16th June 2017
The great Sir John Hegarty on creativity. ‘No great idea has ever come out of a brainstorm meeting,’ Hegarty says. The trouble with brainstorms, he believes, is that they operate at ‘the speed of the slowest person in the room.’ ‘Einstein didn’t work in a brainstorm session,’ he adds. He sees parallels between brainstorming and communism. “Germany got the BMW, while East Germany got brainstorm sessions and the Trabant. Who wants a ******* Trabant?!”
Google is perpetuating a very bad definition of eugenics. ‘Google’s practice of highlighting one answer to a search query has led the tech giant to inadvertently endorse the idea that the Earth is flat and that Barack Obama is planning a coup, as well as give credit to the wrong person for inventing email. This is Google’s ‘definition’ of eugenics – ‘The science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavour only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.‘
This is very nicely done. To launch Gatorade’s new electrolyte water they made a true-to-life water athlete, animated it in mid air, and caught it on camera. G Active : Water Made Active.
The online media transparency crisis is turning into an opportunity(?), as Google has promised a U-turn on giving brands a third-party guarantee that most of their ads can be seen by users. Google promises independent viewability verification by the end of the year.
Cannes Lions 2017 starts next week. According to Digiday, these are the storylines that will dominate – ‘keeping brands safe’, ‘platform power plays’ ‘WTF Trump’ and ‘gender equality.’ You can sign up to Digiday’s Cannes Daily Briefing here.
Why algorithms make surprisingly good Creative Directors. ‘It started as a joke. But writing a computer program that would generate ideas for creative projects sounded like a worthwhile challenge to pursue’.’People are actually interested in the idea of a computer as a character, as a personality, we all sort of have these personal and intimate relationships with our computers.’
A look at the world of Travel and Tourism. A leader in The Economist observes that younger business travellers are more likely to extend trips for fun.’ACCENTURE‘, ‘advertorial’, ‘jeggings.’ The competition for ugliest portmanteau is fierce. Few constructions, though, can match “bleisure” for barbarousness. For the uninitiated, the word is a blend of business and leisure. But ugly as it is, it exists for a reason: the practice of adding a few days of pleasure to a work trip is becoming increasingly popular.‘
From a couple of months back, but still highly topical – another fabulous infographic from @informationisbeautiful. The World’s Biggest Data Breaches.
This is a painstaking piece of work and quite some achievement. Someone has edited the Wizard of Oz to be in alphabetical order. Worth skimming through to the speaking parts. This then is ‘Of Oz The Wizard.’
Ever wonder what your plane looks like from the outside when it’s cruising above the clouds? Wonder no more. This weather balloon camera captures an airliner rocketing by at 38,000 feet.
Finally, just say there will be no newsletter next week, back on the 30th June.