Month: September 2018

  • A few thoughts on innovation

    I started thinking about a post on innovation, after an agency meeting about a possible project. My friend Nigel Scott has been researching the venture capital industry. His ideas fired some of the thoughts in this post. It caused me to reflect again on innovation and the way we think about it. Innovation rewards hard…

  • China male beauty market + more

    The booming male beauty market in China – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China – finding the latest Asian male beauty market trend – Korean idol flower boy image difficult to square with mainstream male beauty products. I guess this male beauty market trend must be analogous to the new romantics of the early 1980s.…

  • Dr Eugenia Cheng & things that made last week

    Dr Eugenia Cheng Dr Eugenia Cheng talks about the key themes in her book The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn’t Outtakes from Dr Eugenia Cheng talk: Pure mathematics is a framework for agreeing on things Pure maths is a framework for how to think Make progress rather than…

  • iPhone Xs launch

    Random notes as I watched the iPhone Xs, iPhone XR and Apple Watch Series 4 launch. Watching the introductory clip, this felt like an event designed mostly for an internal audience. The events have become a parody of themselves with very well worn tropes. Company and eco-system update Apple stores: 500,000,000 visitors per year. The…

  • Good strategy inspired by Matt Holt

    A couple of tweets on good strategy by Matt Holt inspired this post. Strategy and planning are considered to be disrupted by changes in the advertising industry. It often boils down to ‘ who needs strategy when you have big data / machine learning’. Big data; isn’t good strategy. Instead it tells you retrospectively where…

  • NYPD surveillance + more things

    IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color – you might feel a bit squeamish about the application but this is established image recognition that Google (and Yahoo!) search engines used 12 years ago rather than anything new. We shouldn’t be surprised that the NYPD surveillance search system…

  • Colin Kaepernick + more things

    Colin Kaepernick  If you work in marketing, you’d have had to hidden in a remote jungle outpost to avoid all the industry big opinion pieces and social discussion over Nike’s latest brand campaign. The outrage was over a social image of Colin Kaepernick supporting the video content below Believe in something. Even if it means…

  • Autocorrect + more things

    I Invented Autocorrect. Sorry About That; You’re Welcome | WIRED – More than 10 years after the initial release of the iPhone, the state of the art now is much as it was then. Even with recent advances in AI and machine learning, the core problem remains the same: Software doesn’t understand the nuance of human communication.…

  • Realm of the Damned by Alec Worley

    I was given a copy of Realm of the Damned – Tenebris Deos by one of the staff at Forbidden Planet. Werewolf Press did a really nice job of printing up Alec Worley’s graphic novel. The subtitle is a nice touch as Worley must have been thinking that he had a franchise on his hands.…