25+ years in business. Creator of Profit, Innovation & Leverage (P.I.L.) Innovation & commercial creativity to transform your business aspirations into reality.
Basingstoke, England
Joined May 2009
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I just wanted to say what an amazing experience I had with @Halfords_uk Basingstoke. A big thanks to Bobby and the team for sorting everything out. I am blown away by the customer service. Wow!
Again: "I complete agree with your frustration—that was completely my mistake for sending you down that rabbit hole, and I am genuinely sorry for wasting your time on it." I wish AI companies would stop releasing new features & fix the core capability of not MAKING SHIT UP!!!
Nearly an hour on chat to @virginmedia and not getting anywhere... I specifically asked if the price would jump and was told "no". So, signed up. Now I find it will go from £26.99/m to £80/m at the end of 24months. Grrrrr.
The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.
And he said it without being anti-AI.
Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.
Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.
The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.
And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.
Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.
The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.
What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.
Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.
Those are different jobs.
Claude is like working with a dementia patient. I simply can't trust it on anything if it can't remember that Thursday is not "tomorrow" after Monday... @AnthropicAI
Claude is so good. And yet so bad. It is utterly bamboozling that it has no concept of dates and time. One of the first things we teach a human child. Disaster @AnthropicAI
A free 45-minute #webinar for business owners and senior leaders ready to think differently about their #business #strategy. eventbrite.co.uk/e/imagine-w…
Getting #innovation #strategy right is key. Who are you - a product company great at marketing, or a marketing company shifting some products. youtube.com/shorts/QvsZI2TxG…
Ironically, the business leaders who most need to listen and get help are often the least likely to ask. Thinking you have all the answers is a 100% sure-fire way to eventual business/career collapse.
Ooba Creative (Adam Clark) retweeted
Marc Andreessen: AI coding doesn’t eliminate programmers — it redefines them. The job is no longer typing code line by line, it’s orchestrating 10 coding bots in parallel, arguing with them, debugging their output, changing the spec, and pushing them toward the right result. But here’s the catch: if you don’t understand how to write code yourself, you can’t evaluate what the AI gives you.
The next layer of programming isn’t writing scripts — it’s supervising AI that writes them. Today’s best programmers spend their day jumping between terminals, managing multiple coding bots, fixing mistakes, and refining instructions. The irony? You still need deep fundamentals, because without them, you won’t know when the AI is wrong.
The job of the programmer has changed. Now it’s about arguing with coding bots, debugging AI-generated code, and understanding why something doesn’t work or isn’t fast enough. AI abstracts the work — but only people who truly understand code can tell if the abstraction is doing the right thing.
Programmers aren’t going away — they’re becoming 10x, 100x, even 1,000x more productive. Tasks are changing, the job is changing, but humans are still overseeing the process, evaluating results, fixing errors, and making judgment calls. AI changes how we code, not who is responsible.
The future programmer isn’t replaced by AI — they’re upgraded by it. You still need to learn how to write and understand code, because when the AI gets it wrong, humans are the ones who have to know why. That up-leveling of capability is the real revolution.
Ooba Creative (Adam Clark) retweeted
I'm obsessed with cognitive biases.
A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that destroys decision-making.
11 most powerful (and dangerous) cognitive biases I've found: 🧵
1. Survivorship Bias:
Under standing Volume is key in marketing... Most SMEs just don't appreciate the scale at which they have to combat obscurity. youtube.com/shorts/4sri21GaT…
Have to say... @LloydsBank . Bit of a screw up. But your customer support has been amazing. And all sorted. Always nice to be nicely surprised! :-)
You probably don't need an app. It's like having a baby to save your marriage. Gives you lots of things to focus on but it wont fix your business.
Ooba Creative (Adam Clark) retweeted
I read Ogilvy on Advertising for the 3rd time
A list of ideas from the book:
1. The beginning of greatness is to be different and the beginning of failure is to be the same.
2. Down with committees. Committees can criticize, but they cannot create.
3. Search the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.
4. Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell. (That is the most important sentence in this book.)
5. The more you tell the more you sell. Long copy sells more.
6. Long copy conveys the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not.
7. You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.
8. Include the price of your products in your ads.
9. Consider how you want to position your product. Positioning answers (1) what the product does and (2) who it is for.
10. Have humility in the presence of a good idea.
11. At the beginning good ideas are fragile. Nuture — don’t kill.
12. Make the product the hero.
13. Make the product different.
14. If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that your product is better. Just say what’s good about your product – and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.
15. Repeat your winners. If you write a good advertisement repeat it until it stops selling. (Most campaigns are abandoned far too early)
16. The good ones know more. I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any. This willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the craft is all too common. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests.
17. It is not uncommon for a change in headlines to multiply returns ten times over.
18. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end. If you are both killer and poet you get rich.
19. You are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution. Be personal, direct and natural.
20. Friction polishes you.
21. Pressure refines you.
22. Write down your principles.
23. Don't put profit before service. (Money comes naturally as a result of service)
24. Focus on value not price.
25. Be upfront about your weaknesses. People will like you — and your product — more.
26. Five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. Unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money.
27. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit – like a whiter wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities.
28. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another.
29. Your ads must be entertaining and informative. You can’t save souls in an empty church.
30. You cannot bore people into buying your product.
31. It pays to write short sentences and short paragraphs. Avoid difficult words.
32. Promise is the soul of an advertisement.
33. Don’t waste time on problem babies. Back your winners. Abandon your losers.
34. Concentrate your time, your brains, and your money on your successes.
35. Pricing is guesswork.
36. The higher you price your product the more desirable it becomes in the eyes of the consumer.
37. Advertising is a production cost, not a selling cost. It should not be cut back on when times are hard.
38. Study the history of your industry. Get to know the pioneers.
39. Advertising is salesmanship in print. If you can write copy that sells your product nothing else is needed.
40. Great achievements are generated in an atmosphere of dynamic tension.
41. Believe in the dogmatism of brevity. We are both in a hurry.
42. Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man.
43. Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor, and obey your hunches.
