Who is using big data in the best way? The shortlist has been published for the best use of big data for buying.  The Gold winner of the Media Week award 2017 in this category has just been announced.  The excellent shortlist demonstrates the range of applications for media buying:  reacting to the news; identifying…

Want a real competitive advantage? New McKinsey research, published in the FT, reinforces earlier assumptions about the importance of diversity and calculates that the gains can be even greater than previous stats. Simply put, companies run by diverse teams perform better.  McKinsey have analysed gender diversity at exec level across 754 companies across the globe.…

You used to call me on my, you used to, you used to You used to call me on my cell phone Late night when you need my love What makes a hit a hit? Since the dawn of popular music, two factors have mattered most, as reporter Derek Thompson explains in Hit Makers.  A…

This month JoeMedia took on the big topic of whether Social Media is dividing us or bringing us together. As their CSO Will Hayward pointed out at the recent Social Media Week London conference there’s been a huge stepchange in democratising news because of Social. News is no longer curated by a set of editors…

12 months ago Kathryn Jacob and I published The Glass Wall: success strategies for women at work and businesses that mean business (Profile Books). Since publication we have given over 50 talks in companies in many sectors ranging from the civil service to banking via media companies and the entertainment business.  Businesses have recognised that…

How do you win big at the upcoming Awards, where the final round of judging is imminent?  The judges will surely be looking for brave work. Brave work that innovates.  That breaks the mould.  That shatters existing preconceptions.  Robots can’t deliver this, only people can. As more and more tasks are taken over by machines who can…

In the months since the Cannes Advertising festival in June I have been mulling over the state of our industry.  As a self-proclaimed champion of diversity in senior management, how was gender diversity represented there this year? I wasn’t staying in Cannes so needed cabs to and from my out of town room and I’m…

Mark Zuckerberg remarked at the launch of Facebook Watch, a Youtube style content video channel: “Watching a show doesn’t have to be passive. It can be a chance to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things.” Thus at a stroke, he adopts for Facebook a couple of the strongest…

Daniel Kahneman is the father of behavioural economics for which he won a Nobel prize in 2002 for his revolutionary theories that challenged the idea that economics worked on the basis of humans being rational. He showed instead that economics really operates on the basis of dumb instinct. When I saw him speak (thanks to Rory Sutherland)…

Gillian Tett is the managing editor of FT. Last month she created a new acronym to explain to the world the continual surprises of the electoral results in the western world. FUCU. Tett wrote FUCU as a political analysis. A cynical analysis.  It led me to question whether FUCU might be a descriptor for marcomms too.…

Did you catch the headlines about women’s brain size earlier this month? It turns out that women’s brains are smaller than men’s.  This is not particularly startling as men are on the whole larger than women.  (Especially when they man-spread of course).  A new study from Erasmus University in Rotterdam claims that this correlates with…

Last summer Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer published a book called “The stupidity paradox”. At a time when let’s face it many of us thought that we were having a summer of stupidity. Spicer and Alvesson’s book is not however about politics, elections or Brexit.  It is instead about organisational stupidity at work. They argue…