DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image via Wired.

Marcus Wohlsen's Wired article explicitly called "How Facebook Could End Up Controlling Everything You Watch and Read Online" would have been quoted so many times in a second part of my dissertation about information on the move... but since that imaginary second part is not happening (anytime soon, at least), at least I get to share it here. Anyone interested in the future of news, journalism, publishing, content creation and marketing, and well, the Internet in general, should have a look. Here's a fragment of the article: "Given that links appear to be more clickable when shared on Facebook, online publishers have scrambled to become savvy gamers of Facebook’s News Feed, seeking to divine the secret rules that push some stories higher than others. But all this genuflection at the altar of Facebook’s algorithms may be but a prelude to a more fundamental shift in how content is produced, shared, and consumed online. Instead of going to all this trouble to get people to click a link on Facebook that takes them somewhere else, the future of Internet content may be a world in which no video, article, or cat GIF gallery lives outside of Facebook at all." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 5'

Image via The Economist.

And obviously related to the previous article, Alexandra Suich writes for The Economist print edition a nice piece about how technology is profoundly changing the advertising business. This is fragment of Little Brother: "In 1963 David Ogilvy . . . wrote: 'An advertisement is like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.' Half a century later advertisers are at last taking him at his word. Behavioural profiling has gone viral across the internet, enabling firms to reach users with specific messages based on their location, interests, browsing history and demographic group. Ads can now follow users from site to site: a customer who looks online for flights to Frankfurt will be inundated with German holiday offers. Conversant, a digital-marketing firm, uses an algorithm to deliver around 800,000 variations of an ad to its big clients’ prospective customers to make it as irresistible as possible. . . Extreme personalisation in advertising has been slow to come, except in search advertising, where Google, Yahoo and other engines have been serving up ads tailored to users’ interests for years. But now it has arrived in earnest. According to one poll by Adobe, a software company, most marketers say they have seen more change in the past two years than in the previous 50." Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 6'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Mashable.

T.L. Stanley describes in Mashable how the ad industry has finally made peace with crowdsourcing and how mass collaboration continues to blossom nowadays as consumers prefer authentic, quirky or unvarnished brand messages. "James DeJulio, co-founder and chief executive of Santa Monica-based ad tech firm Tongal, says crowdsourced advertising is the Uber of the marketing world. There’s tremendous demand for a service – in this case, original content with a fresh voice for digital, social media and other platforms. And lucky for brand marketers, he says, there’s a passionate and motivated labor pool ready to step up for quick turnaround, low-cost projects." Read full article in Mashable. E.T.P. 7'

Photo via PSFK.

Super interesting article by Sophie Maxwell, Pearlfisher's Futures Director in PSFK: "It is increasingly hard to switch off from a world that is always on. Our new and infinitely connected world has enabled us to exercise endless choice. And keen to optimize every aspect of our lifestyle, we have bought into the fact that the digital and the physical need to work in synergy. But now, there is a growing realization that we are struggling to find the head space for it all. As a result, we are seeking to restore some sort of balance – in terms of how we connect with each other and with our surroundings – by taking shelter, slowing down and switching off.
It may seem counter-intuitive but we are looking to brands to guide us. We want brands to help us schedule time for contemplation, create new space for significant moments and connect with us in more creatively controlled ways." Read full article in PSFK. E.T.P. 3'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Dmytro Verholjak; Markova village, Ivano-Frankivs’k region, Ukraine. Via The New Yorker.

Faces of the Second World War. In 2010, while visiting Russia for an exhibition of his work, the photographer Sasha Maslov took the first portrait for what became his current project, “Veterans.” The portrait is of Piotr Dmitrievych Koshkin, a Red Army plane mechanic who served in the Second World War. Inspired, Maslov began a four-year project photographing and interviewing people who lived through the war. His subjects include not only soldiers but also medics, engineers, partisans, members of various resistance movements, prisoners of war, Holocaust survivors, and civilians who suffered as a result of the conflict. All of these people, Maslov told me, were those “who experienced the war in a dramatic way, in their own skin.”Read full article and have a look at the photos in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 6'

"In a campaign that's new to us but appears to have been running for a while now, Y&R Paris has created a series of ads for eyewear retailer KelOptic showing impressionist paintings brought into focus. The tagline is "Turning impressionism into hyperrealism." Another case of advertising sullying some of mankind's greatest artistry? Sure. But also pretty awesome." Have a look in AdWeek. E.T.P 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

(Great) Illustration by Brock Davis via Fast Company.

Baratunde Thruston writes a very provocative piece in Fast Company in which he poses the question: What if brands stop trying to join the conversation and make products worth talking about? I personally think that both things are not mutually exclusive, social media not always is an attempt to compensate for bad, outdated or boring products, but hey, for a lot of brands out there do think that, so he has a very good point: "Brands are so desperate "to join the conversation" on social media that most only get as far as "I gotta do the social media!" and don't have a thoughtful way to determine what to do on the social media. They ask, "What's our Snapchat strategy?" without ever considering if they need one.

Can social media promotion work? Sure. I've employed it for myself and my clients. But we've reached a point in marketing where we seem to have forgotten our best "engagement strategy": the product itself. The actual thing you're trying to promote is itself its own vehicle for promotion. Whoa." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 6'

As we share a couple of weeks ago, "the MoMA Design Store in New York City collaborated with the crowdfunding site to sell Kickstarter-successful products in stores and online, from May 13 to June 16. It's a part of NYCxDESIGN, a city-wide celebration of all things design." Have a look at some of the projects in Mashable. E.T.P. 9'

Photo: Flickr user Eli Christman via Fast Company.

Himanshu Saxena propose three new job titles that can companies to deal with two of the main issues that seem to be severely afflicting corporations today: how to survive gracefully in this uncongenial business environment and how to sustain leadership amidst growing competition and disenchanted customers. Are you willing to hire a Chief Reimagination Officer, and Chief Paradigm Officer and a Chief Paradox Officer? Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via AdWeek.

"What do Bob Dylan, Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Colbert, the Muppets, U2 and the cast of the '90s sitcom Full House have in common? They all starred in Super Bowl commercials this year, and none of them came anywhere close to the top of the list when it came to sharing of the ads online". Read this interesting article by Tim Nudd in AdWeek. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via Quartz.

"China already has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. And the country aims to more than double the amount of high-speed railway by 2015. Officials want to build everything from an undersea railway tunnel from the Chinese shore to Taiwan—twice the length of the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain. In that context, it almost seems feasible that China would be considering a recently discussed project—13,000 km of high-speed railway that crosses from China to Russia and North America that includes a 200-km tunnel under the Bering strait. A railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering told the Beijing Times that officials are having discussions about the project." Read Lily Kuo's full article in Quartz. E.T.P. 4'

Photo via AdWeek.

"It's such a great, simple idea: Young Brazilians want to learn English. Elderly Americans living in retirement homes just want someone to talk to. Why not connect them?

FCB Brazil did just that with its "Speaking Exchange" project for CNA language schools. As seen in the touching case study below, the young Brazilians and older Americans connect via Web chats, and they not only begin to share a language—they develop relationships that enrich both sides culturally and emotionally." Read full article and watch the project's video in AdWeek. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image:Flickr user Dan DeLuca via Fast Company.

Fast Company published a list with the world's top 10 most innovative companies in advertising. Among them is GoPro, Volvo Trucks, and Samsung. According to FC by having a look at their strategies you can have a pretty good idea of how the future of advertising will look like. Read list in Fast Company. E.T.P. 6'

Photos La Muralla Roja via Fubiz.

Have a look at this amazing, colorful and very original architectonic project in Spain made by Ricardo Bofill in La Manzanera, Spain. The complex is called La Muralla Roja. More photos and info in Fubiz. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo: The Procrastinator (some) Times.

Marketers, Welcome to the World of Disappearing Media. Snapchat's model gets viewers to focus and act fast, before the content vanishes forever. There has been a lot of articles trying to discern if refusing a 3b offer from Facebook was a smart move from the guys behind Snapshat, and now David Berkovitz in AdAge asks what would happen if all media functioned like Snapchat? Read it here. E.T.P. 4' 

Photo: The Procrastinator (some) Times.

Five ways the advertising industry is about to transform. "Technology has prompted tremendous change in the advertising industry—change that would have been inconceivable even a decade ago. People are accessing, consuming, and sharing content in more varied ways than ever, and marketers have scores of new opportunities to understand, reach, and engage with consumers. But at the same time the ecosystem of technologies that supports online advertising has become so complicated and cumbersome that it actually makes it harder for advertisers to invest more money to market effectively, putting the industry’s growth at risk." Sounds familiar? Keep reading Bob Lord's post in the HBR Blog. E.T.P. 5'
 

Photo: twechy/Flickr via WIRED.

Cady Metz article in Wired starts like this: Eight years after a group of authors and publishers sued Google for scanning more than 20 million library books without the permission of rights holders, a federal judge has ruled that the web giant’s sweeping book project stayed within the bounds of U.S. copyright law. Boom. Want to know how is that possible? Read full article here. E.T.P. 4'