The100: Bubbles of blinkeredness, going wide and  Montell Jordan

“Treat the AI like an infinitely patient research assistant”

Sharing a metric tonne of sense, Neil Perkin has some great tips on using GenAI as a thought partner. I particularly like the idea of using LLMs to play the role of your audience and asking it to critique presentations:

“You can give it context like what’s important to them, how they respond to information or the kinds of questions they ask. But it’s an excellent way to prepare, and seems to be able to anticipate questions or challenges very well.”

The Bubble Of Blinkeredness

Rob Campbell has been reminding us to get out there, to remove ourselves from our bubbles of blinkeredness and look to the edges: 

“we live in a world of corporate convenience … where the economic benefits of process complexity, C-Suite complicity, and/or pundit popularity beats spending unfiltered time listening, learning and experimenting with the very people who create the subcultures around your category […] make sure we’re comfortable being uncomfortable, because the only thing that will keep us ahead of things like AI, is looking to the edges rather than aspiring for the comforts of the middle.”

Related, if it doesn’t feel like real life, it’s not real research. 

A cure for your FOMO

Speaking of learning from the edges, lotsssss of Food & Drink folk were at Expo West a couple of weeks back. It’s an 80,000 person tradeshow focussed on showcasing new, natural / organic / health-focused CPG products. 

For those of us who weren’t able to make it to Californ-i-a, Brent Vrdoljak wrote up all the trends, hype and hidden gems and shared them in his always excellent Supergoods newsletter:

“For years, we’ve condemned sugar as a society, whilst simultaneously producing and consuming endless amounts of it. Remembering that Expo West is a battleground of both new and natural, the stance of sugar was one of the most interesting and immediate things that stood out to me.”

“Let’s not get myopic”

When trying to change behaviour, Mark Earls has been encouraging us to consider the wider physical and social contexts in which that behaviour happens. 

“[look] beyond the behaviour we’re trying to change – to understand the physical and social context in which the behaviour happens […] most of us only collect data about the thing, not about the context. How can we hope to change the behaviour if we see it in splendid isolation?”

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Have you noticed more and more adverts being set in fantasy worlds? Creative Salon has been digging into why, one of their reasons being that:

“Advertising has, unsurprisingly, often struggled to portray ‘real life’, and been criticised as such. After all, the ennui of most of our daily lives doesn’t often provide rich fodder for storytelling.”

However, I disagree. It just seems like they’ve taken the easy route. After all it’s much easier to NOT do real life, than do real life. 

But when it’s done right, I think it works brilliantly. It’s more authentic, more relatable and often very funny. 

And finally…

Statsignificant (their newsletter is well worth getting) have used Chartmetric data to find which songs have been most used in TV and film. In 3rd place, At Last by Etta James, in 2nd Push It, by Salt-n-Pepa, and in first place, the one and only Montell Jordan’s is how we do it. All on my playlist. 

Part 47b of ‘skills that AI can’t replace’… Watch a rather large cruise ship being built in under 3mins. Go on, you know you want to. 

As Skype is on its way out, we will no longer be treated to this sound (though it will always live in my head). Is it as annoying as this one from Intel? No it isn’t. Nothing is as annoying as that. Not even this from Apple, which still only makes me think of having to reboot my machine after it crashed, not it starting up with joy. 

Any ear worms you care to share?