28th January 2017
Seven take-aways from the World Economic Forum 2017. It isn’t easy summarising an event over four days, 400 sessions, a multitude of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and countless conversations between 3000 delegates. But @rishad has given it a fairly decent shot. If there is one theme to come out of Davos this year, it is : Trust – how to get it and how to keep it.
Very interesting new book from cultural theorist Yves Citton – ‘The Ecology of Attention.’ ‘We are constantly drawn towards attempts to quantify and commodify attention, even down to counting the number of ‘likes’ a picture receives on Facebook or a video on YouTube. By contrast, Citton argues that we should conceptualise attention as a kind of ecology and examine how the many different environments to which we are exposed from advertising to literature, search engines to performance art, condition our attention in different ways.’
Recent research from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, provides mixed messages on ad-blocking. Three quarters of UK marketers say ad-blocking will be good for the industry, but 38% say they are likely to give up online altogether.
From WARC’s Toolkit 2017 – ‘Effectiveness in The Digital Age.’ (‘An) issue is the right balance of short-term and long-term strategies. Fresh research this year has suggested that brands are over-investing in short-term ‘activation’ media, undermining the impact of creativity and harming long-term effectiveness.’
The anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo has hit 10 billion searches. ‘The privacy-focussed search engine, which doesn’t track user data, recorded a 600 per cent rise in traffic following Edward Snowden’s revelations about state surveillance three years ago.’
From @longshortmag, ‘(Don’t laugh) How Industrial Strategy Can Make The Spirit Soar’. ‘If early imperial Rome can be said to have had an industrial strategy, public buildings were a central part of it. And they have inspired generations of inhabitants and visitors ever since.’
Interesting and interactive, this is ‘Ekman’s Atlas of Emotions’ – an interactive tool designed to build emotional awareness. ‘The site invites you to visualise, identify and explore five primary emotions (and their related feeling states, actions, triggers and moods) in order to gain a better understanding of how they influence our lives.‘
Can selfies really represent an art from? London’s Saatchi gallery, certainly thinks so.
As the Oscar nominations are announced, here is a great infographic from @informationisbeautiful comparing past films, in terms of total budget, critical reviews and % budget recovered. And do you happen to know where the name ‘Oscar’ comes from?
Finally a couple of short videos, for the weekend. What if there was no ‘War’ in Star Wars? What if the disagreement between the Empire and Rebel Alliance could be settled amicably? Here is an alternative world view from Juhász Márk. I am particularly fond of the inflatable Death Star.
Got to love John Malkovich’s irritation that ‘his’ url has already been taken .
Enjoy La La Land? Did a few bits seem familiar? Then you’ll enjoy this tour of the many musicals that the film referenced.