Five things on Friday #258

Another week, another book recommendation (if you missed the last edition, then Molly Flatt’s Charmed Life of Alex Moore is OUT NOW – it’s dead good).

This week I’m recommending a different book altogether. Something that, had I not heard it from the horse’s mouth direct, I probably would’ve shrugged and moved on from – I’m hella glad I didn’t.

Some background: last week, the second week of the Squared Guru training I mentioned, we were fortunate to have an amazing speaker in the shape of Sam Conniff. Founder, ex managing director of youth marketing agency, Livity, and now author, give a talk about why pirates were THE ORIGINAL innovators (he wrote this article about the book launch – worth a look).

Aside from setting a new bar for representation on a single slide, the talk – and Sam – was excellent – and I am a complete convert. I bought the book off the back of that presentation and you should do the same.

I’ll read mine, you read yours, and then we’ll compare notes in about a month. Deal?

Deal.

Go get.

First, The Drum wrote about the purposeful decision to cultivate and encourage different cultures between companies and their in-house innovation teams/departments – something that I hugely disagree with!

You can read more about that, here.

Second, WIRED wrote about YouTube’s recently announced foray into recruiting ‘A-listers’ for its next batch of original content. The angle of the piece makes it seem like it’s an ‘instead of’ or an ‘either/or’ when it’s actually an ‘and’ and furthermore, a really interesting strategic point of growth when you think about it…

Me? I tend to fall down on the more audience-centric POV.

Third and finally, I’m speaking at the Buy Yorkshire conference on Tuesday next week (May 15th). Running through a slimmed down (but updated) version of the #OgilvyTrends2018 presentation. I’m really looking forward to it and, if you’re in the area, you should come (it’s free).

It was a Sunday night. An ad came on in the background – it sounded a bit… different. I looked up. And I saw this.

And it was awesome (and so I tweeted about it, above).

There’s a lot to love here.

1. I LOVE how the ad uses a catch-all term for all home assistant. Over, for example, the easier route of just going after one.

2. I LOVE the test itself (you should try it).

3. And I LOVE the fact that Channel 4 used a TV ad to drive interaction with this, what is ostensibly a teaser trailer for its next seasons of its sci-fi drama, HUMANS.

Ask your Home Assistant ‘Start Human Test’ and have a play.

Those that hold up the Burger King ‘Whopper Hijack’ as a ‘best in class’ use of voice (it isn’t) could learn a lot from this.

Good job HULK agrees then.

Not that new but if you missed it it’s definitely worth taking a look at.

As is this thread of data points therein.

Three this week: 

• What do we do with these men?
• The Nike Exodus.
• Monica Lewinsky: disinvited.
• R Kelly. About time.
• Roman Polanski. Unsurprising.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand…. GO! 

• Did you know that you can view (and edit) the advertising info that Google has on you? I didn’t either. Go see.
• What is life?
• Klout closed. Just in time for GDPR. I’m probably going to write about this at some point (the first two comments on that post are SOLID GOLD too).
• Mark Hamill is great. 
• There’s a pixel watch coming, apparently.
• Facebook said sorry - in an ad.