I started my advertising career at Berry Bush BBDO, in Cape Town, a couple of weeks after Rory. Rory was in account management with me, and we serviced the same client. Thing is, Rory didn’t like me, and I can’t blame him as I wasn’t all the fond of myself at the time either. Rory…
Category: ideas
A case for why we can do better than democracy
I was almost expelled from boarding school when I was 16. I broke into the apartment of one of the teachers who stayed on campus. He had confiscated a video I’d rented (long story) and had promised that he would give it back to me on Saturday morning. I knocked on his door after breakfast…
Be more reckless with your life
I was 32 and I hated my job. I hated it so much that I would drive to work in the mornings and wish that a bus would drive into me. Hard. I wanted to be injured seriously enough to end up in hospital for a few days but not so seriously that there’d be…
Where to find stories worth telling
I’m a liar. It started in my teens. I would tell the most outlandish lies and expect people to believe them. At one point I told my friends at school that my mother kept cyanide capsules in one of her rings and that we had a 50-metre pool in our backyard. Between the ages of…
Overcome resistance
I struggle to write these posts each week. They take me around 6 hours to research, write and edit. And each week I try to convince myself that I can skip a post. After all, nobody is forcing me to write weekly articles about things that I thought were interesting or confusing. And nobody will…
Advertising works because we think it doesn’t
Why did the oil and gas industry spend $10 million on Facebook advertising in 2020 in the US? Because it works. This report lays out how the oil and gas industry use Facebook as a channel to promote their climate friendliness, using misleading content and information that doesn’t align with the science of climate change….
I hate Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
I hate Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The pyramid is too simplistic a representation of human need states. The theory can’t be tested empirically, I haven’t recognised the hierarchy in any person I have met (and I have met a few) and when you really think about it, it just feels wrong. As an example, babies…
Walk without rhythm to overcome the algorithms and the sandworms
In Frank Herbert’s, Dune the desert planet of Arrakis is home to colossal sandworms. These creatures grow to be hundreds of metres long and the largest is around 80 metres in diameter. The blind worms hunt by detecting rhythmic sounds on the sand. The only way to escape their notice as you travel over the…
If you want my time, I’m probably going to ignore you
In a week I usually receive between 50 and 100 unsolicited pitch emails, LinkedIn messages, connection requests and letters. Every single one of these makes a request of my time. People want to ‘jump on a call’ for me to explain to them what our strategy and pain points are, or they want to ‘pick…
We have practice all wrong
A little more than a year ago I listened to an interview with Annie Duke . Annie’s other name is; the Duchess of Poker. In 1991 Annie was pursuing a Ph.D in psychology when she decided to give it all up and play professional poker. In this interview Annie discusses how she approached decision making…