Stupefy: Slack vs. Fortnite - Netflix and consumer products

One is a time-wasting distraction, the other is a collaboration tool. Can you guess which is which? While Fortnite, the massively popular battle royale game, just executed one of its most popular in-game collaborative events over the weekend, Slack this week killed one of the only creative uses of the app ever. As Americans bifurcate into two groups of media consumers - one made up mostly of adults who work jobs and spend an average of 5.5 hours a day watching TV, the other made up mostly of young people in school or transitioning to the workplace who watch less TV and spend the remainder of their media time dispersed across places like YouTube, Fortnite, Twitch, Instagram and Snapchat - we also split ourselves into the distracted and the collaborative. The former use a lot of Slack. The latter use Fortnite. Slack, the millennial workplace chat app, is gearing up for an IPO later this year after being valued at around $17 billion. While Slack is ostensibly a collaboration and communication tool, in reality it’s becoming more and more clear that it is anything but.

At the same time, Fortnite is gaining more and more momentum as a collaborative, collective and communal platform for creativity and communication with a clearly visible and prolific output. Slack was supposed to kill email and ease communication. It hasn’t. What it has done is actually created miscommunication, stress and hate. According to RescueTime, a time management software company, since Slack was invented in 2013, the amount of time we spend communicating has maintained roughly the same while chat apps have exploded to half of workplace screen time. In other words, they’ve done nothing to ease communication, only to create more of it. And that workplace chat app communication can be distracting, stressful or even worse. According to Vox, “When Slack was down for a few hours on June 27, 2018, people using RescueTime software behaved more productively than they had the same time a week earlier.” Other studies have shown that miscommunication leads to stressful work environments and even makes workers hate their jobs. If that wasn't bad enough, Slack is actively removing any fun or creative uses of its app.

On Wednesday, The Verge reported this: "Workplace communication platform Slack says it will be deactivating a public channel dedicated to giving away $1,000 per day to anyone that can guess that day’s selected vocabulary word, citing company policies."The Slack channel in question, The Word of the Day, was the closest thing Slack had to trivia app HQ: a killer application that was a collective experience with scarcity and FOMO built in. While Slack stifles it, Fortnite is the defining platform for creativity, collaboration, expression and entrepreneurship among a generation coming behind the Slack users. Consider the week Fortnite has had. On Saturday, the game featured one of its famous "events," and this one was the culmination of a month of collective, collaborative creativity. According to Polygon: "Over the last month, the entire Fortnite community has been working together on puzzles in hopes of unlocking the event." The Verge explains: "The event started out when a mysterious spaceship-like vault located in Loot Lake opened up, transporting players to a strange new dimension.

There, six previously removed items from the game appeared encased in glass, and players had to work together to break one free so that it could return to the game."This event is now the most popular in-game event ever, according to a survey of over 11,000 Fortnite fans. Not only is Fortnite collaborative, it's an entrepreneurial platform. For a young person, Fortnite offers myriad ways to come up in the world, both in clout and in material gains. Some users are making money by pushing their own personal discount codes for the Epic store, nudging their followers to support them by buying skins or items using their code. Fortnite is also a media platform, spinning out bitesized videos that generate hundreds of millions of views across platforms from YouTube to Instagram to Twitter. It mints star personalities. It's a venue for concerts. It's a venue for amateur creativity. In this way, Fortnite is less of a game - one title within a genre - than it is an art form or a cultural activity that within it has multiple mediums, expressions and genres.

It's less like one album by an artist than it is like music itself, less like one TV show than it is like a new TV - it spins out auteurs, performers, expressions, moments, statements and experiences. And the average Fortnite player only plays for 1 - 1.5 hours per day. That's less than the time workers spend on chat apps at work. And less than the time adults spend watching TV. The collective output of those hours spent playing Fortnite is a monument to collaboration.

How Netflix is shaping consumer products

Netflix is conquering so much of our time that it’s beginning to shape how we use and purchase consumer objects, which in turn will shape how they’re made and marketed. Buried in this Vogue Business piece on Net-A-Porter's beauty business by Cheryl Wischhover is a fascinating nugget on what sells right now. Net-A-Porter beauty director Newby Hands on what all of their best sellers have in common: “Part of their success is that they all tend to be simpler to use,” says Hands. “As one facialist said to me recently, ‘They have to pass the Netflix test.’ Can you do them watching TV? If the answer is yes, the better they sell.”Netflix is not a quality company. It’s a time company - as I’ve written before. The reason these products fit so well with Netflix consumption is that most of the time people don't really care how good the content on the platform is, they just want to kill time with a mild distraction that's often in the background of some other activity. And Netflix admits this. In investor documents, Netflix spells it out very clearly: they are attempting to peel away hours from all free time rather than just hours spent watching "premium" or "quality" content like HBO.

From Netflix investor materials: "We compete with all the activities that consumers have at their disposal in their leisure time. This includes watching content on other streaming services, linear TV, DVD or TVOD but also reading a book, surfing YouTube, playing video games, socializing on Facebook, going out to dinner with friends or enjoying a glass of wine with their partner."So as the product colonizes more and more time, how do consumer goods respond? And the marketing campaigns that accompany those goods? There's a chance that beauty is a unique category in that it lends itself nicely to the Netflix hours. But is it also possible that more and more categories will follow, seeing a small uptick in sales for products that can be used while completely distracted and zoned out followed by a push of products that fit that mold?

Here's what products look like in a Netflix world, Net-A-Porter's four best-selling beauty products:

Angela Caglia rose quartz face roller ($65)

Dr. Dennis Gross SpectraLite eye mask that uses uses therapeutic light to penetrate the dermis ($159)

Nurse Jamie uplift roller ($69)

Ziip facial device ($495), which delivers "small electrical currents to stimulate cell regeneration and collagen production"

Rolling. Illuminating. Electrocuting. At least you'll feel something if you add these products to your otherwise mind-numbing Netflix viewing. I think the reason that it's likely we see Netflix shape consumer products is because of just how good the product is at engagement. Netflix engineers are relentless about improving the product so it's easier and easier to maintain engagement. Skip credits. Autoplay next episode. Autoplay previews. These features reflect the company's obsession with engagement. It's designed to keep you watching, no matter what. So sit back and barely pay attention. It's only a matter of time.

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