VAR has only helped to magnify the subjectivity in Premier League refereeing; it just means those decisions now take several minutes, and they happen in an office not on the pitch.
All Threads
Across all types of video watching, some people watch a lot and a lot watch a little.
50% of vinyl buyers don’t actually own a record player. Some music fans want to see and touch their favourite albums without wanting to listen to them.
With the goal of ‘putting glamour back in the sky’ but with insufficient money to launch a traditional advertising campaign, Virgin Airlines used the plane itself as a source of publicity; hosting a Victoria Secret’s pyjama party during a flight, and featuring an advanced screening of the HBO TV show Entourage. The constraint brought originality and freshness that a normal campaign would have lacked.
Branson music
How could Volkswagen hope to outsell competitors with a cheap, slightly ugly German car? Flaunt your flaws, and ask consumers to ‘think small’.
Audi’s iconic slogan was inspired by a factory tour. In the words of John Hegarty: “I had gone to Ingolstadt and found the factory and I saw a very old faded poster on the wall that someone had left up there,” Hegarty says. “I saw this line ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’. They said that was an old advertising line but ‘we don’t use it any more’. And it stuck in my brain.”
Does the UK public want to change the voting age? Well, it depends on the wording. 52% support giving 16 and 17 year olds the right to vote, but only 37% support reducing the voting age from 18 to 16.
Or is it Airbnb?
The opening of a new Waitrose supposedly adds £36,000 to the value of nearby properties. But this ‘Waitrose effect’ is the result of reverse correlation: the supermarket chooses store locations that are already expensive.
In 1992 the 100-year-old Wensleydale creamery was in danger of closing, but luckily Wallace & Gromit came along. The iconic TV duo helped to revive the cheese’s popularity, and when the 2005 full-length film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released, sales increased by 23%.
Warby parker 2/3 revenue from physical
The legendary investor drafts his annual letters with his sister Bertie in mind. “She’s smart, but she’s not active in business and she doesn’t read the business pages every day… so, what would interest Bertie this year?”
Waymap is a revolutionary navigation app that works underground and in crowds, when conventional services are notoriously unreliable. It was borne out the frustration of Tom Pey, who lost his sight after falling from a roof. “We saw that there was a problem for blind people, which actually mirrored a similar problem for everybody. Google Maps and its equivalents only work outdoors for some people, some of the time, and work indoors for no one.”
It’s an idea popularised by films like Limitless, but it has no basis in science. fMRI scans show that even simple activities require almost all of the brain to be active.