• The year that will be…

    Crystal gazing began in right earnest in Dec 2012, and across the web, there were many top x predictions for 2013.

    Trendwatching made a list, and my favourites in it were #9 and #10 – “Full Frontal” and “Demanding Brands” respectively. The first was about brands moving further on the transparency curve and proactively showing they have nothing to hide as opposed to merely reacting. The second was about brands getting their consumers to contribute to their sustainability and socially-responsible endeavours.

    Branding Strategy Insider made 2 lists – Brand and Digital & Media. In the first, I found #5 – ‘The Known and the Branded’ – a very intriguing thought. Brands being thought of as category placeholders, stuff that doesn’t really stand for anything. Understandably, brands will find it harder to differentiate themselves. In the second list, again #5 – omni-channel marketing is something I have written about earlier while on the subject of cohesive experiences.

    JWT has their annual 10 trends list as well, and I thought #1 “Play as a competitive advantage” and #9 – “Going Private in Public” were particularly insightful. The reason I look forward to the JWT list is because while they deal with the immediate, they also come up with a couple of nuggets which are really far out. But the thing is, I can instinctively connect with them and am sure that even if not this year, these are inevitable somewhere down the line.

    This year, I also found Next Generation Media’s list quite interesting, especially because of their ‘implications for brands’ after each trend. My favourites in this list were #9 and #10 – “New Currencies” and “The WOW factor” respectively. I like the direction of the former, but would have liked it to be pushed further, but that’s mostly because of a more (personal) philosophical perspective on us having no alternatives to money as a currency. “The WOW factor” – related to ‘The Known and the Branded’ I mentioned earlier in the post, and the writing is pretty much on the wall for brands!

    Update: Came in late, but Simply Zesty’s list is a must-read as well!

    until next time, hope y’all have an awesome 2013. 🙂

  • Oh, my 90s

    A couple of years back, I had written this post about the golden years of Bollywood music in my life – the 90s. The search for a restaurant within JP Nagar before we watched Talaash (at Gopalan) took us to Kakori Kababs & Curries. The restaurant review is for later, but what really made the day for me was their instrumental music collection of 90s Bollywood music. I listened to songs from Sainik, Imtihaan, Damini and it was amazing how I could remember most of the lyrics despite not having heard these in years! Just goes to show the power of those imprints.

    Later, Talaash also took me on a sidetrack – memories, and I thought about how our reality changes massively over time. Many things that seemed to be the crux of our existence at one point in time slowly fade away into memories and then into archives of insignificance in the larger chapters of our lives. We can’t even mourn or be happy about them because we don’t remember them in the first place.

    So the next day, I started working on this playlist, just so that every time I go through my YouTube channel, I would remember, and could help myself to a blast from the past. Music has always been time travel for me. Probably, many years later, when the memories surrounding these songs and the times they existed in slowly begin to fade, and they seem like a dream from years back, (what they say when they come across the lamp post at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia Part 1) this would be my crutch to go hobbling on that path. 🙂

    until next time, the soul of music

  • Brothers at War

    Alex Rutherford

    ‘Brothers at War’ is the second of the ‘Empire of the Moghul’ series and begins in 1530, right where the first one ended. Babur is dead, and despite naming Humayun successor to the wealth and the new empire he has founded, and asking him not to do anything against his half brothers, there is dissension among them. Humayun thwarts an early attempt by his brothers to grab the throne, but spares their lives and sends them away to rule far away regions.

    Despite early successes, Humayun fails to hold the empire together, and his preoccupation with stars coupled with an opium addiction ensures that he loses the hard earned empire to Sher Shah. After losing several strongholds including Delhi and Lahore, Humayun becomes an emperor without a kingdom. In addition to scheming feudal lords and other relatives, he also has to deal with the treachery of his brothers yet again. In the meantime, he marries Hamida, thus alienating Hindal, (who also loved her) the only (half) brother who had allied with him.

    Humayun wanders further away from Hindustan, fueled by a belief in his destiny – to rule the empire again. He finally gets help from the Shah of Persia, to whom he gifts the Koh-i-noor, but who also extracts a bigger price. From then begins Humayun’s journey back.

    The books seems to be showing a pattern – starting with a prince who has just ascended the throne and ending with the heir in the same position. Humayun’s failures are a tad repetitive, and are not helped by the fact that many of his journeys share similarities with Babur’s experiences, but the pace is more or less maintained and there are reasonable twists to keep the reader engrossed. Except for a few characters and events, history has been not tampered with much. Humayun comes across as a courageous, intelligent and driven man who, though lost the empire to begin with, ensured that he rectified his mistakes. If you’re interested in history, this does infuse life to the characters familiar from textbooks. 🙂

  • Zerodha

    Zerodha offers a low cost and highly-efficient online trading platform. In conversation with founder Nithin Kamath.

    [scribd id=118221532 key=key-1wuitdrd6edh5tent47m mode=scroll]

  • Broadcast 2.0 then?

    Facebook is planning a new video-ad product that will offer video advertisers the chance to target video ads to large numbers of Facebook users in their news feeds across devices. It is also becoming more public about its Publishing Garage, that aims to put into place a set of measurements to demonstrate how well campaigns are working. Twitter has partnered with Nielsen for the the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” – an industry standard metric for measuring the conversation that TV shows spur on Twitter.

    The commonality I see is the shift from social to media, though to be fair, the Twitter-Nielsen partnership also talks of sentiment being measured in the future, in addition to tracking the volumes generated. I am using the term ‘social’ for two of the biggest platforms around now – FB and Twitter, but considering they have been the trendsetters, it is likely that the others will follow suit. Yes, there would be exceptions, I’m sure, but let me generalise a bit. While time will dictate whether this shift is smart or not, I’d think this shift is massively underplaying the true potential that social has thus displayed as a disruptive force. Social is now walking the measurement rules laid for a thoroughly different kind of media. (I liked this post at GigaOm because it throws light on, and questions why every social network is trying to turn into a broadcast platform) Doesn’t this put them on the same path of vulnerability that traditional media is facing now? Is this inevitable or is this sheer laziness and/or conforming? Also, from a user perspective, isn’t this a fundamentally different direction from the original premise/reason for existence of these platforms?

    Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that this is happening at the same time as users (increasingly) are treating social as broadcast – from the shoot-from-the-hip opinions on everything to the careful posturing. Not so suddenly, it’s more about numbers than actual conversations. Now what does that remind me of? 🙂 I don’t know how much of it is unconscious and how much of it is subtle nudging (read) by the networks and their features. But whatever the reasons, imagine a future where everyone behaves the way media behaves today – loud, pompous, full of themselves, ignorant to their own faults, violent towards any criticism, and generally abhorred. What happens then?

    So in the current direction I see the networks (and users) taking, the future media mashup will show more characteristics of traditional broadcast platforms than the social traits displayed by the social networks in the early days. My concern in such a scenario is because of what Godin has stated in another context – “Media doesn’t just change what we focus on, it changes the culture it is part of.” That’s when I wish social/we would be more ridiculous.

    until next time, growing pains