On the week that Toys R Us announced it is to close its doors for good, the Financial Times warning for leading consumer good groups back at the beginning of March reads all the more poignantly. The toy store’s plummet into administration has been coming, but its final collapse serves as another timely warning for top retail brands to stay on top, and far ahead, of the trends.
Elon Musk famously declared we are ‘summoning the demon’ with the development of artificial intelligence (AI), and cited it as the most serious threat to the survival of the human race.
Coming from someone famous for cutting edge technological innovation, Musk’s disturbing predictions were taken to heart, and have contributed to an overall view of AI as a concept that should be feared. Add in sci-fi themes from the likes of Blade Runner and Dan Brown’s novel, Origin – where autonomous bots threaten the human race, and it’s easy to see where the dread of AI comes from. As AI capabilities progress, fears grow that fiction could soon become reality.
Sarah and I met in a rainy playground three years ago when we were both getting to grips with having “two under two”. We were at the height of sleep deprivation and finding the long days tough (and lonely!) when that friendship swept in and saved the day. We hung out together all the time, and reflecting on it all a few months later, we wondered why there wasn’t a better way to find mum friends.
Any quick Google search tells you instantly that Barcelona, Siem Reap, Cape Town and so forth rank the highest as best cities in the world. So I guess the branding, PR and communications of these cities are getting the most positive messages across. Well done to their marketing teams. The objectives are simple, to make a city as aspirational as possible to the widest possible market. Solid communications plans are based on the obvious – what are you, what do you deliver and who are you for, who is your target market, who you’re trying to “sell” to. Furthermore, the consistency of messaging, a city hanging its proverbial hat onto whatever “hook” they decide upon and then sticking with it most often has better success. A good logo doesn’t go amiss either – a sticker of a city’s logo travels a long way.
For us, the biggest innovation in terms of media spaces has definitely been influencers. From people in their bedrooms to organised groups of collaborators and influencers turned celebrity, the influencer media space has grown exponentially in 2017, and it shows signs of speeding up in 2018.
As a trained scientist with a PhD in biochemistry, I’d been accustomed to having a direct line to the latest cutting-edge science throughout my academic career. It was only after graduating from Cambridge University that I began to notice the huge difference in accessibility to many things I had taken for granted previously: the wealth of scientific knowledge that I had been so used to accessing during my studies was no longer available to me.
Innovations for the business community – the Fintech sector has been experiencing its bubble as-of-late and rightly so. Traditional banking was languishing under the weight of cumbersome legacy systems and was ripe for disruption. There have been (and continue to be) massive opportunities to innovate. However, so far, most disruptors have been focusing on consumer-orientated solutions – which are, unsurprisingly, a lot easier to implement than B2B solutions. In fact, according to a PwC report compiled last year, 80% of respondents believed that consumer banking will continue to be the epicentre of disruption over the next five years with personal loans (64%) and personal finance (50%). It makes sense to go for the low hanging fruit.
“Venture investing is about building large and sustainable businesses. Our capital allows companies to grow quickly and invest more in product. A good team understand that the quality of their product is the priority, if they get this wrong they will not retain customers and they risk the whole company with a major product outage or security breach. The balance is achieved by focusing development on what really matters for early customers.”
Co-working has been the ‘It’ workplace trend for quite some time now. By the end of the new year, nearly 1.2 million people worldwide will have worked in a co-working space. Enabled by mass mobility, it’s now forcing many of us to rethink the role of the traditional office building and ask the question ‘what’s the future for the office in a co-working world?’.
In recent years, video content has risen to become a critical weapon in the engagement arsenal for digital marketers. But aside from its potential to deliver messages in a concise, memorable and emotive way – prompting increased consumer-brand engagement – video is also now emerging as an important ranking factor for SEO, with Google’s ownership of YouTube meaning (unsurprisingly) that websites incorporating high-quality video can expect a significant uptick in their organic search traffic.
