Messing with the magic Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. The slithers of rope tethering online advertising to any form of respectability are gradually being severed. $5 to anyone who can read the (albeit old) eBay case study without shaking their heads. “The experiment ended up showing that, for years, eBay had been spending millions of dollars …

Rebranding data Canvas8 has been asking global tech ethnographer Tricia Wang for her tuppenceworth on why thick data makes big data more valuable. There’s this belief that anything that is measurable is more valuable, but that devalues a large part of human expertise because if it’s not quantifiable, then it’s not valuable knowledge. That’s scary, because …

Valuing mental availability Paul Feldwick’s article on how brand experience should not distract marketers from fundamental brand truths has been well shared this week, but it’s a must read. “the most important search engine is still the one in your head” I just adore the William Hesketh (uni)Lever example which shows that things haven’t really changed much …

Czech this out There is a marketing festival in Prague next year which is called, errr, Marketing Festival. The time they saved coming up with the title must have been put into curating the speakers, because the line up is pretty special with Tom Goodwin, Helen Edwards, Binet & Field and Vikki Ross all there. …

From The New School Tim Stock teaches what looks to be a hugely interesting course at The New School called Analyzing Trends. Sadly, I’m a few thousand miles and most likely a couple-of-hundred grand short of being able to enrol. But Tim has released the slides from the course introduction where he covers a plethora of points. …

Flipping failure It’s good to be back in the hot seat after a couple of weeks on holiday (and see that no-one had filled my drawers with balloons… it happens here). One of the trip highlights was a 3-day hike through the Atlas Mountains with the saucepan lids. You see, walking is about 498th on the …

Intellectual mischief Alex Morris has released his Strategy and Planning Field Guide. There are enough gems in there to sink a ship. I simply can’t list them all. So here are my top 5: Page 28: Ways to start doing research differently Pages 34 – 35: The danger of aggregates and averages Page 37: A guide …

This is just the beginning The BBC has published a list of 101 people, ideas and things that are changing the way we work today.  The potential for a competitive e-residency market is intriguing, and ‘JOMO’ is utterly brilliant. Willy Wonka is a postman On the topic of workplaces, these trivia and pictures from Roald Dahl’s …

The search for the substantial Big data, big responsibility. And this bang-on-the-money article from Alex Murrell is a useful health warning when it comes to using it. Murrell discusses 5 question marks around big data (of collection, claims, completeness, correlation and comprehension) and shows how we need to look at big data with a more …