“Von Clausewitz summed up what it had all been about in his classic On War. Men could not reduce strategy to a formula. Detailed planning necessarily failed, due to the inevitable frictions encountered: chance events, imperfections in execution, and the independent will of the opposition. Instead, the human elements were paramount: leadership, morale, and the almost instinctive savvy of the best generals. The Prussian general staff, under the elder von Moltke, perfected these concepts in practice. They did not expect a plan of operations to survive beyond the first contact with the enemy. They set only the broadest of objectives and emphasised seizing unforeseen opportunities as they arose. Strategy was not a lengthy action plan. It was the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.” — Definitely the best passage from Jack Welch’s mediocre autobiography, Straight from the gut, p.448.
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“For retail [investors] to survive in this emerging environment, I think they will have to be long-term passive investors who are basically index players because any market inefficiencies will be small, transient and exploited by those with huge economies of scale. The notion that a single retail investor can somehow bet the market in a short-time play by exploiting an arbitrage now seems impossible.” — Martin Fahy, CEO of the Financial Services Institute of Australiasia, in ‘Lost in the dark pools of competition’, Weekend AFR, July 3-4, 2010
The angular house had disrupted the space-time continuum; he could feel his features starting to blur.
(Photo: Nicolas Saieh; ArchDaily)
“Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.” — From this wonderful New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten (via the brilliant @STWnext)
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“Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.” — ‘The Velluvial Matrix’ by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker
In this week’s issue: George Packer on the McChrystal debacle; Ken Auletta on Afghanistan’s first media mogul; Tad Friend on Steve Carell; Charlayne Hunter-Gault on Jacob Zuma; Rebecca Mead on playgrounds; James Surowiecki on financial illiteracy; Sasha Frere-Jones on Robyn; James Wood on David Mitchell; Peter Schjeldahl on Charles Burchfield; David Denby on “Knight and Day” and “Winter’s Bone”; fiction by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum; and more: http://www.newyorker.com/
Oh hai there New Yorker, welcome to Tumblr!
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“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (via colporteur)
“Sites like Facebook, Twitter and others have allowed for the creation of what we call a Digital Super Me. A highly-sharable and incredibly robust digital version of our selves that only drinks the best wine, vacations in the finest locales and has the best and brightest children. We have created these alter egos and now we not only refuse to live without them but we have a new expectation for the contribution that other products and services should make to our lives. So for essentially an investment of zero it delivers the most powerful way to say who you are and share it with the entire world, if you like.” — ‘Why are our cars so dumb?’ by Alex Bogusky
I love Herbert Simon’s idea that we live in an ‘attention economy’. In a world where we are busier than ever, the ideas or brands that we choose to spend our time with have the most currency. Those that we choose to spend no time with don’t exist. This poses an incredible challenge for companies that are used to buying attention from mass media audiences that are declining every day.
Today we have absolute control over how we consume media and interact with brands. We can DVR our favourite TV shows and skip the ads. We can install the AdBlock Firefox plugin and ignore banner ads. We can choose what organisations we want to ‘Like’ and communicate with on Facebook. We download our music from iTunes. We get our news from the RSS feeds that we chose to subscribe to.
How can marketers respond to this?
There are a lot of stopgap solutions we can put in place. We can still reach consumers through interruptive mass media advertising, although it’s getting harder every day. We can experiment with new ways to make digital media more interruptive and more like traditional media. In the short to medium term these will work, but I don’t believe that they are really viable long-term solutions to the fundamental problem.
As far as I can see, there’s only one real long-term solution. We need to learn to create our own media. The terms ‘owned media’ and ‘earned media’ are not new and they are certainly in vogue amongst digital people right now. But very few brands are actually doing it.
There’s no doubt that creating your own media is unpredictable. When you buy 2000 TARPs from the TV networks, you know pretty much exactly what you’ll get. You can probably model the sales increase you’ll get from the TV buy pretty accurately too. But when you put 80% of your budget into creating content that will earn you media, you don’t really know what will happen. It’s scary stuff.
Luckily the skills that advertising agencies have learned over the past 60 years will be more relevant than ever in a world where we need to make our own content to create media. Audiences will continue to congregate around the most compelling ideas and content, it’s just that this won’t necessarily be a 30 minute network sitcom. It could well be something created by an agency.
The incredible storytelling skills that have been built up in the advertising industry will need to be applied in new and different ways. A lot of our work will still end up as linear video content, but instead of making one extremely expensive 30 second clip, we’ll need to make executions in any number of lengths or formats at much lower costs.
But sometimes the skills required won’t be storytelling - sometimes that brand will need to use technology skills to create a software platform that becomes owned media. The most commonly cited example of this is Nike+, which has become an integral part of the product and has brought new relevance to a brand that was rapidly losing ground with runners.
In any case, the thinking will always have to start with “what can we make that will be entertaining or useful for our audience?” rather than “how do we communicate this message to our audience?”
Some are getting this right. Wieden + Kennedy’s ‘Write the Future’ spot for Nike has had nearly 15 million views in just a few weeks. They spent $12 million (US) on production, and little or nothing on paid media. Fiat EcoDrive is a technology system that integrates into the car and helps drivers be more environmentally friendly, earning Fiat free media around the globe and bringing real credibility to their brand’s eco-friendly positioning.
The brands and agencies that figure out how to create their own media will ultimately survive and thrive as the currency of the attention economy rises. Those that don’t adapt won’t exist.
“I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy. While the security hackers were attacking the security economy at the center of power and authority in the pre-web days, these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are.” — danah boyd | apophenia » “for the lolz”: 4chan is hacking the attention economy (via rafer)
“Psychology is also at work when you look at the women of Paris. The principle at work here is the assumption of style and the amplification of grace. Because you are in Paris, you assume that women are fashion-aware, which colors all your judgements about dress, hairstyle, and other factors of appearance. Because you suppose the most stylish of intentions behind whatever the actual outcome, you will find seductive and ennobling qualities behind almost everything and anyone. What would be a dowdy old hag or a trampy termagant in the wrong part of Baltimore is suddenly the epitome of French cuteness. It’s a sophisticated variant on the “Emperor without cloths” syndrome.” — Ionarts via Marginal Revolution (via somethingchanged)