#18 – The most important strategy skills, helpful generative AI, mindless marketers, and desperate foomscrolling.
Hello!
A weekly dose of inspiration, a day later than usual, with an extra waft of salty coastal air on top of a list of the most relevant strategy skills, an actual helpful generative AI experiment, our relationship to our co-workers, stats on humour in advertising, mindless marketers, and desperate hype-cycles.
If you know anyone who could be interested in any of the above, please share this issue of Six Links of Inspiration.
Enjoy the read:
APG Strategy Skills Survey 2023. Shared by Sarah Newman on LinkedIn, these are the results of the APG’s annual planner survey for this year. What are the key skills to be successful, which ones are getting more important, which ones are getting less important. No big surprise that planners thing understanding people, defining problems, and unearthing insights are the most important skills now and in the future. Interesting enough, data-led skills are slightly less rated – even though they’ll have the potential to massively free our time for real thinking and bigger imagination.
TextFX. Talking about data-led/tech skills: not a week goes by without there being a new AI tool revealed and Google launched an interesting experiment in partnership with artist Lupe Fiasco. It’s a suite of AI-powered tools “for rappers, writers and wordsmiths” and a great way of experiencing how technology potentially, one day, might be able to be properly helpful in writing great creative work. As a planner, I find the “Fuse”, “Simile”, and “POV” function interesting. But would love what you think about these.
The Dark Side of Saying Work is Like Family. This is an article from a year back. It covers a topic that I find deeply fascinating and am struggling with at times, particularly as someone having grown up professionally in creative agencies. The boundaries in those companies are often very blurred, and when I moved countries and to a city where I knew nobody, work did, for a while, become like family. I was lucky with my work family, many others are not and might be drawn into a dysfunctional relationship (which means it works for the company, but not for them…) “Families, like workplaces, exist on a spectrum from outright hostile to nurturing and supportive.”
More Entertainment, less Preach. A double-share from Thom Binding via Praveen Vaidyanathan, this is a simple chart that serves as a reminder that people like to think that humorous brand messages are most appealing to them. Their ideal ad is fun (humorous), familiar (from a brand they know and trust), and that relevant (tells them something new/interesting). So, in a way, when our team at 72andSunny and Lynx/Axe used to aim for offering “a laugh, not a lecture”, we gave the people just what they wanted.
It’s True, Most Marketers Are in a Cult. I love when in short the same concepts pop up in very different corners of “my Internet.” Florian Kratz recently posted about Cargo Cult on his LinkedIn. A few weeks later, someone else shared this article by Ivan. It serves as a powerful reminder that we all ought to use our ability to think critically a bit more rather than blindly following trends (or copying behaviours of seemingly successful players.)
Welcome to the Age of Foomscrolling. Not unrelated is this piece about “foomscrolling”, the collective behaviour to scroll through our social media feeds to finally, finally find the thing that saves us from our destructive selves. Often leading to the increasingly shortened hype cycles we can experience, annoyingly, on X and LinkedIn, when there’s suddenly tons of self proclaimed experts in
Web3,AI,superconductors, etc. etc. “Peak superconductor foomscrolling may have already passed. But the cultural desire that fueled it—the hunger for a new tool that will lift us out of our human frailty and onto some smooth exponential trajectory to a shimmering and deathless future—that looks to be quite resilient. That collective longing may have been with us since Olduvai, in one form or another. The internet only magnifies it into a kind of searchlight. I imagine that its beam will soon find something else to lock onto, something new for the world’s insomniacs to Google in the dead of night, in the hope that maybe, this time, the foom will be real.”
Thanks for your time and attention – and see you again next week.