Future of Advertising industry

• First-principles for branding in Metaverse.
• Value of an Idea
• Crashing out of ‘Goldilocks zone’
• Making Marketing Hate-free
• Future of Creativity: Convivial Creations & Collaborative Commons
• Four Principles for Building Brands in the Climate Change Epoch.
• The end of Monoculture and what that means for agencies?
• Our role in the fight against Climate Change
• On how not to ‘disrupt’ advertising agencies
• The Business of Transformation
• Must you Merge?
• 2018: A good year to disrupt creative agencies
• The precariat agencies
• Essential Mutations for the 21st Century Brands
• Advertising industry’s new ‘Pivot’
• Targeting: the holy grail of 201x’s ad-tech creeps
• Agency as a platform
• “Being a force for good to grow”
• Right to a marketing free life
• If agencies remain married to ‘ads’, agencies are doomed.
• Specific diseconomy
• Tencent and Dentsu’s Mobile stack – what exactly are they trying to achieve?
• Agencies as platforms – setting up for failure
• The triad of Consultancies, FB and Google will neuter creative agencies globally, unless…
• FAQs – Open Source Ad Agency business model demystified
• Future of work
• ‘What will our life be like in 2065?’
• The Advertising Agencies of future will be Open Sourced
• Future of ideas

Business of Advertising

• No PPT Decembers.
• Optionality Framework: A Brand Strategy Framework for a World in Flux.
• “Insights” as revelations of hidden optionalities
• An ostrich, an Albatross, a beaver and a phoenix walk into a pandemic…
• Spine
• Slowdown to break the stride of bull-shit surfers
• Good places -> Good routines -> Good work.
• The very real Digital/ Mainline divide
• Sponges & Rocks
• The Brown Dwarf
• The sudoku problem and the delusion of conservative ad men
• Advertising bros have a big problem: low self-respect
• Sell the damn soap. Don’t ’empower’ anyone.
• The feedback loop
• Effie Awards propagating wilful ignorance?
• Fool’s pride
• Enamored with ‘simplicity’
• Stop feeding the parasites
• We can do this.
• “That is the creative challenge”
• The philosophy of advertising
• The absurdity of brands
• “Relatability”
• The importance of knowing the unsaid objective
• There’s an idea in the soap sud
• How not to be a lazy hack
• A capitalist industry can only be saved by a communist ideal – unions
• Honest marketing meetings
• Strategy-Wategy
• Advertising is not art
• A matter of dialing ‘it’ up or down
• The theater of freedom
• Account planner as a disinfectant of spurious notions and confusions
• Account planning as role playing
• Advertising as an amoral tongue on rent
• Advertising as parasitic meme
• “Moment of Truth”
• What does the ford figo controversy mean?

Philosophy of Markets

• What media teaches us.
• Live commerce is inherently anti-humanity.
• What’s Covid got to do with your chips’ and biscuits’ pricing?
• Embrace Complexity to Navigate the Complex World
• Five principles to rescue humanity from the post-Covid spiral
• Imagining a Post-Covid World
• Evolving for times of crises
• Markets & Corona-Virus
• Perils of Specialism
• Fighting monopolies in the age of AI
• The Mad World of Monopolies Over Brains
• Platform as commons
• The knowledge grid
• OpenAI is not enough: On why Elon Musk must also disrupt the education system and ignite utopian imagination
• End of the bluff
• Fight for your tomorrow

Irresponsible brands

• Mastercard: Greenwashing extinction
• Unilever’s Quality Walls: regressive AF
• Making slavery palatable
• Irresponsible brand #57: Maggi addled brains
• Irresponsible brand #56: Bisleri
• Unicef flushes good money on bad poo
• Ask me why askme ads suck
• Inventing indulgent future for the rich
• What good are Google glasses? OR How tech companies can choose not to be evil.

Deconstructing propaganda/ Meaning making

• Chasing The Abyss
• The gulf between rating systems and reality
• Re-branding: Postmodernism
• What is “Positioning”? Separating faff from fact.

Cultures/ Insights

• Future is Cow
• Two kinds of ‘Busy’
• 2021. The Year of Humanity’s Burn Out.
• A black hole called mobile phone
• Curb the enthusiasm to share
• The only refuge left for truth – Comedy
• Moving through time
• Home
• The slowness of digital life
• Truth about Powerpointing
• The truth about bullet riders
• Something is rotten when we aspire to be underdogs.
• Truth about ‘being human’
• Take a knee for humanity
• Travel Travel, Adopt a Camel
• Rebels without a cause
• The mysterious woman
• Food as love / food fetish
• Reading PK
• The puny Ungli
• Watching blockbuster movies
• The N-generation
• Don’t screw Holi!/ Tradition v/s ecology
• On why it took a firang to start FabIndia/ OR Why India still can’t chart its own modernity
• Stop bitching. Start acting.
• The rabid dog.
• On how it is ok to be ordinary
• Imagination and all its sisters
• ‘Adjust kar lo’

Other things

• Shifting to Colombo, Sri Lanka?

Rants

• Driving at 20 in fifth gear

My non-advertising blogs

Mediated democracy and ideas to ‘rewire the world’ for the better- https://rewiringchaos.com

Personal blog – Digging for Meaning

FutureChallenges.org blog