TikTok's Congressional Hearings Remind Us of the Tech Illiteracy Among Our Lawmakers

It’s painful to see just how technologically illiterate US lawmakers are, and I’m not even from America. I’m just a Panamanian that is tired of seeing the top decision-makers of a world superpower struggle with the most basic tech concepts.

US tech companies like Google and Meta have a significant presence in many countries, and changes to their operations in the US can affect users in other countries as well. Laws and regulations in the US usually set an international standard for technology and internet-related issues. Unfortunately, many countries, including my own, look to the US leaders as experts in these areas when the reality couldn’t be more different.

I ain’t opposed to regulation. I’m only opposed to bad regulation, and bad regulation is guaranteed without a proper understanding of technology. We don’t want to hamper innovation or slow down progress, we just want Congress to know what the hell they are talking about. Seriously, these are our elected officials, it’s kind of embarrassing.

As TikTok faces a potential ban amid concerns over its possible influence from the Chinese government, the congressional hearings have made this issue even clearer. TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, has been subjected to a series of ridiculous questions, highlighting how out of touch many representatives are with the technology they are trying to regulate.

For example, Richard Hudson, a Republican from North Carolina asked Chew if TikTok accesses the home Wi-Fi network. Any technologically literate person would know that any social media app needs internet access to function. Another baffling question was "Can you [Chew] say with 100 percent certainty that TikTok does not use the phone’s camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm?".

Unfortunately, this lack of understanding is not exclusive to TikTok's case; Google CEO Sundar Pichai was once asked about iPhones, a product they do not make. Mark Zuckerberg was also asked how Facebook made money if it was free to users (hint: they sell ads). 

This technological illiteracy is the main roadblock for lawmakers to effectively regulate a rapidly changing industry like tech. The US had a solution to this problem once: the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Established in 1972, the OTA was created to educate and brief both the House and Senate on scientific and technical issues. The OTA had a staff of approximately 140 scientists, engineers, and technologists.

But surprise, in 1995, the federal government dissolved the OTA, deeming it "too wasteful", with the assumption that government officials were capable enough to understand and govern the issues and technologies of the day.

This assumption has been proven wrong time and time again, as we have just seen in the recent TikTok hearings and previously with Google and Facebook.

So, what can be done to fix this STEM illiteracy problem among our politicians?

We could reinstate the OTA or a similar entity, providing lawmakers with the necessary expertise to make informed decisions. But another better option could be to encourage more STEM-educated individuals to run for public office, bringing their knowledge directly to the decision-making process. This is what I’m all about.

We need more STEM professionals in government, who can develop actual solutions that work for everybody. With more tech-savvy representatives, maybe the debate over which app kids get to make dancing videos with will be replaced by more thoughtful conversations about how to use tech responsibly and ethically.

It is paramount for our politicians to understand the impact of the technologies they are trying to regulate, the science behind them, and how the industry works. These people get paid a ton of money just for making decisions. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

How Much You Should Spend on Marketing to Grow Your Business?

The cost of doing marketing might seem high, but the cost of not doing marketing is even higher. Companies that don’t inject a good amount of their budget into customer acquisition and brand awareness will have a harder time than their competition when trying to scale profitably.

Competitors that invest more in marketing get to be light years ahead of those that see marketing as a cost rather than an investment. There is a reason why, in this context, the term ROAS (return on Ad spend) is essentially the same as ROI.

But how much should you spend on marketing?

Well, it depends. There are lots of factors to consider when making such a decision like your company’s overall operating budget, your business objectives, your company’s stage of growth, and the maturity of its product.

A good place to start is by allocating around 3% to 5% of your company’s total revenue to marketing if you’re a startup or small business. If you’re a larger company, you should be spending anywhere from 7% to 12%. And if you’re a large enterprise company, you should be spending upwards of 15% percent.

Of course, these are just rough estimates based on industry comparisons but they do help give you a general idea of where to start.

At the end of the day, the amount you spend on marketing should be relative to your company’s size and its goals. If you want to acquire more customers and grow your business, you need to be prepared to invest in marketing.

It’s an essential part of doing business.

How much content do we skim by or skip through on a daily basis? Some studies say we are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 branded messages every single day. This includes each billboard, sign, brochure, TV or Radio commercial, every email, and every coupon. Most major movies include product placement and if you follow any type of influencer, from athletes to make-up gurus, chances are they have probably recommended you some product or brand in the past. Ads are omnipresent within our social media networks, from being the first 5 seconds of every YouTube video to following you around from page to page.

However, even though the ad exposure is so high, we notice or really pay attention to very few of them. We are so used to them being everywhere that we just sort of tune them out, like how our brain usually ignores our nose from our field of view because we are used to it. When it comes to not noticing advertising, the concept is usually referred to as banner blindness and it comes from all the web banners we see on the internet. The idea is that the vast majority of advertisements out there are not attention-worthy because we’ve already seen thousands of similar versions before. Our brains are just bored of the same things over and over again.

A very common path of action when it comes to choosing your marketing strategy is to look at what others in your own industry are doing and then try to follow in their footsteps. This will inevitably make your advertising or your brand feel similar to theirs, which in turn makes your brand stand out less. The idea isn’t to blend in but to stand out.

As marketers, our job is to fight this invisibility for our brands. We combat this banner blindness by communicating with customers in new, and unexpected ways, by showing them something different, something worth sharing, something funny, or useful. The idea is to stimulate our audience’s emotions in a way that doesn’t just get them to notice us but to remember us.

The easiest example that comes to mind is Coinbase’s Superbowl ad. It was just a floating QR code bouncing around on a black screen for 30 seconds. That was it! No celebrities, no over-the-top film production, no jokes, and no logos. With most Superbowl ads featuring famous actors and crazy special effects, Coinbase’s ad stood out completely from every other traditional commercial that aired that day. The Superbowl audience had to face a 30-second spot of a mysterious QR code bouncing around the screen, this is gasoline for curiosity. Millions of fans around the US grabbed their phone, as they already usually do during commercials, and scanned the code to solve the mystery. In turn, Coinbase’s website had so much traffic that day that it crashed. The ad performed so well that the Coinbase app rose almost immediately to the top of the app store. All of this by doing something untraditional. 

Even though marketing is 50% business, it’s also 50% art. We need to allow ourselves to have fun and try new things. Creativity is the last unfair advantage any company can have over one another. So invest in creativity, it’s an economic multiplier.

Machine learning models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were used to generate visual renders and abstractions of the world’s biggest brands by using text-based prompts. Each image below was created by artificial intelligence without any human retouching.

Duolingo is a brand that has managed to stay within popular culture for several years now. Now Duolingo is joining forces with HBO to promote the sequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon.

They launched an advertising campaign written in High-Valyrian, one of the fictional languages ​​of the show. Only the biggest fans of GOT who have studied the language will be able to decipher the billboards. But for the curious who want to be able to learn the language, the advertising directs them to the Duolingo application where one can learn any language, even fictional ones like the ones from Game of Thrones.

Duolingo explains that the reason these types of campaigns are effective is that they’ve learned that popular content drives interest in learning languages. Their data shows that there is a direct correlation between the growth of new users and cultural trends. For example, with the success of the Squid Game, Duolingo has seen 40% more interest in learning Korean on its platform.

With the anticipation for the new Game of Thrones series, this is a super smart strategy from Duolingo, they continue to tie their brand to iconic content and popular culture and for the more hardcore fans, this gives them a way to dive even deeper. in the world of Westeros.

When it comes to marketing, there are only two strategies that really work. The first and most obvious one is to have the cheapest price. This is the strategy that Spirit Airlines or Walmart uses for example, they sell exactly the same thing as their competitors but at a fraction of the price. This strategy is particularly effective with commodities like water, gasoline or food, for example.

The second and more difficult strategy is differentiation. Differentiation is the added value that exists in the mind of your target. It doesn’t always need to be an objective or tangible value. It’s the reason why one would prefer a Louis Vuitton bag to a Jansport one even though they both are bags and fit the same amount of things. 

Differentiation is how some of the world's largest companies have managed to grow into the businesses they are today. Amazon grew thanks to being the only company offering 2-day shipping on millions of different products. Netflix grew thanks to being the only company offering access to thousands of movies online for a monthly subscription. Uber differentiated itself from taxis and Airbnb from hotels, eventhough they are both competitors.

The downside of a good differentiation strategy is that eventually your competitors will start to copy you and offer the same to your customers. But that's the key word: “eventually”. Since your brand was the first, it has what is called 1st-Movers Advantage, that is, a competitive advantage with your market segment. This 1st-Movers Advantage allows the brand to establish strong brand recognition and capture a large segment of the market before competitors arrive.

It's the reason why Ford has remained one of the largest carmakers in America for the last 100 years and the reason we use Google and not Bing, or Duck Duck Go. Everyone remembers the first man on the moon, but not everyone remembers the second

Within the market category of water, there is very little differentiation. Most bottled water brands have products that are substitutes of each other, very similar packaging and colors. They all focus on the freshness and purity of their products. Competitors like Volvic, Dasani, Nestle, Purisima or Cristalina only have a logo but not necessarily a brand and they play in a market of sameness.

This was Liquid Death's opportunity to completely set itself apart from the crowd, starting with the packaging. Unlike the rest of its competitors, Liquid Death doesn’t sell bottled water, they sell canned water. This creates a very big visual difference inside stores and supermarkets.

The fact that their product is canned is also part of Liquid Death's mission, better defined by them as "Death to Plastic". It is a water brand that seeks to fight against the consumption of single-use plastics, which is why they use aluminum cans for their packaging, a material that is infinitely recyclable. It is a brand with a mission, strong values ​​, and a purpose that is difficult to find elsewhere in the industry.

In addition to the packaging and mission, there is another branding element that helps further differentiate and position Liquid Death as an entirely new product: the name. It's called Liquid Death for god’s sake. They sell the healthiest product possible and they dare put the word Death in the name. Many wouldn't make this risky decision, but Mike Cessario, the brand's creative director and founder, knew that selling water in a traditional way in a market oversaturated with traditional competitors was going to be harder than doing it in a non-traditional way.

The name is only one part of the company’s branding. Through all its designs, content, and language, Liquid Death manages to position itself as a Heavy Metal punk brand. They present themselves very much as an extreme, hardcore, horror product. Their logo is a skull with gothic text, their mascot is a shirtless serial killer with a can for a head, their TV commercials feature demons, torture, witchcraft (watch Superbowl brand activation below), cannibals and their newest brand ambassador is a porn star.

This narrative of breaking the unwritten rules makes this water seem like an entirely new product in the consumer's mind, fueling even more adoption and sales in a difficult-to-penetrate market. They have been on the market for less than 5 years, and they already have their cans in more than 16,000 stores across the US.

Liquid Death is the perfect example of how creativity can be an economic multiplier.

Twitter was founded in 2006 and went public in 2013, meaning that the blue bird app has been a publicly-traded company for the majority of its existence. We are talking about the same platform that silenced a president, the same app at the center of political scandals, civil revolts, and new internet economies.

I am going to start this article by making a bold claim. Twitter, which started as a simple and innocent text-based social network, has now become the most important asset in the world, which is why the richest person ever just paid over $44 Billion to take it private again.

Our media landscape looked very different before Dorsey co-founded Twitter back in 2006. Before social media, as we know it, people used to be social online only through public web forums, chat rooms, and e-mails. This means that there were millions of disconnected conversations happening in a million different places. After Facebook and Twitter came into popularity, the conversation/information market share started accumulating towards the top networks. 

Facebook grew up as the digital version of your physical social life, a platform in which you friended people you actually knew, and the content in your feed was about people in your social circle. Facebook created another layer of connection for those already connected. Twitter, on the other hand, connected the disconnected. We’ve never met most of the people we interact with on Twitter because Twitter is more than a social network, it’s a topic network. What connects users with one another is the topics they are interested in, not their social circles. 

That is one of the main reasons why Twitter is the most powerful asset in the world: the fact that it has the power to bring people together under shared ideologies. It sounds obvious now, but back then nobody thought Twitter would become the political, and economical lever that it is today. 

The signs were clear when Obama won back in 2008. Back then, he had the most followed account in the platform, and his team largely credits their social media efforts as instrumental to his election campaign. No politician would ever dare to run for office without using social media after that. Then a few years later, the same app proved to be instrumental in toppling dictator regimes across the Middle East. People were able to organize like never before in order to change the status quo of their country. Now, it’s no wonder why most social movements today begin with hashtags. 

Today, Ukrainians are using Twitter to organize themselves against invading Russians. Politicians use it to understand public sentiment and spread political messages. Journalists use it to break relevant news. Bad actors use it to spread misinformation campaigns. Scientists use it to fight misinformation and share breakthroughs. Developers use it to promote cryptocurrencies and NFTs and I use it to stay informed about marketing trends. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of different people.

Now with people linking Twitter to the spread of hate speech, fake news, and violence, the company is dealing with a massive ethical liability dilemma. The platform that was started to further free speech now paradoxically finds itself censoring tons of accounts and flagging information for containing controversial keywords. This brings me to a tweet Musk posted right after the acquisition was officially announced. He said: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”.

Elon understands that Twitter is not just a social network like Instagram or LinkedIn, it is a completely different animal, one with the power to make or break democracies. The platform is a simple open message broadcasting protocol and as Naval Ravikant said, all protocols converge on a winner-takes-all monopoly. A protocol monopoly that dictates who gets their voice heard and who gets it silenced. A protocol monopoly that can overthrow governments. 

It’s no wonder why rich powerful people want to control such a powerful asset as Twitter is. This isn’t the equivalent of Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, Twitter’s acquisition is the equivalent of buying the newsstand where the Washington Post is being displayed and not just that newspaper, but almost every other newspaper, magazine, podcast, article, or type of media content out there. By buying Twitter, Elon now owns the town square where everybody on the internet wants a voice.

Back in March 2020, I was an NYU grad student traveling to Panama for spring break. Skip to a couple of weeks later, and I’m still in Panama, not being able to fly back because of a certain virus. NYU stopped holding classes on its campus and told every student to download an app I had never heard of before called Zoom. Millions of other students and professors across the world were also instantly catapulted into the world of remote learning. 

Like most of us, I didn’t think this setup would last longer than a semester. Then months went by, the news kept getting scarier, and the light at the end of the tunnel was nowhere to be seen. Airline stocks plummeted and Zoom’s stock price reached all time highs, the world economy had accepted a new status quo: remote was here to stay. 

I graduated in December of that same year and received a PDF instead of a paper diploma. Now, it was time to find a job and put that virtual education to good use. I thought getting a job in the US wouldn’t be possible because I was still stuck in Panama. All that changed when an American ad agency gave me a chance at doing freelance art direction for them, all the way from my bedroom. 

For some context, Panama’s lockdown was still in full effect with police patrolling the streets to make sure people weren’t breaking their curfew. Nobody had a social life, and those who tried to would either get reported by some noisy neighbor, fined by the government or shamed on social media. 

Everyday I was working in my boxers alone in my room for long hours, with my only human interactions coming in the form of Slack messages. This was the perfect formula for getting burnt out and depressed. Work from Home was starting to feel like Live at Work and the line that defined my work-life balance was starting to get erased. 

This is when I began experimenting with the possibilities of WFH. To get some company and a change in scenery, I started going to work at my girlfriend’s place and vice versa. The more comfortable we got with this notion, the more we started working from different types of places. We started taking beach trips that were weeks long, and we could do so because we had a good internet connection. The casual ocean dips in between meetings didn’t get in the way of getting more work done. So much so that my girlfriend and I took it one step further, and decided we could probably do this from another country if we wanted. 

Next thing we knew, we were flying to Mexico, renting a car and doing a month-long road trip along the pacific coast. We were able to stay in lots of different cities, towns and beaches, as well as get immersed in the culture and tradition of each place we visited. We did all of this while still taking the same amount of Zoom meetings and churning out the same amount of work. 

This trip was possible too because we were both earning in dollars and spending in pesos, like Tim Ferris preaches in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. The food and the Airbnbs were extremely cheap when compared to prices in New York or even Panama City. We felt that as long as we kept making a living, we could stay in Mexico indefinitely. 

This trip made everything click for me. I was happier and more productive than I had been in a long time, I would even go as far as claiming that being happier led to me being more productive. I was able to start juggling more and more projects, to the point that I was able to consider doing this forever, not working from home, but rather working from wherever there’s WiFi.

If you have a remote job, I implore you, take advantage of this opportunity, get off your couch and explore other internet connections, you won’t regret it.

It all started with Mike Winkleman (A.K.A. Beeple) in March 2021. After he auctioned a digital collage through Christie’s Auction House for a whopping $69 million, the word Non-Fungible Token entered the mainstream. This sale kickstarted a flurry of interest in the NFT space that has attracted audiences worldwide trying to be part of the movement. What started as a really niche tech space became a platform for millions of people around the globe to create, sell and collect tokens. Millions of people paying attention to the space mean brands are paying attention as well, and they are starting to learn how to capitalize in this new untapped market. Here are 10 brands that are making noise within the web3 space.

1. VISA

One great example of this is when Visa bought CryptoPunk #7610. The fintech company purchased a 24x24 pixel digital avatar for about $150,000 and added it to their art collection. This example doesn't necessarily move the needle for Visa’s bottom line, but it does something a lot more meaningful. This move signaled to the crypto-community that Visa sees them, values them, and plans to play a major role in facilitating crypto payments in the near future.

2. Budweiser

One of the biggest beers in the world, Budweiser, bought their very own ENS domain name. For those unfamiliar with an ENS domain, think about them like DNS domains but for your web3 identity. Instead of using a 40 character wallet address, Budweiser can use beer.eth. Very shortly after, they changed their Twitter handle to Beer.eth. At the same time, they launched a vintage beer can NFT collection signaling to crypto-Twitter that Budweiser is building a presence for its iconic brand inside the metaverse.

3. ATARI

Back in March, Atari, the company behind the OG iconic video game PONG, announced a partnership with Decentral Games, the company behind one of the most popular virtual worlds called Decentraland. Atari purchased a 20-parcel virtual piece of land and built a casino in which people can gamble their cryptocurrencies just like they would in real life. They even had a launch party with DJ Dillon Francis setting the mood while people in the form of avatars were playing blackjack and roulette.

4. STELLA ARTOIS

Another beer brand that knows how to leverage the space in a way that makes sense with its brand identity is Stella Artois. The brand is one of the biggest sponsors of premium sports events like tennis and polo. That is not an exemption for web3 where they partnered with Zed Run, the company behind virtual horse racing and breeding. They auctioned rare horse NFTs and built a branded race track, a move that keeps the brand positioned as the official sponsor of premium sports and e-sports.

5. NIKE

The apparel company is quietly getting ready for the metaverse. First, they filed several trademarks that make apparent their plans of launching digital sneaker and apparel collections in the near future. Then they partnered with the online game platform Roblox to build Nikeland, a virtual world modeled after the company’s HQ. In it, players can be outfitted with Nike products and play different game modes. Now, Nike acquired the digital sneaker design studio RTFKT, which allows users to wear collectibles through different online environments. These moves are major indicators of Nike’s transition and adoption of web3.

6. THE NBA

Through a partnership with DapperLabs, the company behind Cryptokitties, they launched NBA Top Shot, a platform for buying and trading NBA game collectibles in the form of trading cards. Very similar to physical trading cards, in the platform you can buy a pack, open it and discover which NFTs you collected. Then you can sell them and based on how rare the collectible is you can even make a profit. A Lebron James card sold for almost a whopping $400,000 this year.

7. ADIDAS

Earlier this year, Adidas bought an exclusive Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT and made it its Twitter profile picture for the Adidas Original account and shortly after that announced that they had bought a piece of virtual real estate in Decentraland’s competing platform, The Sandbox. These moves by the brand garnered a lot of attention for it from the crypto space. This attention made their first NFT launch a complete success. They partnered with BAYC, Gmoney (a popular NFT investor and influencer), and PUNKs Comics (a comic series featuring CryptoPunks and Apes) to launch a collaborative NFT collection named “Into the Metaverse”. Those who were able to mint one of the 30,000 tokens will also receive exclusive Adidas apparel from the collaboration. Adidas made $25 Million from the collection not counting royalties from resales in secondary markets. 

8. Time Magazine and The Rolling Stone Magazine

Time magazine and Rolling Stone magazine are dipping their toes in the NFT world by auctioning limited edition magazine covers as non-fungible tokens. Time’s NFTs are named TimePieces and they roll out different collections periodically by partnering with different artists. The Rolling Stone magazine, on the other hand, also partnered with BAYC to feature an Ape in their cover, which later sold for more than $400,000. 

9. Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, recently listed the first Wikipedia entry ever as an NFT. This entry was edited by Wales 20 years ago and it literally just reads “Hello World”, a phrase once common for programmers to make sure a language’s compiler, development environment, and run-time are all correctly installed. This 20-year-old digital artifact was auctioned through Christie’s for $750,000 and some of the proceeds will go to Wikimedia Foundation initiatives.

10. Louis Vuitton

This year, Louis Vuitton celebrates 200 years and is paying a tribute to its founder by launching a limited apparel collection as well as an adventure mobile game called “Louis The Game”. The phone app follows a character around while it needs to find 200 candles to commemorate Vuitton’s birthday. It is an adventure open-world game that feels reminiscent of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Through the game, the character can find 30 embedded NFTs that were designed by the one and only Beeple. These Beeple Louis Vuitton NFTs can only be collected by playing and exploring the game. The Beeple partnership doesn’t end there, the brand also tapped the artist for the Paris Fashion Week this year. The fashion house incorporated some of his artworks called “Everydays” for its spring/summer collection. This is a great way for the brand to be relevant and be able to reach a younger generation as well as expand beyond fashion. 

Some other brands that deserve some honorable mentions for trying to ride the wave are Campbell Soup, Disney, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Charmin Toilet Paper, Pringles, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Playboy Magazine, Formula 1, Pepsi, and even Coca-Cola.

Google Trends search for NFT

NFTs have been around since 2015, but it hasn’t been until this year that the term started popping up everywhere. 

And like with any other emerging digital trend, there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation that comes with NFTs. So I decided to write a quick piece about what they are, and why you should know and care about them.

So what are they?

Simply put, NFT stands for Non-fungible token. Something that is not fungible is an asset that can’t be replaced, or it's unique in its nature. For example, a painting like the Mona Lisa derives a lot of its value from it being an irreplaceable piece, meaning there is only one original. On the other hand, something fungible is any asset that can be replaced by anything of the same type. Currency is a great example of a fungible asset, you can trade a five-dollar bill for another one and the value stays the same, there isn’t any uniqueness to the value of each individual dollar note.

At a very macro level, most NFTs (or Nifties) exist within the Ethereum Blockchain, a massive network of digital ledgers. People use it to build applications and trade assets like cryptocurrencies and NFTs. These non-fungible tokens can be anything digital like an illustration or a music album. The band Kings of Leon made headlines recently for selling their latest album as an NFT and making over 2 Million dollars just from the sale of the limited edition album. And understandably, a lot of the confusion stems from this, how can something digital which can be copied, pirated, and downloaded an infinite amount of times for free, be so valuable? The simple answer is that the value stems from the proof of ownership as recorded in the blockchain. Anybody can have a print of the Mona Lisa, but only one person can be the owner of the original. Scarcity is the name of the game.

A lot of the excitement surrounding NFTs comes from the art world. Artists and art buyers alike are turning towards NFTs as a transactional medium for art pieces for several reasons as explained by Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Chief Product Officer.

• Crypto Art can’t be counterfeited since it only exists in the blockchain where its ownership is recorded and visible forever.

• NFTs have immense portability and liquidity since you can trade any cyptoasset within minutes in most NFT marketplaces.

• NFT art also permits the artists to gain royalties in perpetuity for every future transaction of the piece. Imagine the families of dead artists being able to receive compensation for the artwork in perpetuity, the same way it happens for the families of famous music artists like The Beatles.

All of this brings me to Mike Winklemann, also known online as Beeple or Beeple Crap.

He recently made headlines for selling an NFT art piece for 69 Million dollars at Christie’s, through one of its first NFT art auctions.

This puts him within the top 3 most valuable living artists of our time. The piece is called Everydays: The First 5000 Days, and it is a collage of 5000 digital art pieces Beeple created over the years. 

NFTs have also sparked a renaissance for the sports trading card communities. The NBA launched NBA TopShot, a marketplace for selling and buying game highlights sold as NFTs. One of these highlights sold for a whopping $200,000, it was a dunk made by Lebron James against the Houston Rockets back on February 6. The news caught my attention and I bought myself a couple of NBA highlights worth around $50 each and I don’t even watch basketball. Similarly, there is another platform for fantasy soccer, where a Cristiano Ronaldo trading card sold for $290,000.

Art and sports are just where NFTs are the most prevalent right now but they are slowly popping up everywhere across the digital landscape. From Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, auctioning the first tweet ever for over $2.5 Million to Taco Bell selling a limited collection of taco-themed GIFs, NFTs can be anything that is digital. 

NFTs allow for anything digital to be minted and traced through the blockchain, so I believe we are just beginning to understand their real potential. But for right now, I believe they are pure hype fueled by get-rich-quick schemes. Everybody is starting to mint every single kind of digital product, from cryptotitties to cryptotweets, which leads me to think that the market will be hypersaturated by all sorts of NFTs and consequently they will lose their uniqueness or their perceived value. 

A lot of NFTs are also only tradeable in specific platforms that host the digital files, so for example, if someday NBA TopShot goes bust, all your NFTs become worthless. Regardless of whether people still think NFTs are cool in 5 years, they will still play an important role in society as they will help with smart contracts, proving ownership, and creating a more democratic market for digital products.

If you want to make your own NFTs I recommend starting through Mintable. And if you want to buy NFTs I recommend the following marketplaces to start dipping your toes in the waters:

• OpenSea (biggest NFT marketplace)

• NBA TopShot (NBA video collectibles)

• Sorare (soccer Trading Cards)

• Valuables (autographed Tweets marketplace)

• Rarible (crypto art marketplace)

This is a new space that will slowly but surely take more form as more people explore it and find value from it but if you are trying to get rich through NFTs, let me just tell you it is probably going to be very hard.

Back in 2015, Starbucks launched a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaign called #RaceTogether. The campaign’s objective was to get Americans to talk about the elephant in the room: Race. Baristas all across the US were encouraged by management to casually chat with customers about race relations and to write the” Race Together” slogan on the cups. The idea was to kickstart a national conversation about race in response to the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man shot by policemen. There were good intentions behind the campaign but unfortunately, it backfired.

Companies create CSR programs for several reasons. First, the bigger the company, the bigger the influence. In most cases, you don’t get bigger than Starbucks as they are a global company with over 300,000 employees. Second, 81% of Americans believe that corporations should take action to address important issues facing society. This means consumers want the companies they buy from to be agents of change in their community. Furthermore, one-third of Americans actively seek information about the position companies take on divisive social and political issues. Inaction and ambivalence from brands against issues like these can ultimately harm the brand in the long run. It’s clear that consumers want the brands they patronize to deliver more, not just in terms of service or product value, but in terms of making the world a better place.

These CSR programs create value for different groups. Obviously, it creates values for the people being helped by these programs. For example, when Starbucks promoted sustainable coffee-growing practices and developed guidelines for ethical sourcing of coffee, they were ultimately helping the people working in the fields, they were helping the communities that depend on the cultivation of the coffee beans. Additionally, these practices have ecological implications too, by developing ethical guidelines and promoting sustainable practices across their supply chain, Starbucks is making a positive impact as their practices are better for the land and for the people that work on it.

CSR programs also create value for employees. There is a high employee satisfaction rate within Starbucks, with 79% of baristas recommending the job to their friends. These are higher rates than some of the smaller regional competitors like Peet’s Coffee. Eventually, Starbucks was named one of the best places to work in. This all goes to show that benefits and salaries are just as important as the way that companies decide to tackle issues affecting real people.

CSR programs also create value for the company as I said, inaction and ambivalence from brands against social issues can ultimately hurt the brand in the long run. Ultimately, corporate responsibility creates value for consumers, because now they are not just drinking a cup of coffee, they are drinking a sustainable and ethically grown cup of coffee. This added value is passed on to the consumers who will keep picking the brand because of the ideological added value that stems from the hot beverage.

Starbucks eventually started running into problems with its #RaceTogether campaign. The company was met with widespread criticism and was mocked by social media users. TV shows like Saturday Night Live, for example, mocked the campaign in one of their comedy sketches.

Employees agreed, they thought it would be uncomfortable to have to talk about serious topics such as race with commuters picking up an iced coffee. The main reason behind all this criticism is the fact that a lot of people on different sides of the aisle believed that Starbucks was overstepping their limits in regards to sensitive social issues that don’t belong inside a coffee shop. America doesn’t want a rich white CEO preaching about race.

Starbucks would benefit if they keep developing their CSR programs but need to be very selective and careful with which ones are right for the brand. For example, promoting sustainable coffee-growing practices and developing ethical guidelines for sourcing coffee is right on brand. At their core, Starbucks is a coffee brand, it makes logical sense in the consumers’ minds, that they would try to make the process greener and more ethical now that they are operating in different communities all over the world. Tackling racism is something that of course comes from a good place with the best intentions, but since they aren't specifically related to the company’s core activities, they are a fairer game for criticism. I would recommend postponing talking about race altogether, and instead, as some critics say, maybe Starbucks should tackle diversity within its own executive ranks first.

The theory states that people are either right-brained or left-brained, this means that one side of the brain is more dominant over the other. People tend to classify creative or artistic individuals as right-brained, and analytical and number-oriented individuals as left-brained.

This theory came from the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain function very differently. 

The left side of the brain is usually associated with linear thinking, logic, and math, and it is usually better for reading, writing, and calculating. On the other hand, the right side is associated with imagination, visualization, and intuition. 

However, after a 2-year study including over 1,000 people, neuroscientists weren’t able to find evidence of one hemisphere dominating the other. 

The two sides of the brain function differently but they do work together and complement each other. For example, the left side of the brain is responsible for reading, but understanding tone and rhythm comes from the right-side.

This is why I refuse to accept the idea that some people are either left-brained or right-brained. No science supports it and personality traits and learning styles vary from person to person no matter their profession, skill set, or industry category.

The best graphic designers are experts in color and layout as well as in measurements and aspect ratios. The best people in analytics are great with datasets and even better at visualizing them and telling stories with them. No matter the profession, a unique combination of both cognitive realms will allow a person to see patterns and connect dots in a way that they weren’t able to before. 

If you are a “creative” person and numbers are your enemy, remember to keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Adding data to the creative mix will always make the work stronger. And if you are a “numbers” person and constantly claim you are not creative, I invite you to grab a notepad and start doodling or writing about something that interests you, even numbers, you might end up surprising yourself.