#12 – What's up with Moral Mirroring, Bed Rotting, the Triple Opportunity of Attention, and Working-from-home Productivity
Hello and happy July,
this week’s Strategy Bites is late (again, definitely) and full of fun little bits of inspiration (again, hopefully.)
We’re covering a quick trip through advertising’s evolution into something that isn’t very pleasant, a deep dive into the linguistic codes of capitalism and the critical people, a photography project portraying commuters, key lessons from (yet another) Cannes talk, a scientific breakthrough that makes the universe hum, and a potential end of the working-from-home illusion.
Enjoy the read, and don’t hesitate to share these links with two of your friends.
Here we go:
Relentless Pressure and Moral Mirroring – Advertising in ‘23. This is the story how one person wants to buy butter. In a way. Steve Walls lays into our industry with that kind of sharp precision that makes my romantic heart bleed and makes me want to change this beautiful, smart, powerful industry. He outlines advertising’s journey from persuasion to desire to relentless pressure to moral mirroring and it’s not a fun ride.
Bed Rotting and Loud Quitting. This is an interesting piece about language as much as it is about trends in employee engagement. The use of language and codes to make sense of the world and make experiences shareable among those who live (and sometimes don’t understand) them. And then the managers and consultants that hijack and invert them and turn them into the very capitalistic toxins that have led to their creation. I might just go and rot in bed for three weeks now.
Photographer spends nine years on one street corner capturing same commuters every day. This is old new, six years old, to be precious, but it’s intriguing and moving in a way that only a person about to become a commuter might understand. (More on that end of this month.) Thanks for flushing this into my timeline, Edward Cotton.
The Triple Opportunity of Attention. Cannes is over but the lessons shared are only just trickling down through the pipes of the internet. This is System1’s Tom Ewing sharing his five big takeaways from Orlando Wood, Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, and Rob Brittain’s talk: “The triple opportunity comes as a total package. Improving creative, media choices and investment will each individually help, but the three opportunities work best in unison.”
Scientists have found ripples in space and time. And you have to buy groceries. I urge you to read past this misleading headline and allow yourself to be carried away by a beautiful discovery that might just prove that we’re actually all connected to each other, the entire universe, and all of its past: “Every gravitational wave in that background the NANOGrav team found is humming through the very constitution of the space you inhabit right now. Every proton and neutron in every atom from the tip of your toes to the top of your head is shifting, shuttling, and vibrating in a collective purr within which the entire history of the universe is implicated. And if you put your hand down on a chair or table or anything else nearby, that object, too, is dancing that slow waltz.”
The working-from-home illusion fades. I’m not sharing this article because I’m desperate to spend more time in an office (I’m not) but mostly to show how a narrative that is based on a research paper can evolve when the same researchers update their paper with newer data: “They found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline.” The article shares a few other examples before, luckily, concluding that work is not all about productivity and that employee happiness seems to improve in a hybrid world: “There is more to work (and life) than productivity. Perhaps the greatest virtue of remote work is that it leads to happier employees.”
Thanks for your time and read you in a week (or so.)