment), even a countercultural position (SST records and punk rock). The depth of the lore is directly correlated to brand value. Consumers can become pay-to-play characters of the story.

Brand as pattern is about creating something that shows up iteratively in the world, rather than repeating messages rotely. This has classic examples, like Absolut ads, and more mimetic ones, where users take on the pattern and create the brand themselves

Memes are an advanced form of this practice – everything from Pepe to Brat makes use of this repetition to create flexible and iterative meaning.  Brands that rely heavily on UGC are often related to brand-as-pattern.

Then there’s brand as world, the less eggheaded, more contemporary version of brand as story. Worldbuilding as a brand activity feels intuitively more digital and immersive, less linear than straight narrative.  Many luxury brands employ this practice to help us imagine a world of accessible wealth where people are more beautiful, more free, more actualized. Disney offers an accessible, albeit more fanciful version of this practice – creating an actual destination with its own culture and characters. In either case, the brand is a portal that gives you partial access to an alternative reality.

Brand as coherence is another more philosophical way of looking at brands, one that Nemesis-friend Michael Rock of 2x4 talks about a lot. In this world the brand is the je ne sais quois or x factor that makes everything fit together. It’s the systematic principle itself.  This coherence can be emotional… “When we talk about a strong brand, what we mean is that it consistently delivers the emotion it promises. The most successful brands, or at least the ones everyone emulates, have the knack for using design to produce an emotional coherence that spans from content to product to experience. Think Apple or BMW or Chanel. Not everything has to look alike, but it all has to feel alike. Whenever we encounter them we get that familiar brand sensation. That tingling tells you it's working.” (Michael Rock, Hooked on a Feeling) Or technical… “I know that [branding] is an incredibly distasteful term in cultural and academic organizations, but like it or not branding has become one of the major organizing principles of the world as we know it right now. States have brands, corporations have brands, people have brands, institutions have brands — everyone’s talking about that, and when they talk about brand, they may all be talking about different things, but I think it’s a way of thinking about this idea of assembly…I would say maybe that branding is this act of assemblage that creates seemingly coherent entities.” (Michael Rock, Berkeley design lecture)

there’s the brand as vibes. These are not just brands that have us asking what the there-there is. They’re also brands like Marc Jacobs’ Heaven, which has brought together disparate objects that fit a sort of dreamy Gen Z moodboard to great effect, creating new life for what was quickly becoming a legacy brand. Then there’s A24, perhaps one of the greatest vibe brands of them all.

vibes are something we feel, and have something to do with a sense of recognition or belonging.

In a sense, vibes are procedurally generated, created by following resonant patterns and associations rather than by directly expressing new ideas or unique sentiments. The value assigned to brands built on vibes is similarly transitive – if you like X you will probably like Y.  In the best cases, a brand can create and embody its own ineffable vibe that imbues all of its products and endeavors with a sense of magical value. Seeing the new A24 film is more about experiencing a new iteration of the brand than it is about the movie’s actual plot, cast, or story. Fans want to see a particular sensibility applied to the world around it.

When a brand is a person, you have an emotional connection with them (they also have rights: see Citizens United). When it's a story, it entertains you and holds your attention. When a brand is a world, there's immersion and escape. When it's a pattern, you can replicate it and play with it.

With all this in mind, the key to successful brands after vibes may be in creating... something dense and irrefutable: a brand that flaunts itself as proof of work, that makes clear the amount of real information and human effort that went into creating it, that can’t become blurry. The brand is labor itself, a direct expression of the work that produces it. something exceptionally simple – logo only, that is, just one coordination point…or better yet, a ticker, a single letter, a point of pure speculative energy. Something so singular it can’t be spun off into iterations, but due to its singularity, can freely attach to and feed itself by anything and everything. The brand is an atom, a particle, a single-cell organism. something like dazzle, the makeup that helps a face escape facial recognition software: something so incoherent it can't be read by the model or algorithm, something that cannot be expressed as or compressed into a vibe.  In  this case, the brand is noise, something rule breaking that jams an orderly system of meaning / value.

Things seemed to go well at the beginning. Due to the pandemic and the objective challenges of the traditional Brick & Mortar business, the business operated by Nike Direct (the business unit in charge of DTC) was flying and justifying the important strategic decisions of the CEO. Then, once normality came back, things slowly but regularly, quarter by quarter, showed that the separation line between being ambitious or being wrong was very thin.

In 6 months, hundreds of colleagues were fired and together with them Nike lost a solid process and thousands of years of experience and expertise in running, football, basketball, fitness, training, sportwear, etc., built in decades of footwear leadership (and apparel too). Product engine became gender led: women, men, and kids (like Zara, GAP, H&M or any other generic fashion brand).

Consumers are not so elastic as some business leaders think or hope. And consumers are not so loyal as some business leaders think or hope. So, what happened? Simple. Many consumers - mainly occasional buyers - did not follow Nike (surprise, surprise) but continued shopping where they were shopping before the decision of the CEO and the President of the Brand. So, once they could not find Nike sneakers in “their” stores – because Nike wasn’t serving those stores any longer -, they simply opted for other brands.

Until late 2010s, Nike had been on a total offense mode (being #1 in every market, in every category, in every product BU, basically in every dimension), a sort of military occupation of the marketplace and a huge problem for competitors that did not know how to react under such a domination. The strategic focus was only one: win anywhere. The new strategy determined the end of the marketplace occupation. Nike opened unexpected spaces to competitors, small, medium, or large brands (with exception of the company based in Herzogenaurach, that – as they usually do - copied and pasted the Nike strategy and executed it in a milder format).

One of the empiric laws of business says that online, the main lever of competition is “price” (as the organic consumer funnel is built on price comparison). The proverbial ability of Nike to leverage the power of the brand to sell sneakers at 200$ began to be threatened by the online appetite for discounts and the search for a definitive solution to the inventory issue. Gross margin – because of that – instead of growing due to the growth of DTC business, showed a rapid decline due to a never-ending promotional attitude on Nike.com

Nike has been built for 50 years on a very simple foundation: brand, product, and marketplace. The DC Investment model, since Nike became a public company, has been always the same: invest at least one tenth of the revenues in demand creation and sports marketing. The brand model has been very simple as well: focus on innovation and inspiration, creativity and storytelling based on athletes-products synergy, leveraging the power of the emotions that sport can create, trying to inspire a growing number of athletes* (*if you have a body, you are an athlete) to play sport. That’s what made Nike the Nike we used to know, love, admire, professionally and emotionally.

What happened in 2020? Well, the brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation.

shift from CREATE DEMAND to SERVE AND RETAIN DEMAND, that meant that most of the investment were directed to those who were already Nike consumers

as of 2021, to drive traffic to Nike.com, Nike started investing in programmatic adv and performance marketing the double or more of the share of resources usually invested in the other brand activities

the former CMO was ignoring the growing academic literature around the inefficiencies of investment in performance marketing/programmatic advertising, due to frauds, rising costs of mediators and declining consumer response to those activities.

Because of that, Nike invested a material amount of dollars (billions) into something that was less effective but easier to be measured vs something that was more effective but less easy to be measured.

To feed the digital marketing ecosystem, one of the historic functions of the marketing team (brand communications) was “de facto” absorbed and marginalized by the brand design team, which took the leadership in marketing content production (together with the mar-tech “scientists”). Nike didn’t need brand creativity anymore, just a polished and never stopping supply chain of branded stuff.

He made “Nike.com” the center of everything and diverted focus and dollars to it. Due to all of that, Nike hasn’t made a history making brand campaign since 2018, as the Brand organization had to become a huge sales activation machine.

To quote Alexis Ohanian, “Pearpop is the marketplace for brand deals for anyone with an audience. I love my agency, UTA, but the traditional agency model cannot support the breadth and diversity of internet creators. There’s no way you can have agents in an office doing all those deals, nor should you. You want a marketplace for that, and that’s what Pearpop has built."

Many of the first users were successful artists/creators who wanted smaller influencers with highly engaged followings to share their content to extend their reach and awareness.

As Pearpop has grown, brands have been drawn to its ability to execute influencer activations directly in a quick, targeted, frictionless, hyper-localized, economically attractive manner. Pearpop’s self-serve marketplace is a win/win for creators and brands because it’s as simple for brands to find creators as placing a Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn ad.

The briefs go out as a type of casting call and brands are instantly/automatically paired directly with relevant creators. Brands can accept all that apply or specify to approve each influencer before they post.

“Brands play an absolutely critical role in the Creator Economy, and technology has the power to streamline access to the most relevant creators for a brand in the same way Uber and Airbnb streamlined access to cars or home rentals. As just one example, Pearpop shrinks the average time it takes to launch an influencer program from 6 weeks to 6 hours,” said Morrison.

Another aspect creators like is how easy it is to “get found” because of both the way they’re listed in the database, and how challenges are shared.

While the “Creator Economy” is experiencing hockey stick growth, the sad reality, is only about 1% of creators earn a living from their content. Social media platforms have been the primary beneficiaries.

The Wall St. Journal reported the top 1% of streamers on Twitch earn more than half of all streamer revenue, and the majority made less than $120 each in the first 3 quarters of 2021. In spite of that, the number of creators increased 48% in 2021

Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”

Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.

Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking

“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”

a global pandemic struck, markets crashed, and the possibility of a democratic socialist presidency in America started to fade. Much of our work with clients has been about how to address new audiences in a time of massive fragmentation and the collapse of consensus reality.

All the while, people have been eager to launch new products more focused on impressions than materiality, and “spending on experiences” has become the standard of premium consumption.

it’s time to reassess the consumer experience that came along with the neoliberal fantasy of “unlimited” movement of people, goods and ideas around the globe.

Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas. We also believe that the experience economy is dying, its key commodity (umami) has changed status, and nobody knows what’s coming next.

Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline. It was the X-factor that made a certain MA-1 worth 100x as much as its identical twin.

“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial. Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything.

What was actually happening was the enrichment of financial assets over the creation of any ‘real wealth’ along with corresponding illusions of progress. As very little of this newly minted money has been invested into building new productive capacity, infrastructure, or actually new things, money has just been sloshing around in a frothy cesspool – from WeWork to Juicero to ill-advised real estate Ponzi to DTC insanity, creating a global everything-bubble.

Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning. Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.

The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. What’s made us so gullible, and this whole process possible, was an inexhaustible appetite for umami.

eyond its synergistic effect, umami has a few other sensory effects that are relevant to our theory. For one, it creates the sense of thickness and body in food. (“Umami adds body…If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.”) For another, it’s released when foods break down into parts. (“When organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove when you cook meat, over time when you age a parmesan cheese, by fermentation as in soy sauce or under the sun as a tomato ripens. When glutamate becomes L-glutamate, that’s when things get “delicious.””) These three qualities: SYNERGY, IMPRESSION OF THICKNESS, and PARTS > WHOLE, are common to cultural umami, as well.

Umami hunting was a way for the West to consume an exotic, ethnic, global “taste” that was also invisible and up to their decoding / articulation.

when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.

strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is” “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be” “This is both too much and not enough” “I shouldn’t be here but i am” “This could be anywhere but it’s here”

Parts > Whole is just another way of saying a combination of things has emergent properties. In itself this doesn’t mean much, as almost any combination of things has emergent properties, especially in the domains of taste and culture. Coffee + vinegar is worse than its constitutive parts. A suit + sneakers is a greater kind of corny than either worn separately. Most emergence is trivial. The Umami Theory of Value centers on losing your sense of what’s trivial and what’s valuable.

If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident. Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time.

This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.

Content creators chasing engagement, regardless of what kind, to grow their followings happens all the time. And content creators morphing into a weird caricature of themselves much to the chagrin of their audience is pretty normal too.

unlike still-image memes, we still think they must contain some kind of truthfulness to them. And, worse, the more they’re shared, the more we believe it. So when we see a video like the ones Zesu makes — something that appears to be shot out in the world, without any immediately obvious tells that it’s staged, being passed around different platforms — we continue to share it as if it were real. And smart creators, like Zesu, or the porn star with the fake podcast, are taking advantage of that as a growth hack. But it’s also hard not to think that this is, at a macro level, making social media a more annoying place to be.

Not only are ads present on every physical surface you can imagine, they are also on every digital surface. Websites have ads, the most popular apps in the world are made by advertising companies, and many of the accounts people follow are walking billboards.

The purposive design, production and marketing of legal but health-demoting products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure for maximum profit has been called ‘limbic capitalism’. In this article, drawing on alcohol and tobacco as key examples, we extend this framework into the digital realm. We argue that ‘limbic platform capitalism’ is a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities and populations. Accessed routinely through everyday digital devices, social media platforms aggressively intensify limbic capitalism because they also work through embodied limbic processes. These platforms are designed to generate, analyse and apply vast amounts of personalised data in an effort to tune flows of online content to capture users’ time and attention, and influence their affects, moods, emotions and desires in order to increase profits.

A hundred years ago, when image creation and distribution was more constrained, commerce was arranged by class. You can conceive of it as a vertical model, with high and low culture, and magazines and product catalogs that represent each class segment. Different aspirational images are shown to consumers, and each segment aspires upward to the higher level.

The world we live in is no longer dominated by a single class hierarchy. Today you have art, sport, travel, climbing, camping, photography, football, skate, gamer.

Class still exists, but there’s no longer just one aesthetic per class. Instead, “class” is expressed merely by price points that exist within consumer subcultural categories

In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume. Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web. While Reddit communities for gear were self-organizing consumer subcultures from one direction, companies and ad networks were working toward the same goal from the other direction.

API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post

way: in the cultural production service economy, all culture is made in service of for-profit brands, at every scale and size.

European and American commentators of all political stripes recognize the current cultural moment as one that is stuck in some way. Endless remakes and reboots, endless franchises, cinematic universes, and now metaverses filled with brands who talk to each other; a culture of nostalgia with no real macro narrative

Beyond our workplaces, what else is stepping in to provide a sense of community and belonging?

All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins. This seemingly insurmountable gap is what my workshops were trying to address. But what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it?

Culture is a process, with the end result of shaping human minds.

Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind. All communication now approaches propaganda, and language itself has become somebody else’s agenda. Little

When you bought Bitcoin and Ether, it’s with the knowledge that there was also a culture there to become part of. Now years later, there are many tribes to “buy into,” from Bitcoin Christians to Bitcoin carnivores, from Ethereum permissionless free market maxis to Ethereum self-organizing collective decentralized coop radicals. Even if none of these appeal to you, you still end up becoming what “the space” (crypto’s collective term for itself) calls a “crypto person.” The creation of more and more “crypto people” is driven by the new revenue model cryptocurrencies exhibit. The business logic of these tokens is “number go up,” a feat accomplished by getting as many people to buy the token as possible. In other words, the upside opportunity is achieved with mass distribution of Bitcoin and Ethereum culture—the expansion of what it means to be an ETH holder into new arenas and practices. Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.

Under CPSE models, companies brand products. They point to subcultures to justify the products’ existence, and use data marketing to sort people into starterpack-like demographics. Subcultures become consumerized subcultures, composed of products

Authenticity, I came to understand, was more than a culture of irony and suspicion of everything commercial culture has to offer. It drew on a deep moral source that runs through our culture, a stance of self-definition, a stance of caring deeply about the value of individuality.

if you go into the Shanghai City Guide, it’s easy to put together a list of must-visit restaurants or family-friendly activities. Plus, not only is it easy to create bookmarks of places you want to save, but you can also browse other public bookmarks curated by creators and influencers, and then sort the bookmarks by location or distance. This type of bookmark discovery is a completely different use case than how we use Google Maps or Yelp today. Our Western location-based platforms use a manual, search-based process that primarily works for high-intent discovery. In contrast, thanks to the algorithms and user behavior on Douyin, the app can push new places to a user that he or she would never have thought to search for. Short video effectively enables the continuous discovery of the best places around you, and it gets better with every swipe as the platform better understands you and your interests.