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The100: fantasies, fallacies and chocolate hobnobs

“Narcissism described as Strategy”

Okay, stand back. This is powerful stuff and not for the faint hearted MRXer.

It’s Martin Weigel with his Escape from Fantasy talk – and yes, we’ve now built a shrine for him (hand-hollowed out off the wall using unfurled paper clips)  at Watch Me Think towers.

It’s next to Dave Trott’s.

martin weigel escape from fantasy

Martin happened to present this at our Truth in Marketing shindig the other month – am I making those who didn’t come jealous yet?

This takes the biscuit

Guinness Surfer won the world cup of ads organised by BBH – what you missed it?

Yeah, so did most people. It had a grand total of 15,000 votes. So please note that in the world cup of biscuits (yes, biscuits), there were 1.3 million votes. I think we know where the public’s priorities lie. And they’re not in Soho, London.

Difference between knowledge and data

I haven’t had a go at the issues with pure data use in a while. So double-win as WMT Shriner Dave Trott does that for me on why data may be factual but it’s not necessarily the truth.

Champagne bars, dominatrixes & Bill Gates

All feature in The Fallacy of Market Research (13m). As does Dave Trott 🙂

It’s part of Rory Sutherland’s excellent Radio 4 series Thought Cages. In this edition he talks about the need to avoid asking consumers what they want (“faster horses”), why creative people are afraid of the obvious, and the tale of 2 doctors… which is one you’re going to be retelling to others – guarantee it.

Brilliance & brutalisation of insights

Neil Perkin runs brilliant events across a multitude of topics and in this month’s Firestarters he had 3 folks up to talk about Insights. Helen Edwards was the most pertinent to us (there are only so many planners you can listen to)…

Helen decried the kind of vague platitudes and generalisations that can often pass for insights (‘when my hair looks good I feel good’), saying that we need to work harder to define what a great insight is (like ‘little secrets hidden beneath the surface’ or ‘something that is weird-normal’).”

Her outline of the 4 key areas that make up a great insight are something we should take note of:

  • revelatory,
  • directive,
  • about them (not us), and
  • be currently unaddressed

Godfather of Fake News

You can make a business out of people’s propensity to unwittingly lie (see our tagline for further details), but here’s a gentleman that makes money from lying outrageously:

BREAKING: Clinton Foundation Ship Seized at Port of Baltimore Carrying Drugs, Guns and Sex Slaves

While claiming he’s making a political point:

“His aim is to trick conservative Americans into sharing false news, in the hope of showing what he calls their “stupidity””

You can make your own judgements on his actions, but first do you need to make some judgements on yours?

“I need more trees please”

As you know we’re all for observation here, and this film does a stunning job of illustrating an issue perfectly. Every second of this 100 second film is representative of 1% of land-use in the UK. Clever. Beautiful. Informative.