Category: Business of advertising
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Crashing out of Goldilocks zone
I wrote this article for WARC’s ‘Future of Strategy report – 2020′. ___ Survival is a delicate affair of balance and luck. Consider a monarch butterfly for instance. The place where they breed should have temperatures between 86°f to 95°f. Too high, eggs go dry. Too low, the monarch can’t fly. The climate change, loss […]
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The very real Digital/ Mainline divide
Advertising business is a messy beast. The mess is a function of different medias it caters to – TV, Print, Digital, OOH… These medias are fundamentally very different1. The way it is consumed – TV – passive, lean back, long formPrint – scan, quick, purposive, linearDigital – exploratory, non-linear, lean in, active… 2. The way […]
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Good places -> Good routines -> Good work.
Routines have a certain magical quality.In my experience, good routines create a virtuous spiral – good routines increase efficiency, work quality and satisfaction with work. You feel in-control, you manage relationships well enough and manage to have fun while getting shit done. The secret to forming these routines isn’t in our ‘will power’ or whatever […]
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Slow down to break the stride of bullshit surfers
Surfing Notions Is candy no longer an impulse purchase? Is the world still on the ‘liberal progressive’ journey? Will Amazon/ Facebook ‘surely’ cede control to regulators? Will they fight misinformation honestly? From the trivial to the profound, I find myself in the midst of rushed debates where beautiful questions are raised and then summarily decapitated […]
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Future of Creativity: Convivial Creations & Collaborative Commons
“Man is born to inquire and create, and when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of production or a well-trained parrot.” Wilhelm von Humboldt (Chomsky, 1970) Creativity is a fundamental feature of the […]
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The end of Monoculture and what that means for agencies
Flying over Kuala Lumpur, one can see huge expanse of palm trees, beautifully arranged in rows and columns. Fly over Thailand and you would see similar geometry playing out with rubber trees. The human sense of geometry imposed on nature, seen from the human invented vantage of flight. It’s wondrous and beautiful and awe inspiring. […]
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Our role in the fight against climate change.
Weren’t we supposed to be the good guys? Advertising alleviated the pain of the Sisyphean tragedy of modern capitalism. Advertising taught the world how to want. Advertising gave the notion of free will and choices when it comes to consumption. It made the powerless feel powerful, that their choices, their consumption mattered. The consumptive soma […]
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The brown dwarf
Brown dwarfs are the universal in-between – neither a star, nor a planet. They were potentially stars, but failed short. They failed to shine. Unlike the sun, the nuclear reactions on a brown dwarf sputter unstably, sometimes being extinguished of that majestic fire altogether. Its death is slow, degenerate. It contracts, cools, degenerates very slowly, […]
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The business of transformation
WPP is now a ”creative transformation” company. I am cautiously optimistic about this facelift. I hope there is more to come. And that WPP will go beyond the facelift and the simplification. fingers crossed. But… After Ogilvy‘s ‘refounding’ and Publicis’ marcel attempt and now WPP’s structural simplification & brand identity ‘reveal’, it feels as if […]
Truth About Branding 