More and more brands are using live ads during TV events. For me, the one that stands out from the UK marketplace was the live Honda sky-diving ad on Channel 4, and here is a perspective on recent developments in this area – ‘There’s a cachet and a wow factor if a live ad is well executed (Blake Morrison, from Ripplebox). It comes across better to a live audience than something that feels so curated that it doesn’t have any room to breathe.‘
This a pretty powerful way to ‘encourage’ adoption. The WeChat ID pilot programme in Guangzhou is to be extended to the whole of Guangdong province and further across China from January next year (as) WeChat is poised to become China’s official electronic ID system.
This is worth thinking through for a couple of seconds. From the New Scientist – ‘Chinese search giant Baidu says it can create a copy of someone’s voice using neural networks – and all that’s needed to work from is less than a minute’s worth of audio of the person talking. Baidu can clone your voice after hearing just a minute of audio.’
From Adweek. ‘For those few uninitiated souls, HQ Trivia works like this: In real-time, the show’s emcee poses 12 questions with three possible answers, while players vie for a shot at splitting a jackpot—averaging anywhere from $1,500 to $25,000. On Super Bowl Sunday, 2 million people logged on for a single session, angling for $20,000 in winnings (168 people shared the prize). According to the app-research firm Sensor Tower, since launching in August, HQ has been downloaded more than 5 million times.
From MIT. ‘The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximise return on many kinds of investment. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.’
A short video from RSA Create. ‘We have taken huge steps towards tackling some of the biggest threats to humanity throughout history, and in many ways our lives have never been better! So where do we go from here? Author and historian Rutger Bregman argues that in order to continue towards a better world, we need big ideas and a robust vision of the future.
Friend of the Filter, Only Dead Fish’s Post Of The Month competiton, is a good place to see some insightful writing. This week’s winner was the piece featured in this newsletter last week – You Are The Media You Eat from Genius Steals. This was the piece from the Filter which won in Jan 2015 – How We Read Today.
From The Guardian. ‘Echoes of Amélie in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, traces of Nabokov in Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person … Where is the line between influence and plagiarism?’ The highest form of flattery? In praise of plagiarism.
From Wired : A Short History of Technology Worship. ‘In spite of the yoking of technology and science in the word STEM, they’ve always been an uneasy pairing. The word technology is best understood as the masculine form of the word culture, and when you’re pitching culture projects to patriarchal joints that find the idea of “culture” unmanly, I’ve often found that “technology” seals the deal.’
This job application letter (short video) has raised the bar to a whole other level.