CourtneyMota

Cultural Strategist @sparksandhoney. Digital omnivore. Edge dweller. Dot connector. Collaborator. East Coast native living in Los Angeles. Mom to @RovingRiley.

[zoomerbro]

[tgebzzknezz]

Most kids on this website don’t even know what this is

[jackadittyditty]

That’s a coffee table

[courtneymota]

eSports: The Biggest Sport You've Probably Never Heard Of

With millions of people already playing video games and the popularity of video game competition rising, gamers developed an interest in watching others play f…

[courtneymota]

We've all heard plenty about millenials (or Generation Y), those born between 1976 and 1994. But as that generation continues to age, marketers are starting to shift their attention to the next generation—Generation Z, those born in 1995 or later.

[courtneymota]

Meet Generation Z: Forget Everything You Learned About Millennials

Marketers have been focused on Gen Y (a.k.a. Millennials) for more than a decade. In fact, Millennials are the most researched generation in history!  But Gen Z (born 1995 to present) is different from the Millennial generation. In many ways, Gen Zers are the opposites or extreme versions of Millennials and marketers need to adjust to them.  We are just beginning to understand Gen Z and its impact on the future, but this report explores what we know and foresee.

Read the full report here: http://slidesha.re/1l0r65O 

[courtneymota]

This Week In Culture...

In trends…

Uber Anxiety: The customer is always right, right? Not so fast. What if you got rated as a customer? Were you nice to your driver? Were you on the phone at the register? You know, right by the sign that says "no cell phones"? All’s fair in the review economy. 

Emoji Shrink: What does your choice of emoji say about you? With increasingly visual forms of communication, the images you share say just as much as the words you choose. 

Notification Screen as a Channel: The new release of iOS8 will make notifications interactive. This is expected to be a game changer in terms of how we interact with our devices. 

In viral news… 

Richard Dunn spent a night alone at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and made an amazing video to pass the time. The video is set to a Celine Dion song, so naturally, she made a video of her own in response. 

With “only” 317k views in a week, this isn’t necessarily the most viral thing we’ve seen, but it’s one of the funniest. Bad Parkour is what happens when you challenge yourself to put your all into giving 50%.

Dove for Men acknowledges the caring moments of fatherhood that often get overlooked. Happy Fathers Day to all the dads in the RAPP family! 

Enjoy!

[popculturebrain]

Watch: ‘The Simpsons’ does ‘Mad Men’-style promo

[courtneymota]

The End of Money as We Know It: http://slidesha.re/1hzxJFp

Cryptocurrency could very well be a bubble or a blip, but it is a manifestation of an enormous and important cultural shift. Our culture is reconsidering consumption, reconsidering ownership, and most importantly, reconsidering value.

[courtneymota]

The End of Money as We Know It: Bitcoin, Alternative Currency, and ...

Cryptocurrency could very well be a bubble or a blip, but it is a manifestation of an enormous and important cultural shift. Our culture is reconsidering consumption, reconsidering ownership, and most importantly, reconsidering value.

[courtneymota]

This Week In Culture...

Below is a curated selection of stories from this week to keep you culturally literate and in the know.  

In trends…

Cosplay… for Objects?: With Honda's new anime-inspired motorcycle and the Tron Lamborghini are we entering objects into the cosplay space? 

Outsourcing Intimacy: We seem to be entering an age where we feel more comfortable confiding in strangers (and anthropomorphized robots) than our own friends and family. Perhaps it's this recognition of our collective loneliness, and thus our need for empathy, that has made Pope Francis so popular. 

Digital Empathy: Could the internet of things help boost our collective empathy? 

In viral news… 

Taco Bell's new waffle taco arrived this week -- and a bunch of guys named Ronald McDonald seemed to really like it. This guy, however, was less impressed. 

Facebook bought Oculus Rift. Because they could. While some mourned and cancelled their pre-orders in protest, others, like Jimmy Fallon and YouTube, had more fun with the news. 

Celebrity breakups always make news. But Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's "conscious uncoupling"  announcement crashed her site, Goop. It also made the rest of us want to better define our own relationship statuses. 

Enjoy!

[courtneymota]

This Week In Culture...

Below is a curated selection of stories from this week to keep you culturally literate and in the know.  

In trends…

Nano World: Tiny is the new small. Tiny worlds. Tiny sushi. Tiny stores. 

Incognito: The rise of anti-social networks either by choice, or by force. 

Moodgeisting: A new crop of apparel companies are aiming to help you feel better by making you stand better. 

In viral news… 

Early-onset nostalgia has us yearning for the good ol' days… of just a few years ago. Lucky for us, Twitter created a way to look up and share our First Tweet. The #FirstTweet hashtag received over 200k mentions on #TBT, which was also Twitter's 8th Birthday. Ironically, there's speculation that Twitter might be doing away with the #hashtag all together. 

With March Madness under way, everyone is breaking out their brackets. There's the official NCAA bracket, of course. But if college basketball isn't exactly your thing, there's also the LA Taco Madness Bracket,  the 2014 GIF Tourney, or The Bitchy Bracket. 

President Obama continues his crusade to target Millennials. This time he's capitalizing on March Madness to drive signups on HealthCare.gov with the basketball-themed Gameplan4me web site, and another BuzzFeed style Gif-off voting page.  

Enjoy!

[courtneymota]

This Week In Culture...

In trends…

Last week we looked at how Normcore was flattening fashion. But normal is only normal because it's balanced out by the weird. And the really weird. Seth Godin explains this tension in the bacon/Yelp correlation.

Privacy and silence are the new luxuries. 

Cognitive Cooking: IBM researchers are experimenting with cognitive computing to get more creative in the kitchen. Why it works. 

In viral news… 

Whether you thought President Obama's appearance on Between Two Ferns was funny or unbecoming, it was the largest driver of traffic to Healthcare.gov.  

HBO Go failed fans of True Detective trying to watch the season finale. The internet erupted in buffering outrage and reveals the continued falsehood surrounding cord-cutting. 

Jeopardy! jerk champion Arthur Chu answers questions in a Reddit AMA, after Reddit AMA was a category on Jeopardy! 

Enjoy!

[micdotcom]

Gender-bent Disney princes make meaningful point about the fluidity of gender

To combat the strict stereotypes that Disney princes and princesses represent, some geniuses at Imgur have started swapping the genders of Disney characters. Genderbent Disney shows that Disney clearly gets a little lazy when it comes to reusing their character molds, making it surprisingly easy to look more feminine. To make a male character look more classically feminine, for example, all you need to do is round the chin, soften the jaw and make the nose a little slimmer.

But with the simplicity of these alterations — a few millimeters of nose, a different hairstyle — Disney accidentally makes a meaningful point about the fluidity of gender expression.

Read more | Follow policymic

[psfkideas]

Samsung patent turns people’s palms into virtual keyboards.

[courtneymota]

Happy International Woman's Day.

[courtneymota]

This Week In Culture...

Trends we're watching…

Normcore: The term being used to describe conspicuously unpretentious, endearingly awkward fashion of people like Steve Jobs or Jerry Seinfeld. Some might even call it frumpterable. It represents a shift away from using fashion as a means to buy, rather than discover your identity. The New York Magazine article really made it take off, but here are some older examples of debranding.

Temporal Planning: Apps like ThrowBack and Timeflash allow users to send past memories to a specific time in the future. There have even been some recent ads from TD Ameritrade and Chevy that play with time and nostalgia by telling their stories in reverse.  

Quiz Culture: While quizzes aren't new, there seems to be an explosion of them clogging our social feeds lately. (Thanks,  BuzzFeed. No, really.) But if last year's most popular New York Times article was actually a quiz, it all can't be drivel, right? Quizzes are crazy traffic drivers for news sites. What's really driving our quiz obsession though, according to researchers at MIT, is fear, and not narcissism. And if you don't like your answer, there's a cheat that lets you reverse-engineer the quiz to get your desired outcome. 

sparks & honey in the news…

Last week s&h published an infographic with 5 Key Oscars Moments for Brands: How to Create Real-Time, Buzz-Worthy Content. Three out of the five predictions came true and the other two were close. It received over 4,000 views on SlideShare.

In viral news… 

The selfie shared 'round the world, the strategy behind the spontaneity, and the subsequent spoofs.

A video for Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love told entirely in emoji. Want to know which emojis are trending right now? Here's a real-time emoji tracker that comes complete with its own epilepsy warning.

Enjoy!

[courtneymota]

How to Create Buzz-worthy Real-time Content for the Oscars http://slidesha.re/1hKCizc  

[courtneymota]

This Week In Culture...

A weekly snapshot of what's happening in culture that could inspire ideas and impact business.

Trends…

Mood-Geisting: Mood-based marketing and design as the next step in behavior-based marketing/design

Shock & Transgress: The changing image of working moms 

Screen Culture: In an era where people are slow to read, but quick to share (#TLDR), metrics like DUA (Duration of Undivided Attention) or "attention minutes" are replacing clicks/shares/likes in measuring engagement. 

In the news…

HuffPost article "For Me, The Future of Teaching Is Already Here" mentions s&h's prediction that "Un-schooling Counselors" will be one of the high-demand jobs of the future. For more Jobs of the Future, click here.  

In viral news… 

Actor Harold Ramis passed away this week, and the internet paid tribute to him in the form of Ghostbusters memes. 

Pepsi MAX and race car driver Jeff Gordon go to great lengths to prove a disbelieving Jalopnik writer wrong. It worked. 

This mother-daughter team replicate celebrity dresses out of paper — and we can't wait to see what they do after the Oscars. 

Enjoy the Oscars this weekend!