When Richard Branson asks for your opinion on the digital future…you give him one. VirginMedia has a little project running about #ourdigitalfuture and they [in the person of the lovely Hannah] kindly asked me for some words.  Since they are quite positive, they seemed to be a good NEW YEAR post. You can read them…

The nice people at Naked Down Under have put together a rather lovely 'reverse polarity' campaign for the Transport Accident Authority to encourage people to get home safely. Australia has long suffered with drink driving, causing many sad deaths every year – and the problem has been trending up.  This campaign takes the idea a…

Earlier this year Admap ran their inaugural essay contest on the Future of Planning [which, as I discussed in the post below, often really means the confusing present].  I wrote a paper about the fragmentation of strategy, looking to incorporate modern psychology and behavioral economic insight into our advertising, and the impact of technology and…

Luxury Evolved: Craft to Symbol from Faris Yakob A while back I gave the keynote at the Luxury Marketing Council Summit in NYC.  As is so often the case, I was asked to talk about the future of… [this often, in turn, really means the confusing present. As Wiliam Gibson recently pointed out… {I haven't…

 I was briefly on NPR/WNYC this week talking about robots [kind of] thanks to an invitation to attend the opening of the Makerbot store in NYC.  You can listen to the show NewTechCity above.  I'm riffing lyrical on the ultimate implications what are now called 3D printers, but will hopefully become Fabbers. I've written in…

I guest curated the #TuesdayTen last week.  You can read it here.  It's full of tasty links and some contextual commentary, about the OED word of the year, the $20 tablet, a new kickstarter project called the AdTrap, and more.  Have you signed up yet? You should. You can see all the previous editions of…

As everyone knows, it's impossible to get an entry level planning job, because they don't exist. Of course, like everything everyone knows, this isn't really true, but what is true is that planners tend to be the least numerous type in an agency, so there are less jobs in planning in general, and they tend…

  Prologue The nice Effies people kindly asked me [and bunch of other people] to write some thoughts based on their analysis of the Effie winners this year. So I did. And here it is. Separately, the lovely people at WARC approached me with an idea to surface some of the excellent research and papers…

Google Think Travel Keynote – Faris from Faris Yakob Google asked me to give the opening keynote at the THINK TRAVEL conference a couple of weeks back, which was fun. The theme of the day was: Experience Matters.  And it does. But not as much, or in exactly the way, we might think. My thesis…

BMW is driving an X1 around the USA to 12 spots of great natural beauty  and taking some photos of each one on Instagram, and cross posting them to a  Facebook application.For each like, on Facebook or Instagram, BMW donates $1 to that national park. Simple.   {Sidenote: The USA is a really remarkable terrain. Huge. Incredibly varied. Cosmopolitan…