✔️ Nike's *lame* now, but right

OR how efforts to orchestrate a LinkedIn glow-up got in the way of sending my first newsletter

Author

Kerry Waananen
14 Oct • Time to end: 10 minutes

Hello, at long last — HYBRID THEORY is in your inbox.

I’ve allowed myself a prologue to set the table, but first here’s the basics that this newsletter aims to be:

🌐 Observations of the great transmedia-fication of gaming, anime & beyond
🔰 Insights into how brands can & are tapping into these opportunities
🗞️ Collections of interesting news & stories across the subject matter
💭 All from the POV of a guy who studied ‘cyborg anthropology’ and thinks about this stuff way too much

I won’t commit just yet to a publishing schedule, but I want to publish as often as I can. I have thoughts, I have ambition, I have words… I don’t have much time because I’m on the hunt for work, read more about that here and here.

Let’s hit it.

The Prologue

If you know me from LinkedIn (day one subs def do) you’ve seen me plug this newsletter in my posts, in my headline… sort of all over the place.

I’ve waffled for literally two years on what & how to write — concepting, content planning, formatting — to set the right tone for what I think I want this newsletter to be. I had forgotten the age-old wisdom: “Don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough.”

I also found myself thinking too far ahead out of the gate — trying to strategize completely theoretical outcomes, when really I needed to write and send the damn thing first.

Not unique to me, I’m subscribed to more newsletters than I read — newsletters I regularly open include:

highly flammable — gen-z & tiktok trends, I know it goes down on tiktok but I avoid it
Animenomics — I’m trying to learn all I can about the anime industry/business
Reader Grev — exploring impulsive and thoughtful angles around the gaming industry

I have more dead social accounts than active ones — LinkedIn is my only active social network, which I honestly never thought I’d say but there’s a few reasons:

1) I think it’s the least hellscape-ish of them all, AI is rampant, but not yet malicious there
2) Its where I’m connected to the most people I know that understand what I do for work
3) I have spent so much time on the platform for work that despite its changes I still feel the most sane there.

Before this summer, I hadn’t regularly posted content online for a few years. At the start of my career, I worked for an esports business outlet and regularly shared articles and promoted multimedia content I created.

IBut moving on, I was ‘too busy’ grinding away in effort-heavy business roles and most of my day-to-day was either uninteresting or spent working on things under NDA. I didn’t have the time, the mental capacity nor the content to post.

I’m sure many of you may also relate.

I transitioned to freelance in July (available for projects!) and made it an effort to re-invigorate and re-invent my online presence and manifest the type of work I wanted to do by posting content relevant to that.

My content has gone semi-viral twice, which was cool I guess, but makes any other post look automatically shit in comparison. I’d toil over each post, perfecting copy and needling the optimal posting time when I should have been channeling that energy into building this newsletter.

Looking at the trends and having a think, a focus on personal POV & achievements will serve me better (and perform better) in the long-run. Reporting the happenings in my niche (gaming, esports, anime x brands) doesn’t have the scale on LinkedIn to consistently net good results.

Bringing us to the title of this edition... I’ve decided (in this instance at least) to be a man of action — just do it, write it and send it.

If the internet culture reporting I’m reading is anything to be believed, being niche online is the best place to grow your *brand*. Honestly, my goal is just to share my thoughts about this insane transmedia explosion we’re living through with some readers but if that gets me on a podcast or two eventually, I ain’t mad about that.

And with that, I welcome you to HYBRID THEORY — my newsletter about the transmedia-fication of it all: video games becoming movies, anime becoming marketing, music being made specifically for tiktok, AI being shoehorned into literally everything.

I have plans for how the rest of the newsletter’s sections will be formatted and what I’ll be writing about each edition — but, for this first issue, let’s just get this out the door.

Just know you’ll find plenty of inspiration from notable “Playable Brands,” “Animarketing,” and “It’s Evolving” transmedia-ification stuff that’s catching my eye.

Below are quick hits of content I wrote for LinkedIn the last few months. I’ll be taking the energy I spent on these posts here — so expect more of what you read below: summaries, analysis and insights coming to your inbox, outside of the feed.

Hit my line if you have any other topics in mind or you would like to see any sort of specific analysis. If you work with a brand and want to get involved in campaigns like this — that’s my whole thing — reach out to my work email.

Thanks for reading HYBRID THEORY.

I’ll be spending the next week or so ironing out the formatting and content but expect another edition before the end of the month. You can reply to this email with any comments and if you happen to have an extra ticket to Worlds Final in London, I know a guy who would be happy to take it. It’s me.