4th March 2018
‘We are now seeing poetry used in commercial storytelling because viewers are wise to conventional advertising and are bombarded by it, so they have developed ways to filter it out….Poetry is more entertaining than most ad copy, and viewers are inclined to respond to a lifestyle or feeling rather than a hard sell. They are also more open to subscribe to a brand when responding to the emotional and human connection brought about by a poem.’
A recent news article in the Guardian, based on data from e-Marketer, asked the question ‘Is Facebook for Old People?’ The article suggested that Facebook is becoming the social network for the over 50’s. This analysis, which compares total minutes by age for Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, would seem to confirm this.
‘We should broaden the definition of success to include what the customer would see as success: helping them achieve their goals in the moment.’ From Adweek – Why Empathy Is the Key to a Positive Brand Experience.
Fast Company’s perspective on the world’s most innovative companies. Really like the punchy headlines summarising each company’s main achievement. How about this for The Washington Post – ‘Bringing Amazonian ambition to the news’.
If the traditional New Year predictions are not ambitious enough for you, you may like this report from PWC – ‘The World in 2050, The Long View: how will the global economic order change?’ One prediction is that, by 2050, the top 4 goal economies will include China, India, Indonesia and the US will have dropped from first to third.
Interesting piece from Genius Steals (after Eli Pariser and his Filter Bubbles) on the case for a balanced media diet – ‘You Are The Media You Eat.’ ‘ People tend to consume media that supports their existing views, but any content where ideology leads to falsehood, is bad for you.’
‘Facebook is masterfully tempting us to build ‘mediated relationships’ with screens, devices, the cloud and soon via augmented and virtual reality; rather than with real people that are right in front of our noses. Facebook has ingeniously replaced real human friendship with an almost black-mirror type simulation (a kind of ‘demented reality’..) that feeds off the human need for positive affirmation (and dopamine). Facebook is no longer ‘social’ anything, it’s an AI-platform that needs to regulated/updated.’
‘No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer‘.
‘One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead. Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities.’
Dolce & Gabbana used drones to carry handbags down the runway, instead of models.