Star Wars: The Force Awakens is crushing it

December 22, 2015

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Star Wars has enjoyed a very big opening weekend.

The JJ Abrams film has a shot at breaking the record for the highest-grossing movie of all time, according to some analysts. That record is currently held by “Avatar” which generated sales of more than $2.8 billion.

None of these figures include Star Wars merchandise, which have begun to boost Disney’s profits even prior to opening night. In the long-term, merchandise sales are likely to generate much more revenue than ticket sales to watch the film.

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The most detailed migration map ever shows Europeans are heading north west

December 21, 2015

532c3df08Since the turn of the millennium, Europe has been undergoing demographic change.

Just how intense—and intricate—this change has been is revealed in a new map created by Germany’s BBSR, the country’s Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development.

Dark blue patches show an average annual population fall of 2 percent or more, the medium blue patches a fall of between 1 and 2 percent, and the lightest blue patches a fall of up to 1 percent.  Red areas show population growth.

Europe is experiencing a migration to the northwest. But the biggest changes are happening in Turkey: As people leave its countryside and move to its major cities and coasts, the country is transformed into a vivid mosaic that arguably shows more intense rises and falls than any other on the map.

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The busier you are the more you need mindfulness

December 21, 2015

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Aetna, an American managed health care company, instituted a mindfulness training programme designed to teach employees how to take short breaks to centre themselves through meditation and yoga.

More than a quarter of Aetna’s 50,000 employees have taken part. Mindfulness scores increased as expected, but  on average, stress levels dropped by 28%, reported sleep quality improved 20%, and pain dropped by 19%.

Aetna also calculated the savings to the company, finding that, on average, mindfulness participants gained 62 minutes of productivity a week, which is an estimated $3,000-per-employee increase in productivity for the company each year.

Individuals in the top 20% of stress rankings have nearly $2,000 more in medical costs for the preceding year, so this intervention could create significant medical savings.

If you are interested in a mindfulness course for your firm drop email andy@furthr.co.uk

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This intricate 1957 flow chart lays out Disney’s content strategy

December 21, 2015

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This intricate flow chart drawn in 1957 elegantly lays out Disney’s strategy, with films at the centre surrounded by theme parks, merchandise, music, publishing and television. Each piece of the business provides content and leads to sales for the others.

By acquiring Star Wars, Bob Iger, boss of the Walt Disney Company since 2005, has put films back at the heart of the business effectively rebooting the Disney family’s original scheme to dominate the entertainment industry by using content to appeal to a bigger, global audience.

And it’s worked. Profits have more than doubled over the past five years, to $8.4 billion, and Disney’s share price has risen nearly fivefold in a little over a decade, easily beating its rivals.

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CHART: the skill gap between teams in the premiership league is narrowing

December 21, 2015

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Looking at the premiership at the end of this year –  all-conquering Chelsea in fifteenth place while Leicester sit atop the table – it seems clear the  gap in ability between the best and the rest has shrunk in 2015-16.

One way of measuring this is with an Elo system, a simple points-exchange mechanism developed by the physicist Arpad Elo for chess and now used in many sports.

It awards credit to the winner of a match and subtracts it from the loser, taking into account the strength of competition, final score, home-field advantage and importance of the contest.

A paper published in 2013 by mathematicians from the Universities of Warsaw and Amsterdam found that Elo is better at predicting international football outcomes than the world rankings produced by FIFA, the sport’s global administrating body.

And when applied to the Premier League, Elo confirms the popular narrative. The standard deviation of the division’s Elo scores measures how tightly distributed teams’ strengths are: the smaller that number is, the closer the twenty teams’ rankings are to each other.

This year’s mark is the lowest the indicator has been at this point in the season since 2003-04 (see chart above).

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“Homeless media” is a death knell for established media brands

December 17, 2015
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The rise of syndicated content hosted on social platforms is a disruptive model that will get more user eyeballs on the content, but spells commercial suicide for established media brands, says Andrew Pemberton, director, Furthr.

If you click on a link to a news website called NowThis, you will see something extraordinary…

I want to see this entire article on Marketing magazine. 

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In 2015, Facebook changed fashion forever

December 17, 2015

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Facebook is changing fashion forever.

The utter dominance of the social media giant is reshaping all sorts of industries, but Fashion undergoing a major transformation.

The speed between each new product range is getting faster. Like social media itself, fashion is becoming “always on.”

In 2015, Net-a-Porter grew the number of new products arriving online by 14%, Saks Fifth Avenue by 13%, Farfetch by 11%, and Nordstrom by 7%. Adidas recently opened an extra-fast “Speedfactory.”

Millennials became the largest generation in the US labor force this year and are poised to become the biggest buyers of luxury products in the next few years.

For this new fashion customer, fashion is entertainment, part of the endless stream of media delivered through our smartphones.

This demand for immediacy is most pronounced on social media, where fashion brands connect with millions of customers in real-time. This year saw Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram testing “buy” buttons that offer an even more immediate way to buy from the media stream.

“Fashion has changed, and it’s continuing to change because, fundamentally, people get bored quicker,” as Jonathan Anderson, the wunderkind of British fashion, told WWD after taking over at LVMH-owned Loewe last year. “When you see it, you want to buy it.”

 

 

 

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Once again, Norway has been voted the best country to live in

December 17, 2015

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The United Nations’ annual Human Development Report, a behemoth study of every nook and cranny of the world, is out this week. And the countries that come up on top in the rankings portion of the report are entirely unsurprising.

Norway’s continuous success – it’s the 12th continuous year that it’s taken the title – hinges on a number of factors, including an oil-driven economy, robust healthcare system, and strong government structure. Not just a source of pride, its natural beauty also drives a lush tourism industry.

So far, so so.

More interesting is the fact that Rwanda has made the most progress, which is all the more impressive given that its level of development fell during the genocide of 1994. Rwandans can now expect to live almost 32 years longer than in 1990, and spend twice as long at school.

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