11th January 2019

“@adcontrarian on why online ads haven’t built brands. ‘..cultural imprinting relies on the principle of common knowledge.  For a fact to be common knowledge among the group, it’s not enough for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it.’

From It’s Nice That – ‘In Praise Of Doing Nothing: How to turn boredom into brilliant ideas.’ ‘Being bored is a state of dissatisfaction with the neural stimulations you’re getting,’ says Sandi Mann, author of The Science of Boredom. ‘You’re searching for more neural stimulation. If you can’t find that externally, you will find it internally, because our minds are always active.’

Wired seem to think that this is the year Facebook finally admits it’s a media company. ‘Big tech needs to adopt standards to fight fake news.And that starts with accepting what it is they actually do.’

Rory Sutherland considers that technology wastes as much time as it saves. ‘Email is unbelievably misleading in this respect. If you spend an afternoon replying to emails, you happily imagine you are being productive. In fact — by comparison with voice communication — what you are doing is insanely slow and protracted. If you were in a meeting with someone who spoke at the speed most people type, you would feel the urge to attack them.’

The most interesting new gadgets and gear from CES 2019. Including a folding phone, an air taxi, Samsung robots and an intelligent toilet. ..And CES have decided to revoke a product award won by a female-founded tech company. Seems less than fair when one considers some of the other products they appear perfectly happy with.

Frederic Filloux of The Monday Note, is not upbeat about 2019. ‘The rise of worldwide populism, an insular tech world unable to correct its blunders, a devastated journalistic landscape that gives an open-field to the social mob; there are few reasons for optimism this year.’

Some stunning photos won the annual “Dronestagram” awards. Drones let photographers get shots that would otherwise be impossible.

‘In July of 1316, a priest with a hankering for fresh apples sneaked into a walled garden in the Cripplegate area of London to help himself to the fruits therein. The gardener caught him in the act, and the priest brutally stabbed him to death with a knife—hardly godly behaviour, but this was the Middle Ages. A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.That’s just one of the true-crime gems to be found in a new interactive digital “murder map“ of London, compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner.

Here are Marketoonist’s marketing predictions for 2019.

These cheeky pro-second Brexit Referendum films ask: ‘Shouldn’t We Double Check….?’