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…
The age of the toxic brand has dawned. This has ushered in an array of “Marmite” brands and love them or hate them it doesn’t matter – they’re winning either way! The toxic companies are flourishing and no matter how many people despise them they keep on growing, fuelled by the horror stories we hear…
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…
News of Google and Nestle’s KitKat/Android partnership has been met with a wealth of delighted puns in the tech community, but brand managers and business writers have been left with a bitter aftertaste in their mouths at the announcement of this unusual pairing. Though the press release has been widely parroted, and for the most…
Last week, the first ever synthetic beef hamburger was served to a panel of experts. It was a Promethean feat of human ingenuity, involving weeks of intensive lab work, hand weaving of microscopic fibres, and the expenditure of a cool £215,000. Despite all this, however, the achievements of Dr Mark Post and his team pale…
This week, the business and media commentariat have talked of little but the upcoming merger of Omnicom and Publicis, the second and third largest advertising groups in the world, respectively. As befits a venture which involves hundreds of the world’s most glamourous admen and women, the accompanying spin is so utopian as to be dazzling….
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” So said Benjamin Franklin, a man who knew a thing or two about the activities of the state and its miscontents. He recognised the haste with which word spreads once a secret gets out, particularly when the information contained is shocking or surprising –…
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…
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…
I went to supper at the small but deliciously formed Texture restaurant in Portman Street last night with our clients, the government of South Australia, hosted by the Agent General, Bill Muirhead, to celebrate the First Family of Australian wine production. I sat next to Robert Hill Smith, who runs the Yalumba winery. Yalumba is…