Tag Archives: The Truth is Worth It

Ten Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week

29th June 2019

This is music to my ears, according to Ohio State University,

creativity peaks in your 20’s and 50’s.MIT’s 35 Innovators under 35. Over the last decade, many of the young innovators selected for this list have gone on to be spectacularly successful. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Jonathan Ive.(who has just left Apple and is starting his own business).

Attended a great Tortoise Media ‘ThinkIn’, this week with Al Jazeera – ‘Marketing v the news: do brands have to have a point of view?’ Full video of the event here with observations from, among others, Editor James Harding, The Economist, Dow Jones and myself (reg may be necessary).

Voice Search Study, looks at factors influencing search engine rankings in 2019.

Lots of Cannes Lions wrap-up’s doing the rounds. This one from Mediacom includes – ‘We’re entering a golden age of audio (and multi-sensory experiences); Creativity + Data = Growth; Human connections are the most powerful; Brands are becoming activists (with mixed results) and the industry is getting its house in order. …and here is every Grand Prix from Cannes Lions 2019.

…whilst WARC’s Cannes’ list included; ‘Strategy is evolving in the age of experience ; There is a crisis in creative effectiveness; Judges want to see impact beyond the short term; CMOs want action on brand safety, and data on brand purpose; Media owners are talking up ‘context’; Accessibility and inclusion are feeding into brand strategy and Emerging categories hold lessons in brand-building.‘…..and this is why Cannes is the real ‘Home of the Whopper’ – is this the best Titanium Grand Prix Ever? 

Women’s brand Billie is back, with more hair down there.

In the same vein as Billie, a shaving brand that ‘seems’ to discourage shaving; I like the continuation of the Tinder campaign that champions being single with its #singlenotsorry campaign. Engaging and on theface of it surprising, but actually very good for business.

From Statista. The current  expansion of the US economy (June 2009 to date) is set to become the longest (but not necessarily the strongest) since WW2. Here is how it matches up vs the competition.

‘With childhood obesity on the rise and globalisation homogenising nutrition, photographer Gregg Segal set out to discover what a week’s worth of food looks like around the world’. Here kids, from different countries, are photographed surrounded by their weekly diet.

‘The energy in the club that night was infectious. Drag queens dressed as Beyonce and J-Lo performed under throbbing lights. Club goers swayed in a Caribbean aura out on the patio. Hip hop music blasted from another room…’ ‘Three years after the Pulse shooting, she remembers every moment. The shooter haunted her, until she decided ‘no more”. This 2 minute animation is a very personal perspective on the Pulse night club shooting and actually, any situation involving guilt and grief.

Love this. ‘As a writer and marketer, while ‘big, beautiful and powerful’ are the easiest words to describe something that is substantial in size, stature, strength and aesthetic… we could all benefit accessing some other words, every once in a while. Here are 99 powerful words.

Ten Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week

22nd June 2019

This week I attended an APG Noisy Thinking event that looked at some of the creative work up for an award at this years Cannes Festival. A selection of great (but usual candidate) pieces were shown, including – Librese’s ‘Viva La Vulva’, Greenpeace/Iceland’s Rang-tan and Aero Mexico’s DNA Discounts, but there were a few fabulous pieces that were new to me. These included Thisables from Ikea in Israel (furniture design by and for advocates for accessibility), smuggling the Pride flag into Russia, McDelivery in Paris (ignoring landmark shots but impressionist style images still looking beautiful), The Truth is Worth It,
from NYT, and Combat Stress – Bring Them All Home. The standout piece from Spanish alcohol brand Ruavieja, We Have to See More of Each Other, used an algorithm to calculate how much time friends would have left, to spend together, in their lives. Sobering and very moving. 

This new (free) report courtesy of Snapchat and JWT Intelligence. ‘They’re the hyper-connected, highly opinionated generation, moved to activism as the internet and social media landscape has made them acutely conscious of and concerned about world events….this is the cohort of gender fluidity and inclusivity in all its forms.’ Into Z Future, meet the next generation of Super Creatives.

Zuckerbucks. Love this quote about Libra – ‘a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralisation of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook….’ This from MIT, three things we don’t know about Facebook’s digital currency.

HT @neilperkin, from Seth Godin.’If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.’ 

From WARC (and via Cannes) here are the secrets of the CMO of The Future (mission, science and craft).

From Aeon (and Hegel), The Spirit Of History. ‘…history seems a bit depressing at first. Entire civilisations and ways of life come to be and pass away, old ways of living vanish. Nothing seems stable. Hegel’s daring philosophical proposal insisted that we see this procession as manifesting the ways in which each individual form of human social life generates tensions and strains within itself. When these tensions become so great that such a way of living finally makes no sense to the participants, life rapidly becomes uninhabitable. Sounds prescient?

Late last year, Gallup found that U.S. public support for legalising marijuana surged to 66 percent. The poll’s results were particularly noteworthy because a newfound majority of Republicans and Americans over 55 supported legalisation for the first time. This is the case for and against marijuana legalisation.

These amazing wood sculptures are carved to look like figures are trapped inside.

A year through the distant eyes of meteorological satellite Himawari-8 – a hypnotic stream of Earth’s beauty, fragility and disasters. Winner of the 2019 Vimeo Staff Pick Award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

Think everyone should have this framed quote hanging on their wall.