More miscellaneous details

Tag: marketing

Reference board final bosses and the irony epidemic – Vik’s Busy Corner

That’s not to say that every piece of art and creative that references something that came before it is automatically unremarkable or unoriginal. Dropped in the right place at the right time, a good reference, both widely known and obscure, can be a powerful storytelling tool that adds depth to the message or winks at a certain demo while flying over everyone else’s heads. The problem is that more often than not, what the public discourse refers to as a reference is actually just a blatant copy of something ripped out of its original context for the sake of visual aesthetics. […]

“I give it two more years of red carpets before the girlies completely run out of looks to reference,” writer, editor, and the host of The New Garde podcast Alyssa Vingan tweeted out in response to a side-by-side of Tate McRae’s and Britney Spears’s identical lacy mini dresses that they wore to the VMAs — decades apart from each other. She can’t take full credit for it, but Alyssa’s best theory for why Hollywood starlets keep replicating iconic 90s looks is a deadly mix of fearing criticism and craving public attention at the same time. “I think because there is so much content and so many red carpets and so many step-and-repeat moments that if you are a celebrity, an influencer, or whatever, and you want to guarantee that press moment for yourself, going the reference route — because you know that ‘your outfit and then the reference outfit’ post will go viral — is an easy way to get talked about,” she explained to me.

celebrity, fashion, marketing

02/03/2025
Why has LinkedIn become so weird? – The Guardian

Much has been written about how tech is changing how we see ourselves and each other. Instagram pushing unattainable beauty standards and lifestyles, Facebook fake news chipping away at people’s belief in institutions, an X format that reduces a complex thought to 280 characters (no wonder nuance is impossible!), turning all of us into outrage addicts. Dating apps have commodified and gamified those most human phenomena: love and desire. Yet somehow LinkedIn has been left out of the spotlight. But here’s my contention: I think it is doing something to us, shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t. And perhaps most chilling of all, it promotes the idea that we are all just brands, and we must always – always – be selling. Apparently, LinkedIn is now being used as a full social network, a place where people talk about their marriages, make friends and maybe even date. What does that tell us about our lives outside work? Do we even still have lives outside work at all?

LinkedIn, marketing, psychology, social media, work

17/01/2025
An A.I. granny is phone scammers’ worst nightmare – The New York Times

Daisy, with her befuddlement about technology and eagerness to engage, is meant to come across, at least initially, as the perfect target. Her developers said they leaned into expectations, often using their own grandmothers for inspiration. “I drew a lot from my gran. She always went on about the birds in her garden,” said Ben Hopkins, who also worked on the VCCP project. Instead of using a voice actor to train Daisy, the team opted to use one of its colleagues’ grandmothers, who came in for some tea and recorded hours of dialogue.

A prolific scambaiter based in Northern Ireland who posts on YouTube under the name Jim Browning worked with O2 and VCCP in developing Daisy, pumping her full of techniques to keep scammers on the phone. Among them: Go on lots of tangents on topics like hobbies and your family, and feign technological ineptitude. In one instance, three phone scammers teamed up on a call that lasted nearly an hour, trying to get Daisy to type “www.” into a web browser.

AI, fraud, marketing, scams

26/11/2024
Hallucinogenic sci-fi movie: Inside the rather bizarre relaunch of Jaguar – Car Dealer Magazine

Unveiling a new concept car – the details of which are still under embargo until December 3 – Jaguar’s passionate team spoke for most of the day about how they plan to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’. Whatever that means… In what, at times, felt like a drunken dream, Jaguar personnel walked journalists through its plans to ‘reimagine’ the much-loved brand over the next few years. Calling it a ‘complete reset’, McGovern at one point told journalists that his team had ‘not been sniffing the white stuff – this is real’.

advertising, branding, design, marketing, transport

22/11/2024