14th December 2018
‘You might guess that a surefire way to make a hit video on YouTube would be to gather a bunch of YouTube megastars, film them riffing on some of the year’s most popular YouTube themes and release it as a year-in-review spectacular. You would be wrong. This is how YouTube’s year-in-review ‘Rewind’ video set off a civil war.’
Has the chatbot bubble officially burst? Google Allo is done. Announced in 2016, it was Google’s big attempt to build a Google chatbot right into your text message conversations. Allo’s death signals something important to the tech industry: Nobody wants a chatbot listening in on their intimate conversations – especially when that chatbot is near useless.
I attended the inaugural TBD Conference at Stratford’s rather cool Here East last week. A really eclectic and energetic range of talks combined to produce a ‘Wired Live’ style event, ‘on steroids.’ This (HT @paul__armstrong ) is the deck from the day. One of the standout talks was from @F_StrategyClub – ‘Brand Meaning In The Age Of Macro Flux’. Well worth a read.
Nice piece from D&AD, accompanied by loads of examples – ‘Every year on our New Blood Awards, judges call on would-be winners to create insightful work, and recognise the entries rooted in powerful insight. So what is an insight, and how do you find one? An insight is a truth, and it should be the fire in your belly. It could be about anything, from a product to an audience or their behaviour.’ (reg may be necessary)
From NYT. Is Tech Too Easy To Use? ‘After all, the frictionless design of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which makes it trivially easy to broadcast messages to huge audiences, has been the source of innumerable problems, including foreign influence campaigns, viral misinformation and ethnic violence abroad. YouTube’s most famous frictionless feature — the auto-playing function that starts another video as soon as the previous one has finished — has created a rabbit-hole effect that often leads viewers down a path to increasingly extreme content. I picked up on this subject in 2017, with my piece – ‘Facile Externality’ – or when efficiency is inefficient.
Creative Review on ‘The Big Idea’ (sub necessary) – An advertising idea is a – ‘sentence which can be repeated to another creative anywhere in the world, working in any medium, which gives them the information they need to continue the campaign’. For example, ‘Show how Hamlet cigars provide solace after something goes wrong’, or ‘Demonstrate the excellence of the iPhone’s camera by celebrating the great photos it enables average people to take’.
A new service offered by Ibis hotels in Switzerland appears to suggest that for some Instagrammers, the pressure to post amazing images on the social media site may be so huge that it’s ruining their vacations. To ease the strain, the hotel chain is now offering help in the form of a “social media sitter.”
People from all over the world are sending emails to Melbourne’s trees. Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters.
This wriggling robot can chase you on land or water.
Brilliant. Russian state TV apparently became confused yesterday while airing footage of a technology forum aimed at kids. A TV reporter proclaimed that Boris the robot, “has already learned to dance and he’s not that bad.” The only problem? Boris isn’t a real robot. It’s just a man in a suit.