The100: Partisan cheerleading, 2024 trends and The Masked Singer

Can anyone get AI to summarise all of these?

Jeez, 2024? Let’s kick off with all the trend reports that have very kindly been collected into a Google Drive folder. Just the 124 decks in there…

Evans above*

Over and above all of those trend reports, I’d suggest reading Ben Evans’ utterly superb presentation on AI and Everything Else.

*3 days after writing and I’m still patting myself on the back for this heading 😁

Spotify, unwrapped

Elle Hunt wrote a wonderful article for the Guardian about Spotify Wrapped and how reducing human experience to numbers is meaningless. Caution: May cause neck ache from 4 minutes of nodding along.

“The insights resulting from this data are close to zero […] When I think back to 2023, it won’t be the times I spent listening to Lana Del Rey on Spotify that I will remember, but the hour I spent transfixed by her chaotic performance at Glastonbury festival. It won’t be the number of minutes of Taylor Swift that made a mark, but the emotional angst of a breakup I tried to expel by playing Mr Perfectly Fine on repeat for an entire day. And it won’t be Monzo’s dubious praise of my “Caterpillar cakeTM era” that sends me back to M&S in 2024, but the fact that it is a convenient stop on my usual walk home.”

Along a similar train of thought, I’ve put together a new 30 min presentation called ‘Why “why” will never die, even in the face of AI’ and it’s been going down pretty well. If you or your team would like to hear it, just let me know. 

I actually quite like The Masked Singer…

Do you really understand how people live? Including this great quote from Zoe Harris:

“It’s become culturally accepted to look down your nose at ordinary Britain and feel superior […] I say to agency people, where did you go on holiday? What books are you reading? What did you watch on Saturday night on telly? And if they’re turning their nose up at The Masked Singer, that says a whole heap. […] It’s about diversity of class and interests, and a willingness to go out and understand people who are different from their own social set.”

As a first step toward getting closer to people, I encourage our clients to survey their company and find out if biases exist. Once you have that, you know what you need to watch out for and what you need to understand better. 

What an inauguration crowd can tell us about surveys

With around 49% of the world’s population facing national elections this year (hold onto your hats everyone.), this paper about expressive responding in political surveys is worth a read… Or at least the abstract 😁

“We take advantage of a controversy regarding the relative sizes of crowds at the presidential inaugurations of Donald Trump in 2017 and Barack Obama in 2009 to ask a question where the answer is so clear and obvious to the respondents that nobody providing an honest response should answer incorrectly […] Our findings provide support for the notion that at least some of the misinformation reported in surveys is the result of partisan cheerleading rather than genuinely held misperceptions.”

And finally…

The Generation Gap advert from Australia Lamb is genius. It shows in a very amusing way some of the lazy segmentations that are out there .

Behold! Gurwinder Bhogal’s 33 concepts to survive the year. Not sure which is my favourite –  Opinion Pageant, Dartmouth Scar or Opinion Shopping… Oh goodness, all of them!

A wonderful memo from David Ogilvy on his shortcomings, shared this week by the DO Lectures. A good bit of prep for the dreaded “what are you bad at?” interview question. 

Has LinkedIn got really weird? It’s very much a love/hate relationship here at WMT. It’s vital for my job, and I probably am guilty of oversharing, maybe. In that spirit, here is my review of 2023 – both work and personal. 

If you want to have a chat/coffee/walk anytime about what we do, about the insights world, about life, cheese, good books, just let me know. I’m always happy to talk. 

Until next time,

Alistair