BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Why Amazon’s house brands will win big

    On Monday, a pair of Bloomberg articles by Spencer Soper surfaced a recent Jungle Scout study arguing that Amazon’s house brands aren’t selling well. For example, in apparel, “only one percent of Amazon’s total sales account for its private label brands.” One of Soper’s articles, “Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds,” ends in a…

  • Why Google Should buy eBay: Digital Assistant Wars

    Last week, Allison Prang reported in The Wall Street Journal that eBay, under pressure from activist investors, is planning a strategic review of its assets, including its classified ad business and StubHub, in order to “drive meaningful shareholder value.” This is code for “we want to sell off a bunch of things in order to…

  • Why direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies fail

    Three popular letters this month are DTC, which stands for “direct to consumer.” DTC is an exploding category for low consideration products that we used to buy in person at the pharmacy or grocery store. Then we got Amazon and could order online. Now, we can also go directly to the manufacturer, cutting out the…

  • No algorithm for serendipity

    What do Mister Rogers and artificial intelligence have to do with each other?  This is a column about the nature of human expertise. That sounds like airy philosophy, but it’s actually an urgent practical question facing us as a species today because of the pressure that algorithms (artificial intelligences and machine learning) put on what we…

  • Analog Pleasures in a Digital World

    At first, it was hard to appreciate the elderly woman seven rows in front of us who had a sudden coughing fit during the opening minutes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” at a recent trip to the symphony. But as I winced through the coughing and throat clearing that sat between us and the orchestra, I…

  • The Two Failures of Gillette’s Toxic Commercial

    Blowback on Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be” campaign against toxic masculinity, and there has been a lot, falls into two general camps: 1. Don’t you lecture me, Gillette (I’ve seen this from people across the political spectrum, albeit more stridently from the right); 2. Gillette, this ain’t gonna make Dollar Shave Club go away.…

  • The Flip

    It may be the most heartbreaking half hour ever seen on television. “Time Enough at Last,” a 1959 episode of the legendary anthology series The Twilight Zone, features Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a thick-glasses-wearing bank teller who loves nothing more than reading, but whose wife, boss, and other circumstances interfere with his ability to…

  • My 2018 in Books

    This is the fifth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2017 list here,…

  • Nonprofits are the real threat to Uber and Lyft

    There is little that is technologically defensible about Uber or Lyft. Both companies combine a handful of off-the-rack features: a smart phone app, map, GPS, credit card, and a rider/driver-matching algorithm. It would not, therefore, be difficult to clone a ride-hailing competitor. For years, I’ve maintained that Uber the verb (“let’s uber there later”) will be…

  • “Bohemian Rhapsody” is fantastic: what the critics missed

    The Bottom Line: Drop everything, turn off your phones and go see “Bohemian Rhapsody” immediately. The critics are wrong. It’s fantastic.  More details: I have a pet theory that critics—subject matter experts of all sorts, really—get so into the weeds of the production of the material they critique that they lose track of why ordinary…