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As news worsens, the potential for comedy rises. No one understands this inverse relationship better than the team behind The Onion, which has channeled todays dystopian political slide into banger headlines (Trump Spends Entire U.K. Trip Trying To Figure Out Where He Knows Prince Andrew From). The news site has attracted nearly 54,000 subscribers since its relaunch last year, and is on track to generate $6 million in revenue in 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal. Which is why it seemed particularly comical when, in May, the satirical news outlet issued a press release announcing a foray into advertising in order to expand its marketplace dominance. Companies could enlist writers at The Onion for creative projects, because nothingnot spouses, not children, not fragile elderly parentsmatters more . . . than helping brands tell their stories. It seemed like a classic Onion spoof of capitalism and corporate jargon. But for once, The Onion was not doing a bit. Or at least we dont think it was. The Onion has launched what its describing as a strategy and creative agency that operates adjacent to, yet distinct from, the publication. Called Americas Finestnamed for The Onions tagline, Americas Finest News Sourcethe agency is avowedly not a gag. Yet it gleefully satirizes itself in its own press release and social media posts. For The Onion, the agency represents an opportunity to create a new revenue stream: providing corporate clients with copy that is fresh, funny, and written by actual writers, to stand out from AI slop. Americas Finest currently has between five and ten clients, and has done work for Paramount, an ETF fund, and a nonprofit. Its comedy, but packaged as a brand message, says The Onions chief marketing officer, Leila Brillson. The Onions CEO, Ben Collins, sees no downside to the effort, unless we start working with ICE and Raytheon, he says. The Onion launches an Agency The Onion has been lampooning the news for almost 40 years, running classic headlines like “Black Guy Given Nation’s Worst Job” following Obamas election, and “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” after countless mass shootings. A surprising new coalition took over the website in April 2024, led by former NBC News reporter Collins, who pledged as the new CEO to give the writers more creative freedom. The publication relaunched a print version in August 2024; Collins reported recently that it is now the now the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States by subscribers, on a list right between the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, and growing fast. Brillson, who previously worked in marketing at Disney, Netflix, and Bumble, and then ran her own agency, says that it was she whod ushered through the agency idea. I don’t want to say that there were naysayers, she says of her initial pitch, but a lot of people didn’t fully understand what it looked like until it was up and running. The concept of an agency living within a media company is hardly newThe New York Timess T Brand Studio and The Washington Posts WP Creative Group have been operating custom content divisions since 2014 and 2021 respectively, creating stories that may look like standard articles but are really marketing for brands (and acknowledged as such). The Onion itself used to do something similar. Its previous owners, G/O Media, ran an in-house agency called Onion Labs from 2013 to 2019, which produced ads for brands such as Mr. Peanut and Whitecastle. It generated the kind of sponsored content that mirrored Onion stories, along with ads that ran on The Onion‘s own website. It was no small operation. At one point, Brillson says, 30 people worked for this full-service studio that had video capacity, which was costly to maintain. We simply dont live in that market anymore, Brillson says. Americas Finest operates differently. It produces copy for everything from social media posts to billboard adsbut The Onion plays no part in hosting or distributing the work. People are like, Will The Onion write about this? And we have to say, no, Brillson says. We have a pretty strong separation of church and state. Marnie Shure, the former managing editor of The Onion who now works as creative producer for Americas Finest, explains that we’re not necessarily trying to make everybody sound like The Onion. And while video capabilities exist, the focus is more tightly on copy, content, and strategy. To that end, The Onion is commissioning former writers. Louisa Kellogg, a senior staff writer from 2015 to 2018, now accepts agency assignments as they come in, and as they suit her schedule. Her first assignment, in October 2024, was a campaign for The Onion itself, writing fake testimonials from subscribers. She now writes copy for external clients. Comedy writers for hire The company put out the ambiguous press announcing Americas Finest in May; today, Americas Finest has a team of roughly eight writers, specifically ones who dont live in Chicago, including the L.A.-based Kellogg. Living near the The Onions Chicago headquarters is one of the news outlets rigid rules for editorial staffers, but it has left some Hall of Famers out there in the wilderness, Collins says. Americas Finest is a way for Onion management to support writers during a shaky time, in the aftermath of the writers strike, COVID, and the L.A. fires. We wanted to give them a chance to make some rent, he says, and use some of the world’s best comedy writers wh otherwise should be writing for Colbert. But that show is dead now. Americas Finest copywriters use the same system they did in the Onion newsroom: best joke wins. That very deliberate process, honed for almost 40 years, is something you can apply to projects, Shure says, even when the project is not a satirical newspaper. Since theyre remote, Kellogg says writers often email in their jokes (the ad copy), and Shure chooses the winner. The key difference is that its not just the punchline, but also the client brief, that will determine the victor. Clients like the real writingan antidote to the AI-generated slop that’s being presented as advertising right now, Collins saysand the fact that it can be comical. Ads just aren’t funny anymore, and it’s a disease, he says. I cant remember the last time I laughed at an advertisement. ‘If you cant beat em, join em’ Many of Americas Finests early clients are in the entertainment realm: the agency has written for Paramount, including for The Naked Gun, which did well in theaters this summer as R-rated comedies have floundered in recent years. (The agency is hesitant to identify other movie and TV clients: They don’t want to admit that they delegate out copywriting to anybody else, Collins says.) [Photo: courtesy of the author] Other clients have included nonprofits such Subversive ETFs, a fund that invests in equity securities of publicly traded companiesspecifically ones that, public disclosures indicate, sitting U.S. Congress members have invested in. Americas Finest created copy for social media and for posters that were recently wheatpasted around New York City that read: This should not be legal. Congress trades on inside information . . . But if you cant beat em, join em. The agency also works on events. It threw an off-beat party at SXSW for Project Liberty, a nonprofit, founded by billionaire executive Frank McCourt, aiming to create a people-powered internet by shifting control of data to individuals. (Americas Finest wrote the speeches, too.) It also helped throw a party in September for Mexican sports store Culto, themed around the cult of soccer as a religion (it featured a ball that predicted the future, among other curiosities). People come to us knowing they’re going to get some unhinged stuff and might be made uncomfortable, Collins says. Some clients have turned down copy pitches, Brillson says, because they were too weird for them. Parodying LinkedIn from the inside, but still for real One challenge Americas Finest may face as it grows is maintaining its signature voice while convincing potential clients that the whole thing isnt a gag. The agencys new LinkedIn feed, for example, features refreshingly facetious posts about capitalismYou don’t want to be on your deathbed wondering if you could’ve delivered more value to your clientsalongside more earnest posts, like the invitation to the Culto event: I would love to invite you folks to come hang out with us. Lemme know here if you want to party! Collins reassures me that it is not, in fact, a joke. Everything involving The Onion, the first instinct is: it’s a bit, he says. That was true when it announced the rerelease of the print paper, or the bid to buy InfoWars from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Yet somehow, I still wonder. Collins finds this ambiguity fun to play with. It’s a strange way to run a business where you’re just constantly having to tell people everything you’re doing is real, actually.
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E-Commerce
Weve all heard the saying, When you change the incentives, you change the behavior, and most of us even believed it at some point. But with experience, you find that human behavior doesnt fit into such neat little boxes. People act the way they do for all kinds of reasons, some of them rational, some of them not. The truth is that incentives often backfire because of something called Goodharts law. Once we target something to incentivize, it ceases to be a good target. A classic example occurred when the British offered bounties for dead cobras in India. Instead of hunting cobras, people started breeding them which, needless to say, didnt solve the problem. Smart leaders understand that behavior is downstream of culture. There are norms that underlie behaviors, and those norms are encoded by rituals that guide everything from how you hire to how you promote, and how you determine compensation. Thats why you cant just tweak incentives. For meaningful change, you need to activate cultural triggers that shift norms from the inside out. The surface behaviors you see In 1984, Michael Dell launched his eponymous company from a college dorm room with a simple idea: bypass the reseller channel and sell customized computers directly to customers. The model gave Dell a clear cost advantage by eliminating dealer markupsand even more importantly, it allowed him to receive payment before paying suppliers This direct model was a simple idea and a clear competitive advantage, but none of the incumbent industry giants, such as Compaq and HP, managed to adopt it. It wasnt for lack of trying. The advantages of Dells model were well known, widely publicized, and seemingly straightforward to replicate. There were a number of efforts to replicate it. Theoretically, switching to a direct model shouldnt have been that difficult. If a college student like Dell could set it up in a dorm room, surely multibillion-dollar corporations could do the same. They could just easily tweak commissions so that salespeople would be incentivized to focus on selling directly to customers rather than resellers. Yet the real world isnt so simple. Consider all of the salespeople servicing retail and reseller accounts. Theyd spent years earning status within the organization by building those relationships. Its not just about financial incentives, but the identity and status conferred by the connections everybody worked so hard to build. Its not just salespeople either. Logistics would have to be completely redesigned. Longtime employees would have to sever relationships and build others, learn new skills, and do their jobs differently. Jobs are more than just transactions; theyre expressions of who we are and how we see ourselves. The norms that underlie those behaviors While Dells direct model was gaining dominance, the company that launched the PC revolution, IBM, was going through a crisis of its own. After decades of market leadership, it had become a faltering giant, losing competitiveness in the very industry it had pioneered. It wasnt until Lou Gerstner arrived as CEO in 1993 that the company began to reckon with the deeper cultural issues driving its decline. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstners chief lieutenants, would later explain what had gone wrong. At IBM we had lost sight of our values, he told me, and then continued: For example, there was a long tradition of IBM executives dressing formally in a suit and tie. Yet that wasnt a value, it was an early manifestation of a value. In the early days, many of IBMs customers were banks, so IBMs salespeople dressed to reflect their customers . . . IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. In a similar vein, when Paul ONeill took over aluminum giant Alcoa, he told reporters and analysts, If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at how we treat safety. If we bring our injury rates down, it wont be because of cheerleading or posters. It will be because the people at this company have agreed to become part of something important: theyve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. In both cases, transformational leaders, ONeill at Alcoa and Gerstner at IBM, understood that the behaviors they were seeing were a function of norms, some explicit and some otherwise. Both also understood that if they were going to change those behaviors, they had to reshape the rituals that encoded those norms into the culture. Changing rituals to encode new norms Gerstner noticed when he arrived at IBM how the companys rituals reinforced internal rivalry. Instead of collaborating, business units often worked to undermine one anotherhoarding information and maneuvering for dominance. As he would later write in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Cant Dance: Huge staffs spent countless hours debating and managing transfer pricing terms between IBM units instead of facilitating a seamless transfer of products to customers. Staff units were duplicated at every level of the organization because no managers trusted cross-unit colleagues to carry out the work. Meetings to decide issues that cut across units were attended by throngs of people because everyone needed to be present to protect his or her turf. Gerstner understood that if he was going to change IBMs culture and turn the business around, he needed to dismantle the rituals that were reinforcing dysfunctional norms. Through company-wide emails and personal conversations, he made it clear that collaboration was now a core expectation. He even fired a number of senior executivespreviously regarded as untouchablewho were known for infighting. While Gerstner broke old rituals that encoded the infighting norms, ONeill focused on creating new ones. He introduced a simple but powerful rule: any time someone was injured on the job, the unit president had to inform him within 24 hours. But to achieve that, their vice presidents needed to be in constant communication with floor managers, which required them to create new rituals of their own. These rituals encoded new norms ofresponsiveness and transparency that were used to share information that went far beyond safety. Soon, company executives all over the world were actively sharing local market conditions, competitive intelligence, emerging problems, and best practices from across the organization. Gerstner and ONeill both achieved historic turnarounds at iconic companies because they understood how the cultural triggers of norms and rituals shape behaviors. Designing a performance culture Lou Gerstner, reflecting on his legendary turnaround at IBM, wrote, Culture isnt just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value . . . What does the culture reward and punishindividual achievement or team play, risk-taking or consensus building? Every culture encodes norms through rituals. How you hire, promote, produce budgets, and account for expenses and profits all involve ritualized processes. These reflect both explicit and implicit values that guide people on how theyre expected to act. Deliberately or not, leaders are constantly sending signals and people are constantly reading them. Its not uncommon for leaders to be unaware of the signals they are sending. Take stack ranking, which requires managers to rank employees by performance and eliminate the bottom 10%. It’s meant to encode norms of excellence. But often it does just the opposite, encouraging employees to undermine each other instead of collaborate together effectively. All too often, leaders try to shape behavior through incentives. But trying to bribe and bully your way to a performance culture is like closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. To effectively shape behavior, you need to address the norms and rituals that underlie it. Incentives might enforce compliance, but they wont inspire passion or creativity. To build a true performance culture, it is not enough to simply plan and direct action; you have to inspire and empower belief. You do that by being deliberate and precise about how you design cultural triggers.
Category:
E-Commerce
I think these hiring managers are playing in my face. Ive been on the hunt for a new gig for a large chunk of this year, and it feels like Ive seen it all. Ive watched some appealing job listings be pulled down within hours, while others sit stagnantly for months. Ive heard tales of scammers trying to dupe job seekers; legit employers advertising phantom roles to collect talent data and present an illusion of company growth. These days, the job market is feeling like the wild wild west out here and theres no catchy Will Smith bop to dance along to. Navigating that treachery is hard enough. But Ive managed on a few occasions to escape the black hole of applications and get some interest from potential employers. With those strides, the churn has become so exhausting that it has me desperate for a much-needed Bali getaway that I ironically need a job to afford. The slog of these intricate application processes is to blame. A popular meme once asked, What feels like begging but isnt? My answer is what I refer to as the corporate Hunger Gamesa process infamously associated with startup and tech culture in which youre put through rounds and rounds of interviews, tests, and various submissions. When you go through enough of these, which can take weeks at a time, its hard not to feel burned the hell out. A few months back, I threw my fedora in the ring for a marketing role where I clocked that my experience was a perfect fit. I cooked on that cover letter, calibrated my resumé just right to fend off the ATS filters, and said all the right things on the phone screen. But that was only the beginning. Next was the video entry, which involved awkwardly responding to a series of prompts like Tell me about a time you failed via self-recorded one-minute clips. If I wanted to do an audition tape, Id sign up for America’s Got Talent, but whatever. An IRL meeting with the hiring manager followed, then two panel interviews on Zoom, and an (unpaid) assessment that devoured a whole Saturday. Several weeks later, I made it to the final boss. But it didnt matter. After much consideration . . . they went with the other guy. Same as the last two applications, where I was on the unfortunate end of a really tough decision. Its giving always the bridesman, never the groom. After a few of these corporate decathlons, you start to feel it in your spirit. The rejections sting, sure, but its the grind that really takes its toll. Every time you toil away at a resumé revampor pull another weekend shift on a pro bono case studyyoure investing pieces of yourself. And when it doesnt pan out? Its hard not to take that L personally, word to His Airness. The job hunt has a way of chipping away at your confidence until you start questioning whether the skills youve sharpened for years are obsolete. Its a solitary experience. Telling your friends or family youre still looking sounds passive, like youve just been sitting on your sofa waiting for a gig to land in your lap. They dont see the spreadsheet of job trackers. The hours of prep for interviews that go nowhere. The facepalm moment when you realize the role you were excited about is paying $25,000 less than you deserve. Im not one for sob stories, though, so this definitely aint that. Put that violin back in its case. Ive managed to maintain my sanity by treating my mental health with as much discipline as my job search. Its the boundaries for me. Three applications per day, max, and then I shut the laptop. Short walks and gym time are booked in my schedule between those virtual calls. And sometimes, yes, sitting on the sectional on a Wednesday afternoon with Highest 2 Lowest playing on the TV is acceptable. Its all about pacing yourself so you dont crash (or crashout) before reaching the finish line. Searching for a new gig in this economy is not for the weak. Do what you can to secure your bag. And give yourself grace for the things you cant control: the hiring freeze you didnt know about, the manager who already had an internal candidate in mind, the flaky recruiter. Youve got something to offer, and its only a matter of time before someone armed with hiring power (and hopefully a signing bonus) recognizes that. The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with LEVELman.com.
Category:
E-Commerce
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