It wasn’t fancy technology that resulted in £300 million lost profit for M&S. As CEO Stuart Machin bluntly told reporters, it was “human error.” Attackers used social engineering to trick helpdesk staff into handing over access: they rang support desks posing as internal IT, obtained credentials or password resets, and then infiltrated the M&S network.
Sam Salama
The pandemic had surprisingly little impact on the values of the UK mainstream (defined as the middle 50% of the population by household income).
“The great thing about being at 90% is you’re at least halfway there.” In other words, the final 10% is disproportionately hard to achieve. And it’s why so much content is only good not great.
One of the most iconic scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail shows the knights riding around on invisible horses, using coconuts to sound like horses’ hooves. But this wasn’t the original plan – it was done because the Pythons couldn’t afford real horses. Without this constraint, the scene wouldn’t have been nearly as funny.
Michael Jackson may be synonymous with the iconic dance move, but he certainly didn’t invent it. Charlie Chaplin and Cab Calloway used it in the 1930s, when it was called the “Buzz”, and it was used by singer James Brown on several occasions throughout the 60s and 70s.
In 1953, climbing Everest was the pinnacle of mountaineering. It took roughly 30 years for the first 300 people to reach the summit, but in 2019 that number ascended the mountain on one single day – a remarkable upward trajectory.
A fantastic Reddit thread shows how even the best movies can sound awful, depending on the framing. Who would have thought Star Wars could be reduced to that…?
Watching sports highlights is usually ruined because the videos tell you the final score. But the NBA app has an option to hide scores so you can watch with blissful ignorance. A simple trick that makes a big difference.
According to a (rather old) longitudinal study, only 40% of people have stuck to their resolutions after 6 months. The issue is not knowing how to quit smoking or exercise more – it’s taking the steps to do so.
The NYT’s purchase of Wordle, as Shane O Leary puts it, had a “rising tide lifts all boats effect on their gaming vertical.” It brought in tens of millions of people to the app and doubled the number of weekly users for non Wordle games.
But not according to actual purchase data, which shows that the differences are marginal. And where there are slight skews, it’s mainly because older groups buy the category less often – so they simply have less opportunity to shop around!
And yet, as Grace Kite shows, campaign ROI is highest when 40-50% of the budget is spent online. Just because they’re unconventional, it doesn’t mean they’re ineffective.
“In any other circumstances, if ten men were outside your house shouting abuse every time you left, you would say, ‘That’s simply an abuser — someone who’s mentally ill.’ But because they’ve got cameras, it’s allowed.”
It’s a phrase used time and again in brand tracking, but as Andrew Tenzer points out it’s not particularly helpful: it means many different things, depending on who you ask.
Art historians have come up with several explanations for the painting’s meaning, all of which may be misguided. According to Picasso himself, “this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse. If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. I paint the objects for what they are.”