Upstream #170
barbie-heat, effort + care, business unusual, safe space, hak.
Hey. Going to avoid the whole X’s and No’s thing. Time will tell if it works. Hope you haven’t gone and rebranded yourself. You’re enough, just as you are. Right, let’s do it.
“Beauty arrests us, and for a pause we are taken out of ourselves, sometimes lost in the enchantment of something marvellous before us”.
William Desmond
culture // barbie-heat
Barbie hypes been mad hasn’t it. And as the world went pink, it also went from hot to boiling. Makes you wonder, why we react so much to a company that sells plastic planet killing stuff, and so little to existential climate crisis? Maybe it's because we suck at promoting climate change. This piece suggests 5 ways to improve: Simplifying, Humanizing and Rebranding / Less Rationality More Emotions / Fewer Facts, More Friendships / From Bits & Pieces to Prime-Time / Less Doomerism & New Narratives. All important. Culture needs a radical shift to embrace 1.5 degree lifestyles, when endless growth comes to an end. When less, will be more. When small, will be big. History is drawing lines. Which side will you be on?
brands // effort + care
Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer for P&G, makes an effort. And he cares. In March he talked about resetting the brand comms bar for P&G, and more recently, about the next reset: creativity that grows markets. He says that "growing markets is hard work but it can be done”. The 3 key elements he believes are: creative insights, creative inclusion, and creative impact. While he recognises that it’s "the highest bar with the greatest degree of difficulty", he believes it can "delight more people and deliver more value for all”. Always stretching. Relentless effort. It’s impressive. That’s the secret to good brands though isn’t it. When it comes together, it’s magic. That, and caring. As the late great Tony Bennett said, care creates longevity. RIP 💔.
technology // business unusual
It’s happening. AI and the creative industries are awkwardly lurching forward (see Hollywood for awkward high tide). It's a blessing and a boogeyman. It’s exhilarating, with things like Virgin Voyage’s personalised J Lo invites, or the bias challenging Orange women’s World Cup ad, or even Sinatra singing Dua Lipa’s Levitating. But equally petrifying, as the AI generated internet evolves creativity, and erases the line between human and machine. Marketers have bunch of new tools, and it’s spreading, from copywriting (Jasper), to customer support (Ada), to legal (Harvey). What’s next? Well, as George Monbiot asks, how can we teach our children to survive AI? He writes "the word education partly derives from the Latin educere: to lead out. But too often it leads us in: into old ways of thinking, into dying professions, into the planet-eating system called business as usual”. Our kids need to rapidly prepare for a business unusual world.
creativity // safe space
The best ideas, as Ogilvy said, often “come as jokes”. And in his great book The Seven Patterns of Innovation (more on that here), Steven Johnson talks about how most ideas arrive half baked. More hunch, than revelation. Sustaining them is less perspiration, and more cultivation, in a physiologically safe environment. In 2015, Google’s 2 year internal study, Project Aristotle, identified 5 things that set great teams apart and psychological safety was by far the most important. It allows teams to feel safe to make mistakes, express ideas, and share concerns without fear of embarrassment or rejection. It means being more human, vulnerable and honest. It ain’t easy. But the more you do, the more creative capacity you’ll build.
five random (ish) things:
Gambling, is screwed up 🎰.
Screens, it's what's on them that counts 📺.
TikTok e-commerce to launch 🤑.
Ahhh. Heartwarming ⚭.
The rap CV, amazing 👨💻.
watching // hak
Hak Baker grew up East London innit. In his mid-twenties, he was jailed for two years for robbery. Inside he learned the guitar, and eventually coined his own genre, G-Folk, as a way to tell stories in his infectious cockney cadence. The song and video are a real celebration of life. Enjoy.