🧽 Sponge cities are the future

It’s been a big week for advertising.

On Tuesday, Netflix — once an advertising foe — answered analysts’ burning questions about its upcoming ad-supported plan.

Then yesterday, Uber hold-my-beer’ed them, detailing plans for its own foray into ads.

Uber? Advertising?

Consider this: The company facilitated 1.87B trips last quarter across rides and deliveries, with its 122m monthly users averaging five interactions with the company each month.

Those interactions — sitting in a car, ordering a burger — equate to mountains of face time from eyeballs with strong consumer intent, meaning Uber now commands a remarkably powerful platform for serving ads.

The company says…

… early tests have “surpassed expectations.”

• Within apps, brands can sponsor listings and place ads on storefronts or after checkout, among other things. Over 40 brands are on board, including NBCUniversal and Heineken.
• Uber is also testing in-car tablets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and already offers drivers electronic rooftop billboards.

Does this help drivers?

Uber’s head of mobility recently noted that advertising revenue could subsidize Uber’s costs without decreasing driver earnings.

To its credit, Lyft has been doing much of this since August. Its tablets offer riders a map, plus options for tipping, which the company found increase 28% per ride with the tablet.

Notably, the tablets also offer controls for the world’s highest-pressure responsibility — controlling the music.

Apple’s “there’s an app for that” was a fun ad slogan. But now, there may be too many apps for too many things.

Okta, a platform that connects employees to apps, found that companies used an average of 89 different apps in 2021, up from 58 in 2015, per Bloomberg.

• One study found workers across three large employers switched between apps ~1.2k times daily.

The problem

Apps are supposed to make life easier, but app overload actually decreases focus and boosts stress.

Frustrations only increase when companies change apps frequently, require employees to remember a bunch of passwords and complicated login procedures, or when notifications are constantly pinging.

• In fact, complaints about apps increased 32% in 2021, and an average of 76 employees quit per year because they’re so vexed by tech.

The solution? Well, it could be to streamline or consolidate apps across the company to make sure there are no redundancies — but that might mean installing yet another app.

When it rains, it pours. And climate change means it’s been raining more than ever.

Global cities, built in dryer times, aren’t prepared to handle the flooding caused by increased rainfall. Where there was once grass and soil to soak up water, there’s now impenetrable cement. (Something about paving paradise to put up a parking lot.)

To prepare for soggier days ahead…

… urban planners around the world are transforming concrete jungles into “sponge cities,” per Wired. Sponge cities are structured to soak up water rather than repel it, using tools like:

• Permeable surfaces, such as concrete bricks separated by crushed stone
• Rain gardens, which can divert and collect excess rainwater
• Vegetated swales, AKA plant-filled ditches that soak up runoff water

But water isn’t always bad

As storms become more frequent and severe, so will droughts — so the ability to collect groundwater for drinking, cooking, and cleaning will be invaluable.

In case Mother Earth didn’t have enough problems, sea levels are rising, making spongy infrastructure even more important for coastal cities.

And you might absorb some of the cost: Cities such as Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are already taxing residents for their property’s impermeable surfaces.