Next week Theresa May will be writing to the European Council to declare her intentions to initiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. The resounding message of last year’s referendum –for right or wrong- was the country’s desire to ‘take back control’. The message was an alluring one. We have long been told we live in…
Search current articles on Facebook and you’ll find pages and pages on its exciting new messaging app. What is clearly a Snap Chat rip-off, the app allows users to share photos and videos that vanish in 24 hours. That this news itself comes little more than a day after a BBC report into the social…
Twitter is now daily global phenomenon, fuelling everything from celebrity profiles to national revolutions. The media is obsessed with it, and everyone seems to be on it. But what is the real story behind the phenomenon? Since its launch in 2006, the number of Twitter users has soared. There are now 255m users of the…
Oh, the wretched topic of death, such a frustrating interloper, especially at Christmas, damn you. Alas, there is no point in pretending that we improve with age. In his colossal autobiography, Ben Hecht expressed the ageing process thus: “the years diminish us, time rots our body, cools our blood, darkens our brain, and, like a…
Beyonce’s new iTunes record—the singer’s album broke a million sales in six days on Wednesday—should be a lesson not only to pop stars but to anyone with a message to get across. The singer released the album entirely without prior fanfare, tossing it onto iTunes with a casual insouciance. It was a masterclass in cutting…
For those who have climbed life’s greasy pole of ambition, nothing is quite so wretched as past indiscretions. This week, Paris Brown, Britain’s first youth police crime commissioner, has joined ranks with Paolo Di Canio, facing a flurry of public outrage in light of flippant, childish comments made that have been picked up and elevated…
Yesterday evening, I gave a talk at TEDxWarsaw on my particular breed of Googlephobia. Through the talk I told a cautionary tale about the silent siphoning of our most valuable assets – our behaviours – by the internet’s imperial superpowers and how this translates in our daily lives. The talk received a fantastic response, and…
Software may be eating everything. But one thing that I’ve seen at Advertising Week Europe today is that we’re learning to adapt to these changes with zeal. This morning, Trevor Beattie announced the death of the thirty second advert, advocating a culture of five second segments instead. In the midst of the sea of white…
Yesterday’s failed Bayern Munich stunt was an ideal example of what happens when creative energy fails to connect with the reality of the media narrative. For those who didn’t hear, the German football team wrangled a piece of PR trickery which fuelled an horrific backlash. An announcement on their website that “a spectacular name” was…
Yahoo’s announcement last week that it plans to test Stanley Milgram’s influential ‘6 degrees of separation’ theory on Facebook shows that it has very little idea about the implications of social media for human interaction over the last few years. The experiment- in which anyone with a Facebook can participate- requires users to transmit targeted…