#35 – Attention fracking, shit presentations, the problem with competence, and too much trends for 2024
Hello hello,
we’re back with a new edition of Strategy Bites. This week is a rather short one (blame our Christmas party last night…) that looks at shit presentations, the problem with competence, the ad bubble, attention fracking, and a vast selection of trends for 2024.
Enjoy the clicks.
This week’s Six Links of Inspiration:
Your Presentation Sucks. Here’s a two sentence summary of an article that is almost too short to summarise – so definitely go and read it for yourself: “My biggest observation is that slides are either your friend, or in most cases, your foe.
We rely far too much on slides because we don’t really have the logic down.”
To Seem More Competent, Be More Confident. Most people I work with are ridiculously ambitious. They want to get ahead, get promoted, do more meaningful work, and all that good stuff. In order to do that, one needs to signal competence to the people who gate keep those opportunities. Turns out, those people are very often not great at assessing competence — a crucial trait for succeeding at work. Perceptions of competence are just as important for success as actual competence.
Immer weniger Menschen leben als Paare zusammen. It’s not a massive surprise, but here’s some data from Germany about a decline in couples living together. Even couples seem to make the decision to live either in shared flats (with additional people) or live separately.
Trends 2024. Amy, Iolanda Carvalho, Ci En L., and Gonzalo Gregori have done the laborious job of bringing together a vast selection of trend reports for the year ahead. I’d always recommend taking these things with a shovel of salt, but have a peak regardless.
PopPulse. In the newly found passion of ad land to get closer to understand real people, everyone is outdoing each other with new research or report formats. Leo Burnett adds to that endeavour PopPulse – an attempt “to pop the ad-land bubble and plug brands into what the people of Britain are really feeling.” Check it out above.
Powerful Forces are Fracking our Attention. Besides real people, what ad land increasingly is rediscovering is the concept of attention. I’m not going to talk about attention spans and whether they’re really shrinking – but want to share this piece that talks about the forces that are eating away (and profiting) from our attention: “We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.”
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed this issue, please consider sharing it with some of your friends.
See you all next week,
Maximilian