FT: “Waiting to board a flight recently, I witnessed a stark example of a phenomenon at the heart of The Unaccountability Machine. A fellow passenger had been refused boarding and was pleading with the airline attendant. The attendant was obviously sympathetic — but it was down to company policy. There was unfortunately nothing she could do. We were witnessing what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”: a situation in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account. The starting point of Davies’ entertaining, insightful book is that the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the 21st century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. In finance, banking crises regularly recur — yet few individual bankers are found at fault. If politicians’ promises flop, they complain they have no power; the Deep State is somehow to blame.”
Nilay Patel: “[AI] is flooding our distribution channels with a cannon-blast of — at best — C+ content that I think is breaking those distribution channels…So most of the platforms the internet are based on the idea that the people using those platforms will in some sort of crowdsourced way find the best stuff. And you can disagree with that notion. I think maybe the last 10 years have proven that that notion is not percent true when it’s all people. When you increase the supply of stuff onto those platforms to infinity, that system breaks down completely. Recommendation algorithms break down completely, our ability to discern what is real and what is false break down completely, and I think importantly, the business models of the internet break down completely. So if you just think about the business model of the internet as — there’s a box that you can upload some content into, and then there’s an algorithm between you and an audience, and some audience will find the stuff you put in the box, and then you put an infinity amount of stuff into the box, all of that breaks.”
Bonnie Wan: “The practice of the life brief is very similar to the practice of getting to a creative brief. As a strategist, my job is to make meaning out of messiness. Companies are working at breakneck speed in categories that are being disrupted all the time with new entrants. There are forces at play that can really sink a leader’s vision of where they go. These forces can disconnect leaders from the legacy, authenticity, and DNA of the company. My job as a brand strategist is to find that alignment: what the company has always been and connect that to where they want to go. You have all the messiness, and you’re working to distill it down to the sharpest, shortest path from here to there. That practice is very similar in the life brief. I invite people to allow their “messy” to come out onto the page, to be nakedly honest, as I did in my own life. Only when you do that can you see the ingredients, create distance from them, and then meet them with curiosity. And that’s what strategists do. Now we get curious. We want to dive deeper into this vein or that vein. As we collect the ingredients, they start to shape that single-minded, single-page creative brief. You can’t help but want to start. I work with creative people. The act of wanting to create—that sharp clarity—is similar in the life brief.”
WSJ: “Advertisers for years have sought ways to reduce waste by purchasing ads that will only be seen by consumers who are most likely to turn into customers. Digital marketing giants such as Facebook in the late 2000s and 2010s for a time provided that specific kind of targeting, but changes made in response to online privacy concerns have hampered the precision with which they could connect ads to relevant consumers. Customer acquisition costs on tried-and-true digital platforms have also increased. Enter: Almost everyone else. Worldwide spend on retail media networks, the catchall term for the advertising sales units of retailers and other companies, will account for 21.6% of all digital ad spending in 2024, up from 15.1% in 2019, according to forecasts from market research company Emarketer.”
FT: “The more an asset price is disconnected from its “fundamentals”, the more potential it has to go “to the moon”. Could a company trading at 10 times its revenues suddenly start trading at 20 times its revenues? Unlikely. But could a company trading at a revenue multiple of 1,400 suddenly trade at a multiple of, say, 3,000? Sure! Why not? It is already disconnected from any traditional way of assessing its value, so from here, one price doesn’t make any more sense than another. Likewise, it is precisely because crypto has no intrinsic value that its price can climb — and drop — so precipitously.”
