I was on my way to the One Club to help judge the finalists of the digital Young Ones awards last night, and, as is sometimes the way of things, the universe used coincidence to tell me something… "The thing about coincidence is that when you imagine the umpteen trillions of coincidences that can happen…

A while back I gave a talk at the Google Think Travel conference. It was a super fun gig. I posted the deck and some thoughts before. People seemed to like it and asked about the presentation itself. So here are the last 20mins of the talk, which concern travel, dynamic pricing and opportunity cost…

is the name of a book from the 1908s I was given as a gift after a speaking engagement [thanks!]. The title comes from the tension required in those who run advertising agencies: to rule their word must be law, but to be a creative environment they must be "fair…kind and understanding…helpful…and a father [or…

  Let’s get scenius faris from Faris Yakob Here is the live version of the article below that I performed at Social Media Week NYC and the slides that accompanied the 15 minute talk.  Followed by the very excellent talks from my mate the very inspiring Shaun Abrahsom, whose book Crowdstorm just came out:  Crowdstorm:…

is the name of this piece I wrote about collaboration for Huffington Post, as part of Social Media Week.  And here it also is:  "Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being." Gandhi In 1958, Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation For Economic Education,…

[I still get and have a lot of [analogue] books.  I'm an in-betweener. I love Kindle reading, but I love the carapaces of books too.]   A while back I wrote a piece for the International Journal of Advertising called Ex Libris. [It's a regular column where someone shares books that are important or formative…

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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…