Hey, nice to see you. Hope you’re all ok and getting some lovely sunshine☀️😎🍹.
"Perfection of the means and confusion of the ends seems to characterize our age"
Albert Einstein
Culture // self love
We’re re-emerging aren’t we. Normality, is creeping back. The slow down is over. So, did it change us? Lots of talk but, has the pandemic rewired our relationship with busyness for example? Will we continue to glorify it? It’s signalled our worth and status but has this changed? Hope so🤞. There was also the unexpected beauty of Covid Hair 💇🏼♀️. Which is good self love. No bad thing too, as social media increasingly makes us feel terrible about ourselves 😩. This piece on our warped self, discussed new research which shows how social media warps our view of the world. Consistently telling us it’s full of impossibly beautiful, happy people, living wonderfully luxurious and leisurely lives. Which is obvs untrue and is making us collectively unhappy. Social media is the new smoking 🚭. And like all health hazards, it’s due a reckoning.
Brands // multipliers
Intangible assets now account for 90% of the S&P top 500 total assets. 90%… 😲. Yeah, your most valuable asset probably isn’t supply chains or stores. It's your philosophy (Patagonia), or your workforce (Lush), or your set of routines (Slack), or your culture (Netflix), or your priorities (BBC), or your story (British Airways). Good read on that here. Brand isn’t a building block, it's a multiplier. It's not the plumbing, it's the engineering. And good brands, ones made well for a the reality of now, have the capacity to expand horizontally. You know, do different things. Just look at Ferrari getting into fashion or Tesla getting into restaurants or Netflix opening a shop (actually, they want to be Disney). Good brands rock 🤘. Invest the time.
Creativity // sea lions
Most of the time, we don’t say what we think. We say what we think will impress other people. Loved this brilliant post on advertising from Dave Dye on “what I liked before I knew what I was supposed to like”. He delves into the archives of ads from his youth (some absolute crackers), pointing out that real people don’t think too deeply about ads. They like them because of a nice song, or because it was funny or cool. Far more straightforward than we’d like to believe. Sometimes we forget that. It’s why I love this ad from Coors Light. Smashing tune 🎧 (Roy Ayers), cool scene 🏖 and a sea lion . It’s clever. It works hard on category entry points etc and it’s effortlessly enjoyable for the viewer (in 15 secs). Simple, well branded, enjoyable and effective. It’s possible.
Technology // software eats the car
The automotive industry is changing a wee bit isn’t it. They’re rapidly phasing out internal combustion engines, replacing them with electric vehicles, along with navigating shared and peer to peer ownership, autonomous and connected vehicles and micro mobility trends. A lot to deal with. Quickly 🤯. Deloitte estimates that in 2017 40% of the cost of a new car was electronic. Which will rise to 50% by 2030. Meanwhile, half of the recalls in 2019 and nearly 60% of the labor costs to repair collisions involved software and electronic. Software is moving from being a part of the car, to determining the value of a car. And the industry is moving from a hardware-first, to a software-first mentality. Volkswagen’s chairman Herbert Dies says, “Software will account for 90% of future innovations in the car.” Rubber and metal, is getting replaced by code. It’s mad. Just look at VW eying an autonomous SaaS by the hour model. Pay $8.50 / hour to access autonomous driving features. The future’s here, just not evenly distributed and all that. Scary, exciting and different.
5 things:
9 lessons about life from 3 retirees & an inventor. Lovely 😍.
Nature’s amazing 😲. A kestrel’s head perfectly still as it hunts 🦅.
Overconsumption 🎁 🛍 🛒 is next on the agenda 🛑.
25 years, 25 of the best movie scenes 🎬🍿. Awesome 👏.
How market research gets used. Heh 😂.
Watching:
You might have already seen it but holy moly the Bo Burnham special on Netflix is amazing 🍿. So much to like and admire. His creative talent, his ability to smash the creative constraint of lockdown (he did it all in one room, in his apartment). But mostly, it’s his funny and cutting observations on our digital lives 👨💻 😳. Superb 👌. Watch it if you haven’t. Nod and agree if you have.