TSW #14: August 2019
Wes Anderson explains how to write and direct movies, RGA’s Tom Morton & Jess Greenwood on transformation strategy for the age of technology, Bo Burnham tries describing The Internet, Benedict Evans on Netflix, Wait But Why explains the AI revolution, Quentin Tarrantino explains how to write and direct movies, RGA’s Tom Morton on experience strategists as the new brand guardians, Lulu Wang on Americanness, 30 best films about music chosen by musicians, Christopher Nolan explains how to write and direct movies.
The Director’s Chair: Wes Anderson Explains How to Write & Direct Movies
Transformation Strategy for the Age of Technology — Tom Morton & Jess Greenwood
Planning began as a human response to an over-mechanistic approach to ad testing. That thread of humanity, and the belief that understanding what people really care about is a commercial advantage, persists.
The big picture is that technology now enables the full spectrum of how people experience brands. So planning plays out as a human perspective on that full spectrum of brand-building technologies.
We can see how technology is the dominant machinery for brand building by looking at the world’s most valuable brands. Almost all of them are born from technology or reinvented by technology. They are delivered by digital means. Their brand playbook is enabled by technology.
Consumers have done more than shift from broadcast to digital channels. They have shifted away from ad-supported media. Americans spend just 44% of their media time in ad-supported channels, an all-time low, against a global average of 67%. A planning discipline that only applies to advertising will become relatively smaller if the footprint of advertising becomes relatively smaller.
It’s the systematic, action side of the playbook where technology creates a new machinery for brand building and for planning. In place of advertising, we see technology creating new opportunities for brands to build through their actions and interfaces.
A planning discipline that defines a brand in order to guide what it makes, beyond what it says, is increasingly valuable.
Big strategic assignments come from clients asking who they should serve in the future, and how they should show up in the world.
Eliza Esquivel, a former head of strategy who joined Microsoft, explained: “In the agency world, inspiration comes from intuition, insights, stories and culture. In the business world, there are different centres of gravity. In technology, it’s about products and the engineering: how it works, the next feature. The inspiration comes from understanding how people use and interact with products and services.”
A24 Issue 07: Young Internet
Engagement, Influencer, Cyberbully, Blogosphere, Online Dating, Social Networking, Micro-Blogging, User- Generated Content. Why is it that most of the terms we use in order to talk about The Internet sound as if they were coined by a fifty-year-old copy editor who still uses a flip phone? Because they probably were? The quality of the language itself — sterile, self-serious, and old — is the polar opposite of what it’s attempting to describe.
I have also talked about The Internet a lot and have tried to adjust my language to better suit it — to not sound like the dusty farts rambling on about hashtag culture. But The Internet has its own language, and it’s adjusting all the time, rapidly, aging like milk, and the thing you set out to describe honestly on its own terms will have redefined those same terms by the time you’ve finished describing it. You want to write an essay on memes? Good luck. How’s that dissertation on Gangnam Style coming along?
Eventually, I realized that maybe the problem wasn’t my words — it was my impulse to describe it in the first place. The Internet needs no describing; it is its own description. It should be observed. It should author itself. And the people who are currently truly living it — not observing it from the outside — the people who will one day grow up to be crusty, out-of-touch losers like me, banging their head against a wall wondering why they sound so damn old — are kids.
— Bo Burnham (Director of ‘Eighth Grade’)
Benedict Evans — Netflix is Not a Tech Company
Like Sky before it, Netflix is a television company using tech as a crowbar for market entry.
The tech has to be good, but it’s still fundamentally a commodity, and all of the questions that matter are TV questions.
Experience Strategists Are the New Brand Guardians — Tom Morton (R/GA)
Any list of leading brands shows how many of today’s most valuable brands are ecosystems. They come to life in their interface and innovation. They take user data to expand their services. Their ultimate aim is to turn customers into members. They do have a purpose and a narrative, they just bake it into their design as much as they share it in their communication.
As Jeff Bezos says: “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” Their businesses and their brands are entwined in their experience. And if experience is the new high ground for brands, experience strategists are the new brand guardians. That expanded role brings added responsibilities.
The job of brand strategy expands from telling the brand story to building the brand system.
Brand story and brand system aren’t opposing forces. Just as brand stories need a system of media to house and distribute them, brand systems need a brand story to inspire and distinguish them. We can’t decouple brand thinking from experience thinking. The people we design for have technical expectations — like how seamless the experience should be and how they can access it — and brand expectations — like what experience the brand can authentically offer them. We have to work with both in mind to deliver a meaningful experience.
A24 Issue 10: First Gen
I ask myself if I actually feel whole in America. In a country built on the backs of immigrants, who gets to claim wholeness? Who gets to have ownership over “Americanness”? I don’t have the answers. But I feel it’s incumbent on all of us to ask the questions. When I tell my mother this, she says, “That’s because you’re American.” — Lulu Wang (‘The Farewell’)
