JOURNALISM
A selection of my essays and articles for Campaign, WARC, We Are Social, ad-exchange, journalism.co.uk, Medium and others
Political marketing
Selected articles
Staring down the known unknowns. Trump v Biden 2020
We Are Social, 11 September 2020
On the face of it, the social media performances of Donald Trump and Joe Biden point to a US 2020 presidential election victory for the incumbent president. As I argued during the 2016 election, social media allows us to observe millions of people interacting with the candidates, beyond the confines of traditional polling of a thousand or so individuals.
As we know, polling was spectacularly wrong about Trump in 2016, and social media trends closer to the truth. And if we look at social media data now, in Trump v Biden, that same logic indicates a crushing landslide for POTUS 45.
However, there are two major known unknowns this time round: COVID-19 and mass postal voting. Both of these factors lie outside established knowledge, making predictability a thing of the past.
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Social media predicted Trump's victory
Campaign, 9 November 2016
And so it has come to pass. America has chosen a new President: none other than Donald J. Trump.
Spare a thought for the pollsters. After getting it wrong in the Brexit vote this side of the pond, their failure to anticipate Clinton’s defeat in the States means their profession will now face severe reputational challenges. There are almost too many examples of incorrect polls to cite them all; many must be eating humble pie, not least Republican pollster Frank Luntz.
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Mad Men & Bad Men: When British Advertising Met Politics
We Are Social, 20 April 2017
Why was Margaret Thatcher your greatest client?” This was talkRADIO Sam Delaney’s first question to Jeremy Sinclair (Saatchi & Saatchi; M&C Saatchi) at Mad Men & Bad Men: When British Advertising Met Politics, part of the Festival of British Advertising. Without hesitation, Sinclair replied that Thatcher let Saatchi & Saatchi, appointed to run the Conservative Party’s advertising in 1978, do its job. Although she would ask about everything, the Prime Minister would trust the agency to come up with the best communications. Glancing at his colleague Bill Muirhead, who worked with him at the time, Sinclair chuckled: “Also, she made us famous.”
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How social media can help launch a new political party
More About Advertising, 5 March 2019
I remember a time, not long ago, when people used to say that British politics was slightly predictable, with the main parties converging around the centre ground. While this was exaggerated even at the time, it sounds positively strange today. Labour has steered strongly to the Left under Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservatives are deeply conflicted, and smaller parties like the SNP continue to rise in importance.
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Advertising theories
Selected writing
The uncertainties of judgement
WARC, 30 May 2019
Charlie Ebdy recently wrote a fascinating article: ‘Adapt or Die: The Nature of Brand Strategy’. In it, he criticises Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field for their search for universal rules to advertising and marketing. I recommend you read it. It’s a hefty piece, but really worth it.
But that’s not to say I agree with all of it.
In a nutshell, I think Ebdy attacks the right issue, but comes up with a faulty solution.
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Comment les marques peuvent-elles mieux interagir avec le « dark social »?
ad-exchange, 17 May 2019
Le « dark social » est le partage de contenus en ligne lorsque le propriétaire du site web ou des réseaux sociaux ne sait pas d’où provient le trafic. Si un utilisateur clique sur un lien partagé dans un message privé, par exemple, l’URL n’indique pas au propriétaire du site web ou des réseaux sociaux d’où provient le visiteur. Le dark social n’est par conséquent pas la même chose que la messagerie privée. Il s’agit en fait du trafic généré par des clics sur des liens insérés dans les messages privés ou partagés dans un courrier électronique. Dans ce cas, les liens sont généralement copiés et collés dans le courrier électronique.
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Medium, 2019 - 2020
To start with a belief: it is hard to think there is such a thing as a silent discussion.
There are of course ways in which to be quiet, voluntarily or not, to stay out of things, to be on the side-line. But I believe there are half or unspoken instincts, assumptions and hypotheses at work in most situations — and that what appears to be ‘nothing’ is actually ‘something’.
I begin by saying this, because I think some people say ‘nothing’, or ‘not very much’ during the ‘upstream research’ phase of advertising, often with an effect on what the finished campaign or activation looks like.
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Insight generation
Selected articles
What's the point? Discovering the active role of brands on social
We Are Social, 3 December 2020
It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that a brand in possession of a message easily attracts an audience, eager to hear from it whenever possible.
Unfortunately, this vision still holds in many parts of the marketing world, and lots of potentially valuable consumer interaction is lost because of it.
On social media, there are countless examples of brands communicating to little effect, attracting a handful or no engagements (e.g. likes, comments, shares), or failing to drive traffic to websites or other desired actions.
Also, the related idea that the brand communicates, while the audience receives its messages passively (the ‘push’ theory of marketing) is alive and well, judging by the number of unaddressed consumer comments on many brands’ social media accounts.
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We Are Social, 21 February 2017
Wouldn’t it be great if you could start your new job as a creative agency Researcher or Planner and you were able to engage with your colleagues on a level footing, all eager to learn, instead of being overwhelmed by concentrated brand ideas, lofty brand pyramids, funnels of dubious origin and clients demanding ‘hard’ business effects?
Of course, research and strategy professionals shouldn't complain too much - we have the outstanding 'A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King’, Les Binet and Peter Field’s work on effectiveness, Warc’s treasure trove, doorstoppers 1 - 23 of Advertising Works and much more. However, informal yet informative events like Open Strategy’s School of Planning are very welcome. Set up by Matt Butler and Jonathan Colmenares, the School of Planning aims to demystify research and strategy in an open-minded and collaborative environment, so we can all start to improve our work.
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How to engage with news consumers through private messaging apps
journalism.co.uk, 18 October 2019
Users of The Daily Telegraph’s WhatsApp audio briefings are 12 times more likely to convert to paid subscribers than an average homepage reader, according to the briefings’ editor Danny Boyle.
Boyle told Journalism.co.uk that "thousands" of users have signed up to the WhatsApp group. As part of the audio briefings, users are provided with links to articles, giving Boyle’s team insight into click-throughs to site and conversion into paid subscribers.
"People will subscribe via the homepage or seeing something on Twitter but this is another way of reaching people where and when they want it," he said.
The development is part of wider digital trends. Private messaging apps are on the rise generally, with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger the third and fourth most actively used social platform of any kind, as noted in We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Global Digital Report Q3 2019.
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AI & futurology
Selected essays
Quite what is going on – Some philosophical reflections on Artificial Intelligence
LinkedIn Pulse, 7 August 2017
"An important feature of a learning machine is that its teacher will often be very largely ignorant of quite what is going on inside, although he may still be able to some extent to predict his pupil's behaviour. This should apply most strongly to the later education of a machine arising from a child machine of well-tried design (or programme)…Intelligent behaviour presumably consists in a departure from the completely disciplined behaviour involved in computation."
‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950) – Alan Turing
In August 2017, it was reported that Facebook had aborted experimental chatbots, because they had started to develop their own “creepy” language during a ‘negotiation’ task.
One of the researchers on this project, Dhruv Batra (visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research and Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech), subsequently wrote about his dissatisfaction with the way most journalism distorted the far more prosaic nature of what happened.
In particular, Batra isn’t happy with doomsday scenarios: the notion that AI could signal the end of human civilisation. This has popular currency because of warnings by the likes of Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk: AI might not have our best interests at heart; destroy us in a moment of evil; or simply evolve much faster and take over.
It's little wonder that Batra wants to withdraw us from the doomsday front; as an actual AI researcher, he deals with the here-and-now, trying to get things to work; doubtlessly many agents fail to do anything worthwhile at all (little spluttering networks, signifying nothing).
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LinkedIn Pulse, 29 October 2017
To Trending 2018 last week, for a day of insight into the future of consumerism. Foresight Factory’s global annual conference consisted of a series of talks, breakout sessions and panel discussions, typically striking a balance between the accessible and intellectual.
#NeverNormal, the idea we’re living through an era of unprecedented volatility and unpredictability was the central theme, but the evolution of brands, rise of AI, and notions of ageing, emotion and empathy were also key talking points.
In this essay, I’d like to review some of the issues raised by the conference, and to offer my own perspective on their validity. I find the idea that we live in interesting times, when every new tweet by Donald Trump or advanced robotics leapfrog could spell the end of the known world, particularly compelling. It raises a range of questions: will many of us start to wonder about our humanity if AI becomes widespread, like the replicants in Blade Runner 2049, or wish for some final reckoning against unbound technology? Can one imagine genuinely safer, cleaner, emotionally and empathetically brighter futures? Can anyone seriously attempt Utopianism, after the disastrous experiences of it in the 20th century? Might not the future be simpler, or longer, than either an apocalyptic or paradisiacal vision allows for?
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