Faris Yakob
Opinion
08 February 2023
•
Ahead of the Super Bowl LVII, Faris Yakob explores the phenomenon of the event and the opportunities and constraints that the biggest stage in the world's biggest advertising market offers to brands.
Opinion
06 January 2023
•
Where does creativity come from, and where are the finest, most useful connections made? In the spaces in-between, observes Faris Yakob.
Opinion
07 December 2022
•
Faris Yakob on how a new S-curve for artificial intelligence will change advertising and agencies.
Opinion
14 November 2022
•
Celebrities have been used to sell products since the 19th century, but the politics and ethics of celebrity in a world with social media (and Kanye West) present new challenges to both the influencer and the brand, as the nature of the relationship changes.
Opinion
03 October 2022
•
Faris Yakob on music as ‘memory candy’, and its use as the ultimate shorthand of emotion.
Opinion
04 September 2022
•
We live in interesting times: Faris Yakob explores the tensions facing brands and advertising as consumers start to feel the pinch.
Opinion
19 July 2022
•
Following record temperatures this week – an alarming, tangible example of our warming change – Faris Yakob considers the paradox in the advertising conversation.
Opinion
02 June 2022
•
Faris Yakob unpacks the history of names, signifiers, and ultimately portmanteaus.
Opinion
28 April 2022
•
Faris Yakob delves into the history and philosophy of a vital tool for strategists: the presentation.
Opinion
05 April 2022
•
What bearing does luck have on advertising, asks Faris Yakob, who finds in a recent book - ‘Go Luck Yourself’ by Andy Nairn - a form of resilience that looks for what is possible with a rigorous examination of the situation.
Opinion
02 March 2022
•
We have ways of testing creative, ways of measuring its effectiveness, but what do we actually know about how to make creative and effective advertising? asks Faris Yakob.
Opinion
03 February 2022
•
The beginning of the year is always a time for trends, but knowing how to think about trends can be more useful than the trends themselves; Faris Yakob proposes three critical questions to ask.
Opinion
06 January 2022
•
If we let the machines into our creative process, won't they steal our jobs? Relax, says Faris Yakob.
Opinion
08 December 2021
•
It’s not just at Christmas: brands usually default to positive emotions, reflecting the idea that people just want to be happy all of the time; humans, however, are complex beings and their emotions are complex things, argues Faris Yakob, but brands are leaving a vast unexplored area untouched.
Opinion
20 October 2021
•
Coca-Cola’s new brand platform, Real Magic, a global campaign that will need to tread carefully to resonate around the world – Faris Yakob takes us inside the tensions of designing strategy on a worldwide scale that will play locally.
Opinion
15 September 2021
•
A misunderstood part of the advertising business, between tech advances and raw necessity, the production of advertising is undergoing a supply chain disruption – Faris Yakob considers the situation.
Opinion
17 August 2021
•
Characters helped brands tell their story rather than sell their product, observes Faris Yakob; though they have fallen out of favour they remain the engines behind some of the most memorable ads people have seen – is it time to reconsider the character?
Opinion
14 July 2021
•
Faris Yakob reports from a foray into the cross-platform game Fortnite, where the medium of gaming has collided with the mainstream.
Opinion
25 June 2021
•
Language and thought are ridden with metaphors of various kinds, operating at various levels, writes Faris Yakob – but in advertising, a metaphor is often the tightest form of an insight.
Opinion
20 May 2021
•
Given how important fame is to any campaign or brand, we don’t talk about it enough argues Faris Yakob.
Opinion
15 April 2021
•
Attention matters, argues Faris Yakob, but using it to its full potential is a case of balancing fast and slow media to work across both high and low attention environments.
Opinion
18 March 2021
•
The panic over an internet after cookies is growing, observes Faris Yakob, and their use is predicated on a strange and deeply flawed idea of how advertising works in the first place – a rethink is long overdue.
Opinion
04 February 2021
•
Faris Yakob: The economics of America’s biggest TV event have changed, as have the strategies brands use to exploit the attention it captures – this year’s contenders reveal the shape of US advertising.
Opinion
21 January 2021
•
Business to business advertising reinforces a strange cognitive division made between professional and consumer advertising, where creativity is encouraged for one and discouraged for the other - this is wrong, argues Faris Yakob. Building strong brands to justify prices makes a lot more profit than growing volume.
Opinion
11 January 2021
•
Everything is PR because, in an age of crises, everything is crisis communication, writes Faris Yakob, but the flip side is that everything communicates.
