Two Things On A Tuesday - 11/03/2025
What I'm thinking about this week
Hi. Hello. Hey.
It’s Tuesday. And here are two quick notes on things I’ve found intriguing or worth sharing.
Thing #1 - Were You Even There?
A few nights ago I saw Billie Eilish. But did I experience Billie Eilish? Between me and the stage stood a wall of phone screens like human tripods recording, posting, proving.
Billie's fans adore her, which makes sense. She belongs to an era where fame requires constant digital presence and parasocial bonds through screens. As I watched her through someone else's shaky iPhone, I wondered: Have we traded presence for proof?
Ana Andjelic calls this ‘post-mehification’ – where everything is captured and repackaged for consumption, yet the act of recording flattens the experience itself. We're archiving evidence of a life well-lived, but making life feel less alive.
At a different gig, DJ Shadow requested respect for people that want a device-free experience. Phones disappeared, and suddenly people were locked in and untethered. Live shows used to be about losing yourself. Now they're about saving the moment. But if your experience exists only on your camera roll... were you ever really there at all?
Thing #2 - Embrace the detour
Recently I repped my company at the Google DV360 event, discussing how our screen strategy mirrors evolving shopping behaviours. My main advice was to stop planning media in silos. Start from customer experience and build outward, not channel down. Build an ecosystem, not a funnel. I am so over the funnel.
Unpopular opinion aligned with McLuhan's theory that technology reverses into its opposite: media planning has mistaken clicking for agency, scrolling for exploration, and reach for understanding. It's obsessed with placement, blind to how people actually move which is irrational, wandering, nonlinear. The more we optimise for control, the more chaotic real behaviour becomes.
People don't move through media as we design it. They move like they do through cities. Taking side streets, doubling back, ignoring rules, getting lost. The future isn't a better-optimised funnel but an open-world map like a city that influences over time rather than demanding immediate conversion.
We need to stop forcing a path and start embracing the detour.