A recent Stanford study shows that half of Tinder users aren’t interested in meeting offline, and nearly two-thirds are already married or in a relationship. It turns out that social connectedness and entertainment are key motivations to start swiping.
All Threads
Need to save your company from going bust? Ask Tom Cruise to use your product. Ray Ban was struggling in the early 1980s, selling just 18,000 pairs of its Wayfarer glasses. But just when the company was about to discontinue the range, Tom Cruise wore them in Risky Business and sales increased by 50%. Three years later, when Top Gun was released, Ray-Ban saw another massive increase of 40%. These apprearences led to features in several other films throughout the decade, and by the end Ray Ban was selling 1.5 million pairs annually.
Before his fame and as a young student in New York, Tom Ford visited the townhouse of a fellow designer Halston. “I copied everything, the long, low grey couches, everything, from Halston’s apartment for the Gucci store design.” Ford loved the actual Halston place so much that he bought it in 2019.
Ben Greensmith, the UK manager of Tony’s Chocoloney, credits the brand’s growth to clever placement: in 2020 Ocado wanted to send a free gift to loyal customers during the pandemic and bought 400,000 bars of Tony’s Chocolonely to give out with orders. Before that “no one had heard of the company, and now 58 per cent of the UK population recognises our milk chocolate bars. That’s pretty incredible.”
Claude Hopkins, an ad executive, almost single handedly created the habit of toothbrushing. His campaigns for Pepsodent turned it into one of the best-known products on earth, with everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable bragging about their ‘Pepsodent smile.’ Before the campaigns appeared, only 7% of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade later, that number had jumped to 65%.
We follow the herd: in supermarkets, top seller labels result in an average sales lift of 41%.
In 1903, the French sports newspaper L’Auto needed a way to increase newspaper sales and beat off competition from Le Vélo. The chief cycling journalist created a six-day cycling race all around France, and invited the most famous road racers of the time to compete. The Tour de France increased L’Auto’s circulation more than sixfold, and is now watched by 1 billion people each year.
The proportion of transgender people in the UK is largely a function of language. In the 2021 census, those who spoke English “not well” or “not well at all” were most likely to be counted as transgender: 2.2% of them, compared with 0.4% of those whose main language was English or Welsh: suggesting the questions were simply misunderstood.
Travis Scott’s partnership meal with McDonald’s was so popular that it caused supply chain issues.
Treadmills were originally designed for punishing prisoners. Their designer, Sir William Cubitt, proposed using their muscle power to both cure their idleness and produce useful work.
Most people who own trucks don’t use them. 75% of truck owners tow something once or less, and a third do not haul anything in their truck beds at all. In other words, truck ownership is mostly a form of costly signalling.
Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its national income from licensing its ‘.tv’ domain to streaming platforms like Twitch.
TV subtitles were designed as a hearing aid, but they’re now used as an attention aid. That’s why under 30s are more likely to use them than any other age group, even for shows in their native language.
97% of tweets come from one quarter of all accounts.
After Twitter / X privatised the likes feature, there was a huge spike (roughly 10%) in their volume – suggesting lots of people have opinions they are happy to express in private but not public.