What we’ve been reading this week

Our UK readers may be too hot to read, but you can always bookmark this page for a rainy day (literally). Here’s a few articles we enjoyed this week…

From around the web

How Instagram wellness became a gateway drug for conspiracy theories – There is undoubtedly a dark side to the Instagram influencer community, which has manifested itself before in controversies like follower account inflation, failure to disclose sponsorships, and peddling products with dubious health benefits. But this piece by ABC News looks at something else – the conspiracy theories and misinformation that can proliferate among “wellness” influencers, rooted in the scepticism of traditional medicine and healthcare that gave rise to the modern wellness movement originally in the 60s.

AI chatbots are replacing call centre staff during the pandemic – MIT Tech Review reveals IBM saw a 40% increase in traffic to Watson Assistant from February to April of this year. Google responded with a reduced price and updated version of its Contact Center AI in April, too. Tech Review details how Otsego County, New York, implemented IBM’s solution to address callers’ common questions about Covid-19.

Yeezy sends Gap shares soaring – Gap has struck a 10-year partnership with Kanye West & Yeezy, with the apparel line launching in 2021. Sapna Maheshwari tweets that “in five years, Gap is hoping that Yeezy Gap will be generating $1 billion in annual sales. For context, the Gap brand brought in $4.6 billion in global revenue last year.”

Stats roundup: coronavirus impact on marketing, ecommerce & advertising

Ikea’s digital experiments – Wired has a feature on Ikea’s Space10 research lab and it’s new web-based platform called Everyday Experiments. The first is a design prototype, Point and Repair, which “lets you gesture at a piece of worn or damaged furniture and see a variety of personalised solutions on how to upcycle it depending on the damage. This could include tutorials on how to repair it yourself or send you over to a page where you can order parts.”

Estimates of COVID-19’s impact on journalism fail to count freelancers, whose livelihoods have vanished overnight – This is a sobering piece which looks at the impact of Covid-19 on freelancers in the journalistic industry, mostly from a US perspective, and how the pandemic has damaged their safety nets and prospects – even though most of them aren’t counted in the tolls of journalists affected by Covid-19.