6th December 2020
Prof Scott Galloway, on The Great Dispersion. ‘The pandemic’s most enduring feature will be as an accelerant of existing trends. The trend that encapsulates the greatest reshuffling of stakeholder value in recent history is … the Great Dispersion. Similar to prior macro trends like globalisation and digitisation, it offers enormous opportunity, but also real threats…. Social media is a form of dispersion, enabling connections, competition and debate — the dispersal of community. It has also removed healthy friction (truth, science, editors) resulting in an afterburner for misinformation and conspiracy.’
Tom Whitwell’s annual ’52 things I learned this year’, is worth a read. This is No.4 – ‘If Apple AirPods was a standalone business (founded 2016, $12bn revenue, 125% growth, 30–50% margin). it would probably be the most valuable startup in the world.
Very interesting and digestible – WeTransfer’s Ideas Report. ‘The year is 2020, A pandemic has collided with the creative world. It’s time to make sense of it all.‘ (ht @here_forth)
@Faris on Burger King’s approach to advertising. ‘This is the essence of the strategic approach known as OODA [Observe, Orient, Decide, Act] which was developed on the battlefield. It looks like any strategic process to some degree but it’s predicated on the mandate to decide and act faster than your competitors. By getting ‘inside their OODA loop’ you paralyse them from acting because you keep changing the battlefield.’
‘From social media, to the global economy, to supply chains – our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all. The modern world has finally become too complex for any of us to understand.’
How one video helped raise more than $70,000 for a good cause. ‘People kept asking me why a total stranger would travel 10 hours roundtrip to create a film for someone he doesn’t know,” said filmmaker Dan Lior. “The answer is that I knew I could help DeShawn out, so I did. It’s as simple as that.”
Physicists have found the “magic number” that shapes the universe. I regret to inform you that it is not 42.
Well, well. This is TikTok’s most-watched video of the year. Bella Poarch’s tribute (?) to bad UK grime is weirdly hypnotic.
Italian singer Adriano Celentano released a song in the 70s with nonsense lyrics meant to sound like American English, apparently to prove Italians would like any English song. It was a hit.