In Marketing, in Sales, in the neurosis that is us living in the very late 21st Century there's a deep rooted fear that we share with our medieval forebears - THE DARK.
The dark is an unknown place, a place without guide or light and ultimately a place without hope.
The Oxford English describes it thus;
1 [no object] plan and direct the course of a ship, aircraft, or other form of transport, especially by using instruments or maps:they navigated by the stars
...by the stars, by light, by direction.
Ok, Ok, enough of the cheap Gothic novella but it leads a lads mind to thinking. Each and every year we get to read the many lists of trends we will or wont see and one particular thought that I've been mulling over is; will we see a trend towards a "Great Switch Off", stemming from the perpetual night of a disappointed and despondent socially connected online world?
Privacy and the abuse and/or protection of has become a very national sport in the UK over the last few days and yet over 89.3% of Facebook users between the ages of 24 - 63 on questioning realised they had 3 or more pieces of personal data that if combined would easily lead to full identity theft, all posted on Facebook and freely available to their friends, friends of friends (ad infinitum*) network.
We had brands scrabbling to gain commercial advantage by dissasociciating themsleves and declaring themselves the owners of the moral high ground, by their very public decloration of dissasociation the moral indignation of the very readership of the NoW was enflamed.
I had a very interesting conversation with a Vfamous travel brand - which in a nutshell (and without revealing or getting myself into litigation) resulted in the following conclusion.
word hotel: are you in NoW this weekend
Vtravelbrand: (read this with moral indignation and a bit of a posh voice) what the F'#[[ of course not, such beahviour, bloody rotten show... blah, blah, blah
word hotel: I hear they're still pushing the same rate card.....!
Vtravelbrand: yes and everyone knows the circulation will be halved.........
word hotel: so; your not advertising 'cos of phone hacking? or because such a contraction of the audience doesn't justify the ROI
Vtravelbrand: Just Fuck off 'word hotel' we'll spin it as moral high ground but we all know City a.m. will have a bigger distribution than the NoW, if we stayed in it would be equal to feeding cancer to puppies.
Privacy and the abuse and/or protection of has become a very national sport in the UK over the last few days and yet over 89.3% of Facebook users between the ages of 24 - 63 on questioning realised they had 3 or more pieces of personal data that if combined would easily lead to full identity theft, all posted on Facebook and freely available to their friends, friends of friends (ad infinitum*) network.
We had brands scrabbling to gain commercial advantage by dissasociciating themsleves and declaring themselves the owners of the moral high ground, by their very public decloration of dissasociation the moral indignation of the very readership of the NoW was enflamed.
I had a very interesting conversation with a Vfamous travel brand - which in a nutshell (and without revealing or getting myself into litigation) resulted in the following conclusion.
word hotel: are you in NoW this weekend
Vtravelbrand: (read this with moral indignation and a bit of a posh voice) what the F'#[[ of course not, such beahviour, bloody rotten show... blah, blah, blah
word hotel: I hear they're still pushing the same rate card.....!
Vtravelbrand: yes and everyone knows the circulation will be halved.........
word hotel: so; your not advertising 'cos of phone hacking? or because such a contraction of the audience doesn't justify the ROI
Vtravelbrand: Just Fuck off 'word hotel' we'll spin it as moral high ground but we all know City a.m. will have a bigger distribution than the NoW, if we stayed in it would be equal to feeding cancer to puppies.