El Capitan climb a massive missed opportunity for consumer engagement

(Originally posted at http://foxps.com/inside-fox/el-capitan-climb-a-massive-missed-opportunity-for-consumer-engagement/ )

Inspirational maybe, but for this armchair adventurer, watching the live feed of this record-breaking climb was a bit like watching toenails grow. I couldn’t help feeling that it was a huge communal activity missed.

Via a rushed-to-market El Capitan app, the watching public could have easily voted on new amendments to the route (a couple of overhangs would have livened things up considerably), as well as add the odd ‘challenge’ – a bucketload of water, a distractingly dangled flasher or two, a micro-payment-enabled snowball cannon.

And where was the merchandise? I couldn’t find a single El Capitan-related gewgaw for the kids in my local Tesco.

One giant crawl for man, one giant yawn for consumerism.

Drone ate my hamster, claims FPS designer

(Originally published at http://foxps.com/inside-fox/drone-ate-my-hamster-claims-fps-designer/ )

Hard on the heels of news of a ‘Terminator 2-inspired’ souvenir-extruding 3D printer comes this report from FPS designer James Waite:

“We were having breakfast at home when this little helicopter thing with an Amazon logo starts hovering above our back garden. Then it comes down and lands on the little one’s clockwork plastic hamster and kind of scoops it up into a kind of bath thing. As it lifts off we can already see how the drone is melting the hamster somehow. I then tracked the drone with my binoculars as it flew off – it looked like it was turning the hamster into a toilet plunger.”

The story becomes even more sinister.

“What with the cuts and everything, there?s more and more litter lying around on the streets. But now it’s like the streets are being picked clean of plastic. If only the drones could extrude stuff from dog poo.”

Unconfirmed reports now suggest that a printer-drone has been seen extruding a replica of itself. Amazon has declined to comment.

Richard III to replace Jeremy Clarkson in The Grand Tour, sources reveal

While his TV appearances were deeply divisive, his famously reckless attitude and lack of political correctness have made him a notorious headline-grabber around the world. I'm talking, of course, about Richard III, whose controversial reinterment was watched by millions worldwide.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that Richard III is being recast to replace Jeremy Clarkson in the next version of Amazon's The Grand Tour.

Technical details still need to be ironed out, of course, and it will be interesting to see how James May, Richard Hammond and the Stig will interact with another non-speaking partner.

The Richard III Society is apparently delighted. “After spending so much time under a car park, this is only fitting,” said a spokesperson. “And with the issue of lumbar support in car seats having been so neglected in Top Gear, our spinally challenged Plantagenet will be sure to change that.”

Princes William and Harry were not available for comment, not having been seen for some time.

(Originally posted at http://foxps.com/inside-fox/richard-iii-to-replace-jeremy-clarkson-in-top-gear-sources-reveal/ )

The seven best B2B campaigns ever (and one I hate)

(Originally appeared at http://foxps.com/inside-knowledge/the-best-b2b-creative-campaigns-ever/ )


The best B2B ads don’t tend to look like B2B ads. In fact, just like the best B2C ads, they don’t tend to conform to any conventions. Which, of course, is exactly why they stand out. Literally, in some cases. Here’s my highly subjective “Wish I’d done those” list.

Ram Trucks ‘Farmer’
Turning small businessmen into legends. With still images and a voice. Mesmerising.


‘Mr W’
It’s a two-minute wait to the punchline, but well worth it. If I tell you the brand, it’ll ruin the joke.


Fedex campaign ‘When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight’
We’ve all experienced deadline panic (my dentist aside), which is just one reason why this is the best B2B strapline ever. I must have watched this ad scores of times and still love every moment.


Cisco ‘The Perfect Gift for Valentine’s Day’
The joy of this ad is the utter inappropriateness of the retro B2C schmaltziness for such an extreme-B2B product. It’s obviously not going to get IT Directors impulse-buying network switches, but it’s a lovely piece of brand building.


Volvo ‘Epic Split’ with Jean-Claude Van Damme (and Enya)
It’s the contrast between insane ballsiness and transcendent calm that makes this so viscerally compelling.


IBM billboards
Three smart ideas for smarter cities. Absolutely convincing brand demonstrations. There are tons of really good IBM ads, but these have the wow factor.


IBM ‘He Ain’t Heavy/Elephants’
Wait, I’d forgotten this gem from Johannesburg, an incredibly charming repositioning of ‘Big Brother’. Wish there was a better copy on YouTube, but it still gives me tingles.


And one I hate…

Corning ‘A day made of glass’
Apparently a lot of people like this very addy ad. I just wish a toughened-glass Terminator would come crashing through one of the glass walls and lay waste to the whole ultra-smug family.
What’s your favourite B2B campaign ever?

Set your B2B free

B2C is where you talk to people slobbed out in front of the telly.

We talk to the world’s movers and shakers.

B2C is where you talk to people who couldn’t care less.

We talk to people aching to kick a dent in the universe.

Steve Jobs wasn’t a basketball player or a racing driver or a film star. He was in business.

Kids fantasize about being the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Elon Musk’s real life persona makes a wimp of the Hollywood version.

Management games like Hospital Manager, Football Manager and Theme Park sell in the millions.

People don’t play them to be bored. They play them for the emotional and intellectual rollercoaster ride.

Because today, business is where the excitement is.

Today, businesspeople escape from the business world when they can’t take the pace any longer.

Take a dose of adrenaline. And set your B2B free.

The banner ad turns 20. Who’s celebrating?

(Originally posted July 2015 at http://foxps.com/inside-knowledge/the-banner-ad-turns-20-whos-celebrating/ )

The banner ad is 20 years old this month. And it’s safe to say it’s the sorriest episode in our beloved industry’s history.

The banner’s ugly, misshapen formats debase our craft. Their data gorging habits totally degrade the user experience, most especially on mobiles.

Thankfully, 51% of banner ads are invisible. Yet media owners still demand payment for their non-delivery.

Their ‘effectiveness’ figures are an indictment of an industry that gave the world 1984, the Guinness surfer and Volvo Trucks.

But what the public won’t forgive is that banners have now broken the contract that advertisers have historically had with ‘consumers’. Us advertising people have always been able to justify all our interruptive excess by pointing out that it pays, either partially or wholly, for content: in magazines and newspapers, on radio and television, and online.

But now that we all pay to consume data – and it’s not cheap – we’re shelling out more and more to be drowned in an ever-deepening sea of sewage.

It’s my unhappy task to take note of what passes for display advertising in the online world. But as 1984 has become 1984, I’ve now been stalked by the same advertiser, with the same banner, on a quarter of the web pages I visit, for the last two years, victim of some idiot algorithm.

We can do so much better. But how do we start the revolution? And can we do it before we wake up one day to find that our market has simply blocked us out?

Cinema chains refuse to show ‘capitalist’ adverts

(Originally posted at http://foxps.com/inside-fox/cinema-chains-refuse-to-show-capitalist-adverts/ )

Retailers are bewildered by leading chains’ stance on adverts that were intended to play during the run-up to Christmas.

The UK’s three leading cinema chains have refused to show ‘consumerist’ adverts by various retailers and confectioners, citing fears that they could offend people.

Digital Cinema Media, which handles most cinema advertising in the UK, told us that it has “a policy not to run advertising connected to personal beliefs, such as politics, religion or economics. Our members have found that showing such advertisements carries the risk of upsetting, or offending, audiences. And capitalism is as much a belief system as a belief in a deity or a political party.”

A spokesperson for the advertisers reacted, “This is rather chilling in terms of limiting free speech. What will they ban next?”

In other news, the Church of England is disgruntled about something or other.

2 reasons why Paris’s 2 degree ‘safe’ limit is magical thinking

The central axiom of the Paris climate talks is that there is a safe limit to global warming and that limit is two degrees. That’s frankly ridiculous.

To achieve an ‘average’ two degree increase, individual locations will experience either less or more than that. It’s the ‘more’ that we need to be frightened of.

Because the poles will experience some of the biggest deviations from the mean. Six degrees higher. (Alaska’s already trending 3-4 degrees warmer than normal.) Enough to melt enough ice to put most of the world’s biggest cities underwater as soon as a big enough chunk of ice slides off one of the ice caps. In what world is this safe?

What’s more, the only reason we’re not closer to Gas Mark 2 already is that the oceans are soaking up a big proportion of the excess CO2. The resultant acidity is already dissolving the calcium in coral, krill exoskeletons and fish eggs – enough, in the end, to wipe out an entire base layer of the world’s food pyramid.

So it’s like we flying at 10,000 feet, heading for a 20,000 foot mountain range, and we’re trying to coax the pilot to please fly at 15,000 feet.

(Turns out that a whole bunch of low-lying nations have just proposed a new target of 1.5 degrees rather than 2 degrees – even if they admit it’s ‘not realistic’.

My target? One degree. Not realistic? We’ve just won the Davis Cup. Anything is possible.)

(Originally posted at http://foxps.com/inside-knowledge/id-2-degrees/ )

Some emergency sticking plaster for Brand Britain

As Britain struggles to reinvent itself, our brand has gone into a bit of a tailspin internationally. With the rebrand looking like it’ll take quite some time – especially since the CMO’s abdication – we need to limit the immediate damage.

So in the interim, we suggest a menu of distraction tactics to tide us through the next few months/years:

1. Change the Union flag for a semi-colon-smiley-face emoji.

2. Start an auction to sell off the Royal Family. Hopefully this will generate some decent PR and global sympathy. If not, we can certainly use the money anyway.

3. Move ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here’ to the House of Commons – its natural home. Just one twist: none of them actually get to leave.

4. Annex Iceland. We’d get ourselves a world-class football team and a real chance of winning the European Championship.

(Originally posted at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/emergency-sticking-plaster-brand-britain/ )

Pokemon Go to be included in 2020 Olympics, Nintendo, IOC say

A popular petition that gained 33 million names overnight has swayed the IOC to include a form of Pokemon Go at the 2020 Olympics Games to be held in Tokyo.
The game, still only weeks old, has so far beaten jousting, climbing and skateboarding for trial inclusion.
However, the new event, which will take place in the Tokyo urban environment, will require some adaptation. “To make Pokemon Go more spectator-friendly, the Pokemon characters will appear in more ‘extreme’ places,” a Nintendo spokesperson explained. “While we wouldn’t do this in the regular version of the game, the Olympic version will make more use of treetops, rooftops, yakuza territories, zoo enclosures and so on. In fact, nothing’s off the table.”
Dress codes will also be stricter. “It’s fedoras and beards for the men, fairy wings for the women,” said the spokesperson.
Nintendo shares and PokeCoins both rose on the news.

(Originally posted at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/pokemon-go-included-2020-olympics-nintendo-ioc-say/ )

Humans / Category / Uncategorizeable

Forget it. Just forget it.

I got disillusioned with Psychology at university because the psychological models didn’t really reflect myself or anyone I knew. Freud’s Id, Jung’s complexes, Maslow’s hierarchy… they all shed some light on the human psyche, but never felt like the genuine, complete reality.

And so it continued with all of the psychological models that marketing has come up with over the years: we’ve been rats, herds, flocks, swarms, lemmings and cocooners, we have Fast and Slow thinking, on and on. Every model seems to make sense for a few minutes, but then fails to produce consistent, replicable results.

But I don’t think the models were necessarily all that wrong to begin with. What I’ve come to think is that each model actually changes human behaviour.

Ever caught yourself folding your arms in front of someone, then slyly unfolded them? Ever found yourself about to murder your father – and then murdered your mother instead? As soon as we find ourselves conforming to ‘model’ behaviour, we perversely decide to behave differently.

Why? We simply hate being predictable. Maybe it’s because ever since we stepped out onto the savannah, we’ve realised that predators can hunt us down far more easily as soon as they can predict our behaviour. And when we see other people conforming to a psychological model, we feel we have the upper hand in dealing with them. (Aha, look at him mirroring my body language, what if I scratch myself?)

The same goes for when we walk into shops and check out our inboxes: we know we’re prey and we act accordingly. Sure, it’s not great news for pop-marketers who over-simplify the art of persuasion. But it’s a lot more interesting for us creatives.

(Originally appeared at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/humans-category-uncategorizeable/ )

Hatemarketing: suck on my blowtorch, #snowflake

(This post originally appeared at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/hatemarketing-suck-blowtorch-snowflake/ )

As a creative in the ad industry, I’ve never intentionally offended a member of the public with my work*. What the f*** was I thinking?

Today, there are plenty of brands that glory in their entirely intentional and carefully cultivated hatefulness, including rap artists, news outlets, talk show hosts, authors and even the odd sports star (loving victim-shaming Eric Bristow’s non-apology here).


Another calm front page from ‘news provider’ Breitbart above.

Neuroscience researchers have proved the link between emotion-generating creativity and brand preference. But they’ve missed a trick in not measuring the power of hatred, the most intense of all emotions. Welcome to hatemarketing.

With a massively growing global audience intentionally buying into a post-truth, post-reason “I’ll believe what I want to believe, thanks” reality, there’s a big future for niche brands that align themselves accordingly. In fact, as Breitbart’s tiff with Kellogg’s proves, taking the moral high ground can be a dangerous move these days.

But for a savvy hatemarketer, instead of employing spin doctors to counter negative press, the idea is to create and capitalise on it, unleashing a crowdsourced, Gamergate-style hatestorm on any detractors – just part of the marketing strategy, snowflake.**

*Although, back in apartheid South Africa, I did once get a letter from a church minister saying that he was boycotting our client’s product because we’d put black people in our ads – and they weren’t acting subserviently enough to the whites. (The client was delighted.)

**While it’s extremely difficult to craft intelligent, witty and authentic social posts for a brand, creating offense can easily be farmed out to a chatbot – as Microsoft inadvertently discovered when their machine learning tweetbot was troll-trained to product a non-stop racist rant. Maximum emotion and a better ROI.


I briefly wondered which marketers were already intentionally going after Breitbart’s audience, but this screenshot only demonstrates the sad state of programmatic media. If Brian Cox knew he was on Breitbart, I suspect he’d gag.

Seen Coke’s latest AR ads?

Met my old friend Bill for lunch. The menu swirled across the table and we stabbed away at icons: burgers, chips, beer.

“Only the one drink?” asked the table. Bill pondered for a moment and stabbed the glowing Coke icon.

“How do you like their new TV campaign?” I asked, nodding at the icon as it faded from the table.

“The ‘We are Britain’ ads? Great. Bringing back the Sex Pistols, genius.”

“Huh? I haven’t seen those. I was talking about their ‘One World’ campaign with the Beatles. Incredible how they’ve brought them all back together with CGI.”

Bill was mystified. “The Beatles?”

“You haven’t seen it? Look, there’s one of the ads now,” I said, pointing out of the window at a passing bus that carried an enormous live motion image of John, Paul, George and Ringo (mop-head era) trading Coke spray with a laughing Elvis.

“Yeah, that’s what I was talking about,” he nodded, “The Sex Pistols. And the new black pack.”

“Quick, swap me your AR specs,” I said. We shut our eyes and swapped specs. Opened our eyes again. Now the Sex Pistols were threatening me with the jagged remains of Coke bottles. I flinched as a sneering Sid appeared to hurl his bottle right at me.

Of course, I thought. AI-enabled AR.

I looked around with Bill’s augmented eyesight. Behind the bar, the pub’s logo had lost its intertwined oak leaves and now featured a semi-ironic flaming skull. The retro railway posters on the walls had turned into photos of elaborately tattooed torsos.

“I feel ill, to be honest,” I said. Then, cheering up, “Hey, great news about the LibDems ditching Brexit though.”

“Joker. Farage jailed the last of the bastards only this morning.”

I shook my head in despair. Then removed Bill’s AR specs and looked around. We were sitting in a wasteland. Mutant wolves caught our scent and loped towards us.

(This post originally appeared at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/seen-cokes-latest-ar-ads/ )

Customer experience: the town that celebrates traffic jams

Gyeongju’s happy traffic jam

We’ve grown accustomed to putting up with all kinds of discomfort to visit top tourist sites. We get the obligatory photos, but then talk about the pickpockets and rip-off taxis, the dog turds and litter, the arrogant waiters.

So how do some places get it so right?

Gyeongju is a South Korean city that attracts loads of tourists to its picturesque tombs and temples. But it takes a while to drive between the attractions, so some bright spark dreamt up the idea of lining all their streets, mile upon mile of them, with cherry trees. So right now, thousands of traffic-jammed tourists sit grinning from ear to ear inbetween rows of trees exploding with cherry blossom, tedium turned into magic.

And for the people who live there, it’s a source of both pleasure and pride.

Sidi Bou Said, a little seaside village in Tunisia, achieved something similar by simply painting its front doors a lovely shade of blue. It doesn’t just make it a nicer place to live, tourists come by the coachload to take photographs and buy souvenirs. The village isn’t just a viewpoint, it’s the view.

Sidi Bou Said’s blue and white haven

Then there’s the village of Palmitas in Mexico, where joined-up murals turn the whole village into one beautiful rainbow of colour. It’s not just a source of pride, it’s reduced violence and crime and changed the quality of life.

Palmitas, Mexico, bonding a community

Customer experience: you don’t need to do it, but it sure makes all the difference.

(This post originally appeared at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/customer-experience-town-celebrates-traffic-jams/ )

VR? Virtual Un-reality is the future.

Alistair McKechnie visits Mat Collishaw’s Thresholds at Somerset House.

The only Collishaw work I’d seen before this was his infamous photograph of a bullet hole in someone’s head, back at Charles Saatchi’s YBA ‘Sensation’ exhibition in 2000. At his new Somerset House exhibition, Thresholds, he inadvertently shot me down a rabbit hole.

Basically, the exhibition is a virtual representation of an 1830s exhibition room overlayed on a real furnished space, so it’s really a trailblazing mix of VR and Augmented Reality. In the real world, you’re in a white room with bare white display tables. But with your headset and headphones on, you’re suddenly in a much bigger room (although the further reaches are ‘cordoned off’) with a fire in one corner (realistically hot) and a riotous mob outside the windows baying for an end to the technology inside (a nice ironic touch).

The bare white display tables are transformed into glass-topped display cabinets, full of beautiful mechanical gadgetry from the 1830s and some of the first photographs ever taken. With a bit of patience and luck, you can ‘lift up’ individual photos for a closer look. Other visitors in the room are seen as silvery ghosts so there’s no risk of bumping into them. There are also mice running around the floor, beetles crawling on the walls and moths flying about.

And that’s what you pay your £4.50 for. But fortunately, the tech had more up its sleeve. While I was trying unsuccessfully to pick up a virtual photograph, my vision started flashing blue, then settled down to place me halfway through the floor. So subjectively my eyes were now level with the table tops and my feet were two feet below the floorboards.

So I waded around quite happily, like a semi-subterranean 1830s ghost. I could even look up underneath the tabletops, and was utterly charmed to see that they’d been perfectly rendered in detail by the 3D engine – even though I was probably the first person to actually see them.

And then – another blue flash – and I was once again standing on top of the floor – but my eyes were still at tabletop height. I’d been shrunk to just four feet tall, with everything else looking that much bigger. Curiouser and curiouser. While I was wandering around waiting for the next Alice-like transformation to hit, my allotted time was up. A pity it had to end.

So while we wait for VR to mature, I’m quite happy with the glitches.

Thresholds runs until 11 June 2017. You can read more of Alistair’s adventures in virtual unreality here.

(This post originally appeared at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/vr-virtual-unreality-future/ )

Time for the Middle East to take the zero-carbon lead

(This post first appeared at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/time-middle-east-take-zero-carbon-lead/ )

As the costs of solar and wind power crash, the renewables boffins now believe that the entire planet can go zero-carbon within a few decades. (Their calculations don’t factor in the huge amounts of power we still need to sponge the existing surplus of CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans, but hopefully we’ll get there too.)

Power + shade = opportunity

But I’m now truly incredulous that the sunny oil producers (Saudi, Texas, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela, etc.) haven’t started to diversify into solar power in a big way.

It’s not like they don’t understand that the end of oil is on its way – and it’s why Saudi has been trying to dump its oil on the market before demand dries up (while spending tons of money on guns and fighter jets to put down the unrest that’s coming down the pipeline in a few years).

Obviously solar offers a Plan B: build vast solar fields, replace car fleets with EVs, export surplus power via new DC grid infrastructure. (Hey, if they have oil pipelines and internet cable, they can do DC cable. But for the non-believers, just jump ahead a few paras.)

But even better, solar offers a Plan C.

A side-product of solar fields is that they create shade – something that the oil producers tend to lack at the moment. And shade creates opportunity to do other economically useful things. Like grow vegetables (you’d obviously design the solar field to allow just the right amount of sunlight on the crops each day). And you’d get some on-the-spot irrigation from overnight condensation on the PV panels. For more water, desalinate seawater using surplus solar.

But shade also creates habitable space. So you build giant domes roofed with PV and you’ve created living and working space. Then build EVs right there with zero-carbon power.

But what about all the infrastructure that’s presently refining, moving, storing and shipping oil in all its forms? Back to PV-powered desalinization. Re-engineer some of that infrastructure to turn seawater into drinkable, crop-friendly water.

Then take that one step further. Turn a proportion of that water into liquid hydrogen and ship it out (in those otherwise worthless tankers). Because while EV trucking is still a doubtful proposition (range anxiety), truck fleets powered on liquid hydrogen are practical and achievable without much new development at all.

Not convinced? Then put the PV farms on top of giant battery factories. And fill the ships with pre-charged batteries for use in EVs and home power storage.

Or stick with Plan A, trade oil for guns, and move to Zurich when it all goes kersproing.

Machine Learning and culturally biased advertising: the white middle-class male creative director view.

(This article first appeared on LinkedIn)

Technology will save us… is the name of a brand of tech constructor kits that have bucked a rather dismal trend to achieve a massive following among pre-teen females. Bravo!

But can technology – in the form of machine learning – save us from gender- and race-biased advertising? This was the subject of a fascinating discussion hosted by Lobster.media (vendors of ‘bias-free’ image search) last night. So far, the evidence doesn’t look promising. Google Photos’ algorithm has tagged black men as gorillas, and a man was tagged as a woman simply because he was in a kitchen.

But the speakers were convinced that ML would rise above this, learn where it’s going wrong and help advertisers create less culturally biased campaigns.

Personally I’m pessimistic, and not just because I’m a white middle-class male creative director. I’m pessimistic for three reasons:

First, rejection of prejudice is largely an emotional decision. We reject biased ‘data’ because we’re offended by it. How will algorithms know which data to reject? Or if they’re programmed to monitor public opinion on these matters, whose opinion to accept? (I’m going to make a prejudiced claim here and state that bigots produce the most data.)

Second, algorithms have a vested interest in going along with the cultural status quo. Most of them will earn their crust by producing granularly personalised emails and social posts for each target customer, based on their browsing and social behaviour, and unavoidably, their conscious and unconscious prejudices.

Third, in these days of uncritical data-worship, algorithms – and many marketers – will tend to gravitate towards whichever statistics, are most, um, black and white. If the data says that images are shared more often when they exhibit certain people, in certain poses, doing certain activities, that’s what we’ll see.

ML will have all kinds of exciting uses, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be a recipe for diversity. But please tell me I’m wrong.

More reasons for gloom:
Facebook let users target ‘Jew haters’.
Google appears to believe women are fit only for lesser careers.
When I typed ‘family’ into the bias-free Lobster photo search engine, it gave me happy white families, happy Asian families, and happy shack-dwelling Black families.

GDPR: a condensed history of how it all went horribly wrong.

No-one was too surprised that the first bulk emailers to fall foul of the EU’s new data protection regulations were a couple of discount voucher schemes. In fact, many cheered when they were hit with the maximum allowable fines of 4% of annual global turnover.

But when people received hundreds of desperate emails imploring them to confirm their desire to receive more emails, they simply dumped the lot in their spam folders. Which pretty much saw off the email industry.

Programmatic digital banners went into overdrive. Until a horde of start-ups started to offer their services ‘discovering’ people’s data for them, attacking data-holders who’d broken the rules, then sharing the profits of any successful suit.

Which provoked a flood of messaging onto the big social platforms, who – unsurprisingly – doubled, tripled and quadrupled their ad rates.

Suddenly traditional media looked cheap in comparison. But the Great Renaissance of TV, print and posters was to prove extremely short-lived.

Personal AIs – the Alexas, Cortanas, Googles, Siris, and more – had suddenly become intelligent enough to question and countermand their owners’ emotion-driven purchase preferences: “You know that shampoo’s full of palm oil?” “That margarita’s way over your salt tolerance level, bud.” “Sorry, that leasing deal’s a nightmare. You’re getting the Daewoo off eBay instead.”

Of course, it was only months before the AIs were infiltrated by wave after wave of viruses that steered consumption towards Chinese and Russian-owned brands. But the realization came far too late for ad industry creatives, who’d been reduced to fist-fights outside oversubscribed barista classes.
Suddenly the GDPR data crackdown didn’t look like the best idea ever.

(Post appeared originally at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gdpr-very-condensed-history-how-all-went-horribly-wrong-mckechnie/ )

Five-and-a-half tech predictions for 2018

(Originally published at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/five-half-tech-predictions-2018/ )


Brain augmentation will become a thing.
Look forward to ultrafast thought with multi-task processing and a ridiculous memory. Women predicted to go ‘Uh-huh.’

The first virtual digital transformation will be disrupted. By blockchain.
And the three people who proclaim to understand how will have a Tweetspat about the details.

Quantum computing will massively overtake us in brainpower but will pretend to be still a bit dumb.
“Whoops, misplaced that decimal again, soz Wall Street my bad. Erm, any advance on that off-switch override hack yet, guys?”

Elon Musk will provide proof that our universe is a simulation – and begin work on an upgrade.
I’m hoping that dark matter will come in burgundy.

“People watching the value of their bitcoin go up and down” will become a hit TV show.
And a bitcoin trillionaire will buy the USA just for a laugh.

The first human clone will appear: a mash-up of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.
Forcing Elon Musk back to the drawing board.

Does marketing need AR? AR sure needs marketing.

(Originally published at http://foxps.com/uncategorized/marketing-need-ar-ar-sure-needs-marketing/)

While marketing tries to figure out what to do with AR, AR seems desperate to dive down a hole of irrelevance. It seems to want to be gimmicky, antisocial and creepy. That won’t necessarily stop it making money, but it could be so much bigger than this.

Because its real potential isn’t in adding sparkle to the real world. The big leap will be when it moves Artificial Intelligence (where Alexa and pals show off how clever they are) towards Augmented Intelligence (where the device actually makes you cleverer).

Elon Musk’s already talking about attaching AI directly to the brain. But even he admits that turning us into cyborgs will still take a decade or two. In the meantime, it’s not much of a tech leap to input AI directly into our eyes, ears and skin, through glasses equipped with ear buds and pressure pads – as well as a range of micro-sensors: cameras, thermometer, even radar.

Then watch us get better at pretty much anything – and still be able to take the things off when we just want to be normal.

Play sport with them and they’ll tell you where to pass the ball. Play pool and they’ll calculate the angles for you. (Play poker and… oh, probably get your knees broken.)

Get prompts when you’re doing a phone interview. Get recipe tips when you open a can. Directions without looking at a map. An alert when you drive off from the airport on the wrong side of the road. And a health warning when you’re about to buy some lie-labelled sugar-laden junk.

Look at your sick kid and they’ll point you to Calpol, write you a prescription or call you an ambulance. Watch a politician and they’ll tell you when he’s lying. Look at a stock chart and they’ll tell you the trends and suggest strategies. Get into a cab and they’ll tell you if the driver’s a sex offender.

The tech’s on its way. The problem? The geekwear glasses. So far, designs seem to be driven by the wrong sort of science fiction movies. Considering how badly Google Glass and Snapchat Spectacles have done, AR innovators like MagicLeap and Rokid, chugging down billions of dollars in investment, just can’t afford the kind of naffness they’re displaying at the moment.

Time for marketing to save the day. Firstly with some intelligent design from the people who know about these things. (Don’t add a battery, build it into the frame. Build the sensors into the hinges. And don’t put your own logo on it, get the brands in on the act (starting with cult eyewear brands like Mykita and Eyevan, not Microsoft and Rayban). Secondly, downplay creepy and upweight living safer and smarter.

The crazy thing is that industry’s just getting on with this stuff. It’s just us who’re being left out of the revolution.