30th September 2017
I attended a really interesting session at Nesta this week. ‘Trust Playing by The Rules’ ,featuring the compelling Rachel Botsman and her new book Who Can You Trust? ‘We might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions rent their home to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, and trust web bots. The implications and the potential that lie within this new era of “distributed trust” are both exciting and unnerving in equal measure – and they’re coming sooner than you think.’ My related piece on Trust from the Brand Learning blog is here – The Future (and eternal truth) of Marketing : ‘Trust’.
From @adweek – ‘Watson Advertising promises to kick start the era of cognitive advertising, a field that has both legacy tech companies and startups seeking to transform every aspect of marketing from image and voice recognition to big data analysis and custom content.’ Could Watson Crack the Code of Digital Marketing?
From @nesta. The Gender Imbalance in Film Casts. ‘We might expect that the gender mix of film casts has steadily improved over the last half century, matching the rise of women in the wider UK workforce. But the reality is quite different. Since the end of the Second World War there have been no sustained gains in the percentage of cast members who are women in UK films.‘
From Creative Review. ‘Meme culture is a vast and ever expanding tool in our visual cultural lexicon. That’s because even one image can make us think of specific people or situations, while resonating with many of us at once.’ How do you tell a story in a single image?
What are the themes that make memes so popular? Here are some of the strands – ‘co-dependancy’, ‘schemas’, ‘clapbacks’, ‘bad luck brian’, ‘evil kermit’, and ‘me versus you’.
A new BBC series looks at the cultural history of attention metrics from Victorian music halls to Facebook. From Clapping to Likes, and Back Again.
From @campaign. How AirBnb built a brand by telling the world not to travel.
This is a rather wonderful approach to storytelling – traditional, digital and interactive. Alexander Perrin’s Short Trip is the first instalment in a collection of interactive illustrations created for the web. It was created as a study into capturing the essence of graphite on paper within a digital context, and to learn more about web-based graphics technologies.
Interesting piece from Stratechery on ‘Aggregation Theory’ – describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) came to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. ‘Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns that are its endgame.’
The very wonderful, timeless 90 year old David Attenborough, narrates the trailer for the ‘Blue Planet 2’. Music for the series is provided by Hans Zimmer and Radiohead.