How does a game go from a simple playaround to a global sport? And how long does that process take? For football, the world’s favourite spectator sport, it took approximately 2,270 years. And that’s only if we attribute football’s origination to the Chinese game cuju. Roughly translated as "kick ball", cuju (also known as tsu’ chu) began during the Qin dynasty and involved soldiers kicking a leather ball into a net strung between two posts. A couple of thousand years later, w

Choose sounds, press 19, 65, nine, then 17 and you’ll hear a chime. Hold ‘B’ and press ‘Start’ then hold ‘X’ and press ‘Start‘. This is the cheat code to choose any level on the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 game. Press a few buttons and a whole new universe opens up to you. It’s all about buttons and keys. People enjoy the challenge to their dexterity and the risk/ reward payoff of a game while the computer does the hard work behind the scenes. Funnily enough, our relationship with c

When does middle age officially start these days? Is 60 the new 30? Are millennials really fast-tracking towards knitting and Ugg boots, bypassing the joyous indiscretions of youth in favour of gluten-free, spinning-class, Guardian-tutting, ‘lights out by 9pm’ sensibility – all fuelled by probiotic, Bullet-blended, curly kale smoothies and a thousand grains of muesli? As I creak towards my 40th birthday it’s getting increasingly hard to tell what colour-coded stage of life I’

Every social media-savvy adult is aware that Google, Facebook, Amazon and their ilk are not so much service providers as weapons-grade data miners. Their ability to understand, target, retarget and exploit their users means that consumers are left seemingly powerless to their glittery charms. They seem to know what we want before we do – and then handily serve it through an ad or pop-up with a one-click Paypal link just at the instant we’re ready to buy. The social networks a

It's getting to the point where no tech company feels it can be taken seriously unless it's disrupting something. Anything. Just finding an old problem and solving it with a simple, intuitive solution. This newfangled trend for exposing the limitations of an industry by inventing a solution through the use of technology, and rapidly dominating it until a multibillion-dollar IPO, is all we read about in the pop-up blogs of TechCrunch, Forbes and LinkedIn. And it’s great – real

It’s difficult to create true differentiation today, but even in online-only industries you still need brand marketing to make performance marketing effective. Panini football stickers – a great product, no doubt about it. No skill required, inherently social and with a low barrier to entry. They were the ultimate in cheap, disposable and sharable media. A fantastic brand. The yo-yo was also a winner. Everyone at school had one, and they could all master at least a few tricks

The world's best brands aren't at the top of the recall, respect and success leader boards by accident. They constantly reinvest in themselves to stay fresh, relevant and exciting to an ever changing and expanding audience of customers. Starting with the foundations, a brand architecture starts with a Mission Statement. From this paragraph defining the goals and objectives of the brand you expand into a positioning statement and brand personality. This triptych acts as a trip

Over the past 10 years I've led teams that have created six brands from scratch and I've delivered brand refresh projects for several more, including:- Pinnacle (formerly Pinnacle Sports) Heart of Vegas - the hugely successful social casino by product madness, now owned by Aristocrat Foxy Bingo - at the time owned by bwin.party Jackpot Party - the UK online casino owned by WMS For the majority of these I was the key stakeholder and I've been honing my own methodology for refr