A woman spent five days in the Australian bushland after her car got stuck in the mud. Despite having no water, she survived thanks to some snacks, lollipops, and a bottle of wine. The woman does not otherwise drink alcohol, but that’s a “que syrah, syrah” situation if we’ve ever heard one.
In today’s email:
Ambulance chasers: Other industries wish they were growing like air ambulances are
Power bawl: Whybillions in lottery winnings go unclaimed every year
Digits: Google’s AI obsession, hot sauce stays haute, and more newsy numbers
Around the Web: Get better at vacuuming, a long dog’s long-awaited reunion, and more
Top-Flight Care
The air ambulance industry is looking up
Improving tech and an aging population paint a rosy picture for airlift providers.
2023-05-15T00:00:00Z
Ben Berkley
Feeling old? You and the rest of humanity.
With the global geriatric population set to double to 2B+ by 2050, one industry prepares to double with it: air ambulances.
Market researchers identify US air ambulance services as a fast-growing sector, expected to rise 10.6% annually and reach $32.9B by 2030.
More medics will save lives…
… especially if there are more advancements in the sky with them. Want to see what the future of medical transport looks like? Go to Norway, perVertical:
The Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation is testing CT scanners in its helicopters.
… uh, wouldn’t a CT scanner be too heavy for a chopper? Yes, which is why the NAAF is using nanotechnology to develop lightweight scanners that require fewer parts.
NAAF is also a testing partner for Airbus’ automated eVTOL aircraft. The first flight-test is planned for 2024 — sans pilot.
Air ambulances may not have sirens, but…
… alarm bells will still be going off around them. Growth isn’t a given in an industry with major limiting factors:
Staffing: Trained medical personnel can be expensive and hard to find.
Weather: Fleets may be unable to fly in bad weather, limiting adoption.
Perhaps the stickiest issue is cost: Who gets stuck with the bills? Families, insurance providers, and medical transport operators have already spent years duking that out in courtrooms.
Airlifts run up to ~$40k per flight today, per Bloomberg. Maybe someone in Norway can run some nanotech experiments to bring those down in size, too?
TRENDING
Fisher-Price will leverage its popularity with wee ones, who don’t even know what wallets are, to make a play for, well, wallets. The titans of child’s play are now offering a Mastercard that incentivizes families to feed 529 education savings plans to jump-start college funds.
SNIPPETS
TodAI in AI: Listen, you’re probably going to click on this story about someone using AI to depict “Friends” characters as toddlers anyway. We did. Didn’t feel great. But might as well embrace it — we expect far more of this kind of, uh, journalism in the AI age.
Rooting for you, Linda: We’re “~6 weeks” away from a new new Twitter, when Elon Musk’s CEO pick, Linda Yaccarino, will ascend into the top job.
Home on the strange: Love Alexa but wish you could trip over her more often? Meet Amazon’s hush-hush Astro device, a household robot rumored to be packed with AI-powered home-monitoring features. It’s currently being sold, invite only, for $1.6k.
Meanwhile… Amazon recognizes your God-given right to get this dog tuxedo within mere hours, so they’ve adjusted their gargantuan logistics network to speed up deliveries. The faster they deliver, Amazon says, the more people order.
No sweat: Relief could be on the way for the 1m+ menopausal women in the US — the FDA approved Veozah, a once-a-day pill to ease hot flashes.
Inflation, am I right? Back in our day, all it took was a few hundred million to buy an NFL team, but the Washington Commanders officially sold for $6.05B last Friday, setting a new world record in sports-team pricing.
If this is you, congrats: JD Power’s annual airline report shows — gasp — satisfaction is much higher among first and business class fliers. The monied crowd favored JetBlue for a second straight year.
Netflix plans to cut spending by $300m this year, though leaders said there would be no hiring freeze or new layoffs.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 enjoyed a 49% drop in its second weekend — solid for a Marvel movie — and reached $528.8m globally. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is still going strong, reaching in $1.2B+ globally in its sixth week.
Google will pay $8m to settle false advertising claims from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who alleged it gave iHeartMedia DJs scripts to endorse the yet-unreleased Pixel 4 phone, though they’d never actually used it.
Future of AI: AI is about to change everything. We rounded up original data and expert insights on seven ways it will transform the world.
CHART
Olivia Heller
Reminder: Winning the lottery only works if, y’know, you actually claim the money
Why $2B in lottery prizes goes unclaimed in the US every year — and what happens next.
2023-05-15T00:00:00Z
Ben Berkley
It’s not unusual for lottery winners to take some time to claim their prizes.
After all, conventional wisdom suggests strategizing with financial planners and lawyers before collecting a life-altering fortune.
But there is a deadline for redeeming a winning ticket, and it’s truly wild how regularly those dates pass without anyone turning up.
An estimated $2B/yr in winnings go uncollected in the US.
Lucrative unclaimed tickets this century include $77m, $68m, $51.7m, and $46m jackpots.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. And ouch.
What gives?
Lottery execs told Parade how most winnings go un-won:
Tickets are lost.
Results are misread.
Winners forget to check results — or that they bought a ticket.
A Missouri man advanced the “not realizing they’ve won” narrative last month, sitting on a $1m Powerball ticket three whole months after his numbers were drawn.
(Don’t even get us started on the Michigan man who forgot to check his ticket, eventually found out he won — then forgot to check how much before pocketing the $390k he left on the shelf for nine months.)
What happens to all that unclaimed money?
If you’re asking, “So, can I have it?” the answer is… kind of, yeah? At least in a broad, civic sense.
Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots are returned to state lottery funds relative to tickets sold.
Every state handles things differently, but most have public causes earmarked for surplus lottery funds, ranging from school aid to environmental projects.
Ten states use funds to support compulsive gambling programs.
Note: None of the info about winning lottery tickets comes from personal experience, despite very much wanting that to be the case.
Free Resource
The 2023 State of Marketing Report
To bring you the most robust version of this resource available on the web, we tapped the swole squadrons at Litmus, Wistia, and Rock Content.
Together, we, like the damn Ninja Turtles, have sliced and diced one of the world’s ugliest enemies: dull, drab data dumps.
Peruse the brand-new State of Marketing Report for insights on red-hot trends, including AI tools, TikTok and short-form video, data privacy, and more.
What’s top-of-mind for marketers this year?
The biggest changes in our faces
Content marketing trends by Rock Content
Video marketing trends by Wistia
Email marketing trends by Litmus
Future of marketing predictions by top dogs
Over 1.2k experts were consulted in the creation of this content.
Digits: A literal testament to one’s wealth, and more newsy numbers
Plus: Mexican food is hot, employees are on cloud nine-to-five, and more.
2023-05-15T00:00:00Z
Jacob Cohen
1) Hold on to your yarmulkes, folks — Sotheby’s is set to hold an auction of biblical proportions this week with the private sale of the Codex Sassoon, considered the earliest, most-complete Hebrew Bible in existence. Owning it will be a testament to one’s wealth, with the ~1.1k-year-old, 26-pound bible expected to go for $30m-$50m.
2) Taco ‘bout riding trends — with Mexican food sales projected to grow by $113.8B through 2026, hot sauce aficionado Cholula is, quite literally, turning up the heat on competition. The company, bought by McCormick & Co. for $800m in 2020, is expanding beyond hot sauce for the first time with new salsas and seasoning blends.
3) During Google’s I/O developer conference, the company amped up the volume on its AI love song 143x — in the form of mentions of the word “AI.” CEO Sundar Pichai led the charge by saying “AI” 1.15 times per minute during his keynote. The term “generative” got 30 mentions (probably generating some eye rolls in the process); meanwhile, OpenAI only mustered a single, byte-sized mention.
4) Looks like job satisfaction is reaching new heights, leaving employees on cloud nine-to-five. According to the Conference Board’s latest survey, 62.3% of US workers said they were satisfied with their job last year, the highest number since 1987 when the organization began surveying. Satisfaction has been steadily rising since it bottomed out in 2010 at 42.6%.
AROUND THE WEB
🧹 On this day: In 2009, GE began cleaning the Hudson River after decades of polluting it. The effort lasted until 2015 and cost GE $1.6B — and there’s still doubt the cleanup is complete.
👀 Guess what? HubSpot now has a YouTube network. Check out our site for the five business YouTubers in our inaugural class.
🧠 Cure boredom: BuzzFeed’s new word game, “Pyramid Scheme,” challenges you to find the correct word combo to fill the pyramid.
🤯 How to:Vacuum, which apparently is not by haphazardly dragging your machine back and forth.
🐕 Aww: And now, TFW you remember you have a best friend.
Meme
[Blocks out an hour on the calendar for “research,” gets cozy on the couch.] (Link)
TELL FRIENDS → GET PRIZES
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