Rolls Royce reported a £5.4 billion loss in the first half of 2020. Like many luxury car brands, the pandemic had wiped out demand – but it proved to be temporary. In 2023 it delivered more cars than any other year in its history, and its share price was up by 150% compared to before the pandemic.
All Threads
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.
In 2000, M&S’s ‘I’m normal’ campaign broke new ground by showing a size 16 woman to celebrate clothes of all shapes and sizes. Focus groups participants said they loved it, but on air the ad tanked – soon to be replaced by a conventional fashion campaign with models like Twiggy.
How do you demonstrate the thinness of a MacBook? You could say it’s only 1.8cm thick. Or, if you’re Steve Jobs, you pull it out a manila envelope.
In one of Mad Men’s most famous scenes, Don Draper pitches an idea for an ad about ketchup: there is no product, just the tagline “Pass the Heinz”. In 2017, Heinz turned this fictitious campaign into a reality, creating three printed posters of classic American food (fries, burgers and steaks) with the same tagline.
It’s one of the most successful video games of all time, but its cover players aren’t so lucky. Of the 22 players who have been selected to grace the cover of Madden games, 16 have had troubling or abruptly shortened seasons following their cover debut. It may be a curious coincidence, but it hasn’t stopped fans protesting against their favourite players appearing on the cover.
The pandemic had surprisingly little impact on the values of the UK mainstream (defined as the middle 50% of the population by household income).
If only virality was possible. In 2012, Yahoo researchers studying the spread of millions of online messages found that more than 90 percent of the messages didn’t diffuse at all. A tiny percentage was shared more than seven times, but nothing really went fully viral. The hard truth is that to reach lots of people, you have to actually reach them all at once (think Superbowl).
People aren’t hungry for more virtual connections, they want more real connections.
On the dating site OK Cupid, men are magically 2 inches taller than they are according to medical records.
The club’s coaching staff noticed that Pablo Zabaleta, their dogged and industrious defender, had a habit of sprinting across the field during lulls in play. He had worked out that doing so helped him improve two key physical metrics: total distance covered and the number of high-intensity sprints he had produced.
Sir Alex Ferguson noticed that defender Jaap Stam was making fewer tackles than in previous seasons. The data convinced the manager that Stam was past his prime, leading Ferguson to transfer him to Italian club Lazio. But in reality Stam was making fewer tackles because he was making more interceptions and keeping the ball more as a result: his performance was improving, not declining. Ferguson later conceded, “without a question, I made a mistake there. Jaap Stam was the one.”
Once you earn over £100,000 annually, you lose the right to 30 hours of (very valuable) free childcare. So bizarrely, parents are now better off earning £99,999 than £149,999.
The design of Mario was the result of one big constraint. His creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, was limited by low quality hardware, so he made the character as simple as possible; clothing him in red overalls and a blue shirt for contrast, using a cap to avoid drawing the character’s hairstyle, and drawing a large nose and a mustache, which avoided the need for a mouth and facial expressions.
The world’s largest hotel corporation owns very few hotels. Instead, Marriott makes money by selling its brand to franchisees, who then set up Marriot branded hotels and pay an annual fee in return.