Any Hertfordshire shares would be greatly appreciated (a Hertfordshire Share sounds like the polar opposite of a Glasgow Kiss)

Ideas We Love: Features, not Bugs Issue Number 88: A playbook for brands bold enough to own what makes them awkward

A post about reframing bugs as features

open.substack.com/pub/ideaswel...

It’s called the department of war…. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised

Roxy music’s version of Jealous Guy.

This is really weak

Kinda bored of the whole thing where the leads of a movie have to rhapsodise so intensely about how their opposite number is the best thing ever.

Overuse of the word perspective in the business vocabulary is a real issue… “from a …. Perspective” etc

Adrien brody is very commercial isn’t he

New thing in same as old thing shock, innit

Watching Fallout on Amazon Prime.
Does occur to me that we have replaced linear telly with a linear-adjacent form of telly. Ad breaks function in similar way. Programmed released weekly. It Just has less good stuff on.

It’s the year of glad

Guns etc

Weeknotes #42 — Tom Darlington I started writing a thing about last year. I stopped. No one needs another end of year review. Implicit in feeling the need to write some sort of 2025 wrap up is a decision to commit to doing weeknot...

www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/wn41
#weeknotes etc

Nature abhors a vacuum: Weeknotes #40 — Tom Darlington Media is a finite resource. Some elements of media - like video impressions - are so plentiful as to appear infinite. Others, like physical media such as posters, print ads etc, are more clearly disti...

#weeknotes
www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/nature-...

I’ve voted for yourself

my efforts to continue with the #weeknotes survive, barely...on 'doing the boring thing', writing for the IPA and details of various forms of content consumption www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/do-the-...

No One Knows Anything: Weeknotes #38 — Tom Darlington I was asked to give a talk to the marketing department of a big media and technology platform. The brief was to share some trends for the year ahead and discuss the types of things which would affec...

Slowly trying to get back into the weeknote habit...
This week a request to do a presentation results in the conclusion that no one - least of all people in marketing - really knows anything.....
www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/no-one-...

@phil-adams.bsky.social gives us some sage advice in his typically generous style!

Ideas We Love: 'The Agony Begets the Epiphany' Issue Number 68: Phil Adams is next to tell us about how he works....

open.substack.com/pub/ideaswel...

anyway. Night

Given they have a commercial model in place it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. It all looks like a precursor to adding display inventory though or “sponsored” stacks

The changes over at substack are a perfect example. It used to be an email service (get content from A-B). Now it’s got “notes” and a feed. And an inbox. And it’s multi media. People spend all their time talking about how to succeed on the site, not on the content they want to share

Been thinking a lot about one of @willsh.bsky.social ‘s greatest hits - fracking the social web. At some point all services stop being about the plumbing of getting information from A-B and start becoming a platform with features and formats and a more advanced logic for content discovery

Optimising for ‘Aliveness’ — Tom Darlington Recently I was explaining a personal dilemma to a friend. Should I do the big, scary and potentially rewarding thing I was considering or should I do the safe, bland and sensible thing? He then intr...

Taking Oliver Burkeman's idea of Aliveness as a navigation tool and applying it to brands and communication....
www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/optimis...

Rolex’s new golf ads are really really really bad. Why on earth they got rid of #perpetual I have no idea

Why do media agencies need a chief media officer?

Maybe a good analogy for a lot of the sludge we see online from various generative AI tools is Muzak. It looks and feels a bit like the real thing. It works in certain contexts. But if you stare too long you realise what’s happening in real terms

News preferring to focus on the losses incurred by tech billionaires rather than the pension schemes of your average person , I see

Review and rebuild sounds like the worst kind of agency pitch theme I’ve ever encountered

Column. On pathetic European freeloaders.
www.thetimes.com/article/7652...