Tom

Nature abhors a vacuum: Weeknotes #40 — Tom Darlington Media is a finite resource. Some elements of media - like video impressions - are so plentiful as to appear infinite. Others, like physical media such as posters, print ads etc, are more clearly disti...

#weeknotes
www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/nature-...

I’ve voted for yourself

my efforts to continue with the #weeknotes survive, barely...on 'doing the boring thing', writing for the IPA and details of various forms of content consumption www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/do-the-...

No One Knows Anything: Weeknotes #38 — Tom Darlington I was asked to give a talk to the marketing department of a big media and technology platform. The brief was to share some trends for the year ahead and discuss the types of things which would affec...

Slowly trying to get back into the weeknote habit...
This week a request to do a presentation results in the conclusion that no one - least of all people in marketing - really knows anything.....
www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/no-one-...

@phil-adams.bsky.social gives us some sage advice in his typically generous style!

Ideas We Love: 'The Agony Begets the Epiphany' Issue Number 68: Phil Adams is next to tell us about how he works....

open.substack.com/pub/ideaswel...

anyway. Night

Given they have a commercial model in place it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. It all looks like a precursor to adding display inventory though or “sponsored” stacks

The changes over at substack are a perfect example. It used to be an email service (get content from A-B). Now it’s got “notes” and a feed. And an inbox. And it’s multi media. People spend all their time talking about how to succeed on the site, not on the content they want to share

Been thinking a lot about one of @willsh.bsky.social ‘s greatest hits - fracking the social web. At some point all services stop being about the plumbing of getting information from A-B and start becoming a platform with features and formats and a more advanced logic for content discovery

Optimising for ‘Aliveness’ — Tom Darlington Recently I was explaining a personal dilemma to a friend. Should I do the big, scary and potentially rewarding thing I was considering or should I do the safe, bland and sensible thing? He then intr...

Taking Oliver Burkeman's idea of Aliveness as a navigation tool and applying it to brands and communication....
www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/optimis...

Rolex’s new golf ads are really really really bad. Why on earth they got rid of #perpetual I have no idea

Why do media agencies need a chief media officer?

Maybe a good analogy for a lot of the sludge we see online from various generative AI tools is Muzak. It looks and feels a bit like the real thing. It works in certain contexts. But if you stare too long you realise what’s happening in real terms

News preferring to focus on the losses incurred by tech billionaires rather than the pension schemes of your average person , I see

Review and rebuild sounds like the worst kind of agency pitch theme I’ve ever encountered

Column. On pathetic European freeloaders.
www.thetimes.com/article/7652...

Why have people given up on headphones on public transport?

Scale, Speed & Stratification — Tom Darlington In his 2023 book Humanise, Thomas Heatherwick talks about the need for buildings to hold the attention of someone for length of time it takes to pass by it. In order to pass this test, he suggests a...

A thing about dimensionlising brand experience across 'scale', speed and strata.... riffing off Stewart Brand, Thomas Heatherwick and some of my own thinking (god forbid)

www.tomdarlington.co.uk/blog/scale-s...

It’s suddenly all gone very Infinite Jest

It was bad. I’m sorry

Thanks a latte for sharing with us.
Good evening David

Someone voluntarily offered me and my co-writer £95 a year to receive our newsletter. Feels like a minor achievement

In adjacent trivia, it used to be that on TGI there were more people who bought cat food than owned cats.
Good evening

In reality - I accept a little bit of this oddness. I use it for sketching, rather than fine detail. By and large Claude helps me work quicker. The idea that tools like this will be given to people who may lack the experience to spot the mistakes LLMs make worries me tremendously

Have spent a significant amount of time correcting Claude’s mistakes today. The answers it gives me in one of my projects look and feel fluent. But comparing source material with output, it’s easy to spot big errors

The adjectives used by trade press to describe people moving jobs could really benefit from an overhaul. Raids, Re-surfacing and 'reemergences' don't really feel very positive....

Ideas We Love: Community as a Form of Research Issue Number 41: Stone Island brings its community of devoted fans to the fore

A thing about Stone Island and their latest campaign. Never owned anything by the brand, but the more I read about them the more interesting they become ideaswelove.substack.com/p/ideas-we-l...

If only Open AI had stolen some irony along with all the copyright material it ‘borrowed’.

“A little heavy handed”
🤣