The100: Critical ignoring, subject lines and supportive penguins
The best of the best
Jeremy Bullmore is the mother, father and extended family of all advertising legends. And, luckily for us, he’s released his archive. In amongst the tanzanite is a speech Bullmore gave whilst President of the Market Research Society:
Research, of one kind or another, provides the basis for most of the decisions that control our lives. Anyone who makes those decisions will also inevitably make mistakes. Decision-making is an imprecise science; so decision-makers are fallible – and so, however reluctantly, we may forgive them. But we should not as readily forgive anyone who knowingly or carelessly provides dodgy data on which those decisions are founded.
And one more quote because it’s (nearly) Christmas…
I’d be sorry if researchers, having succeeded in digging up insights, were then satisfied to leave the most effective communication of these to others. It reduces the role of the researcher to that of the miner; who digs up the diamonds in their rough and undistinguished state – but then takes no part in cutting them, shaping them or making them glitter.
Ready, aim, fire
A parliament of the finest research minds have shared what they think the industry should stop doing. The list is, unsurprisingly, long. My favourite has to be from Sarah Maloy at Pepsi:
Research is ‘stuffed’ with the practice of gathering qualitative data at the end of a project to ‘bring the findings to life.’ Instead, qualitative data should be systematically gathered and analysed at the early exploratory stages. Only then does it have the potential to be a source of real insight, as it focuses on truly feeling and understanding the problem or need.
What is water?
On the “must listen to, no excuses” list is This is Water by David Foster Wallace.
One of the finest speeches I’ve ever heard. It’s about, amongst other things, instinctive thought and how to manage it:
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Do not feed the trolls
Speaking of managing thoughts, Joshua Benton makes the case for critical ignorance:
Three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention.
I critically ignored the many, many emails last Friday (you know, when everything is “reduced”). Dave Harland scored the subject lines that he was plagued with. Excellent.
No egg sucking here
These 9 Googling tips are useful if you want to step it up your search skills. You can use quotations, hyphens, filetypes, all sorts. You’re welcome 🙂
And finally…
In case anyone wanted to know (hello?), my favourite Christmas ads ever are:
Neil Pasricha is publishing one awesome thing every weekday for 1000 straight weekdays. A reminder that life is good.
And who knew that penguins comfort each other? N’awwwh!
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