What do you do when you’re told your wife has cancer? What do you think, what do you feel, what do you say? First you learn. There are tumours in the pancreas and the liver, too many and too advanced to resect. What does resect mean? To remove surgically. Where…

“Ultimately a thing exists only by virtue of its boundaries, which means by a more or less hostile act against its surroundings.” Robert Musil, A Man Without Qualities The instinct of those who fear the dilution of their identity is to build walls. …

“Planning should start not with what ads do to people, but with what people do with ads.” —JWT’s Stephen King, in an address to the 13th Asian Advertising Congress, 1982. I was at an brand planning conference in 2010 when, after a long night of presentations on the very latest…

Or how to annoy your potential customers without hiring an advertising agency. Brand content that treats digital as an extension of the one-to-many media paradigm is advertising by another name. …

Buckle Up #26 “No brain at all, some of them, only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t Think,” said Eeyore. There were no consequences. The police pulled back the dogs and I sauntered past them as casually as I could into the Johannesburg evening…

The problem with bureaucracy doesn’t lie in its inefficiency; it lies in its efficiency. As of today, the 21st of January 2019, three and a half million people in the UK will have to apply for permission to stay in their own homes. These are not illegal immigrants. They are…

A clear brand positioning requires a compelling “reason to believe”. Problematically, as Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have now so convincingly demonstrated in The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding, human beings will find reasons to justify their behaviour, their beliefs and their brand choices only after…

There’s money in sin. And the deadlier the sin, the more valuable it tends to be. We’ll start with lust because everything starts with lust. Forbes estimates the value of the global pornography business at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion a year. Hard figures are difficult to come by…