#88: Triple peak day
Hello,
Welcome to the newsletter!
Since we last spoke I’ve had Covid. I do not recommend it.
I did give me time to think though, and I’m working on some new ideas and projects — more to come soon.
On with the news...
We’re going to kick off this week with a Martin Weigel double-bill. First up, here is his recent essay on advertising’s relationship with “culture”. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the idea that somewhere below the waves of fashion, but above the deep, slow-moving currents of nature, is the right spot to be thinking about brands and brand positioning. Here you can be close enough to what people value, while still having a chance to find and influence the leading edge of how that might be shifting.
And as a follow up, this is a great conversation between Wiegel and Fergus O’Carroll from the On Strategy podcast in which they talk about the danger of generalisation and superficiality in planning.
While we’re talking about planning heavyweights, I highly recommend this episode of Firestarters with Russell Davies. I’ve admired Davies’s work for a long time and he’s in excellent form here, thinking about the different ages of advertising we’ve been through and what the ‘right size’ of the industry really is.
My friend Matt is writing an A-Z of media planning. It’s very good. No need to rush though, he’s up to ‘C’.
Having been both agency-side and client-side, Hannah Slapper reveals what she has learned. There are some wonderful pearls of wisdom in this, as well as some moments that will make you pause and think about how good a partner you really are…
Great ad from Turner Classic Movies.
I presume Kraft has paid Kelis an awful lot of money to make this track about cheese. It’s hard to find the words.
Machado may be gone but that won’t stop Burger King churning out dreadful gimmicks — here’s their new poop emoji themed ice-cream.
TheSoundOf.Love takes love songs from YouTube and brings them together with the most poignant comment from underneath the video. The result is both heartwarming and heart wrenching — tales of love and of loss, of meeting people and losing them.
I feel like this is destined to be an engine of meme creation, this site lets you create animations of text conversations. First person to recreate the Tory party WhatsApp group wins…
There’s a wonderful madness to this — 2,731 people are building an exact replica of New York City inside Minecraft. I can’t work out why this is so joyful, but I think it’s something to do with the astonishing level of care, craft, and ambition being displayed.
I’m going to be signing up for the MidJourney beta as soon as I send this email out…
Jaw-dropping drone video of the new Tesla factory in Berlin.
Can LinkedIn get any worse? Yes, people are now using fake profiles to trawl for leads.
More meetings (up 250%), longer hours, and the emergence of a “triple peak day” — worrying writing from Derek Thompson in The Atlantic who seems to have precisely described my daily life and the state of remote working.
These are some of the most perfect words I have ever read about drinking pints.
As someone who spends a lot of time writing about digital transformation, I found this Fast Company piece on Starbucks fascinating. It suggests that the world’s third largest restaurant chain has gone overboard on the apps and the AI — reducing their physical locations to chaotic delivery fulfillment depots, and overburdening underpaid staff with tasks issued impersonally from ipads, where consumers abuse their anonymity by demanding ever more complicated beverages from the endless list of options. Also, did you know that since 2020, they’ve been opening a new store in China every 15 hours!?
If you work with data or charts then you should be reading Avinash Kaushik, who has kindly wrapped up all his main advice in one handy series or articles.
I’ve been hugely impressed by the New York Public Library system ever since we moved here (only this week I found that my library card even gets me free access to the Oxford English Dictionary online) but I had wondered how the system worked with ebooks — the New Yorker explains it and as so often, it’s hard to see public funding yet again being milked by private companies.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was the most beautiful book I read last year and it was no surprise when I found out that the author, Ocean Vuong, prefers to think of himself as a poet. Here he talks about writing with a freshness and a lack of constraint that sounds simple, but is nigh on impossible to achieve.
Immigrant Song, played on a rubber chicken. No reason.
Until next time, let’s be careful out there.