Neil McElroy - Godfather of "Brand Men", Soap Operas, and the Internet

If your job is anything like mine, a huge part of it has been shaped by a man you've probably never heard of; Neil McElroy. He was central to the invention of market research, brand management, soap operas - and involved in (although admittedly much less) the development of the internet and the iPhone.

I’ve been doing some reading around the foundations of media and market research (trying to figure out the general trajectory of ‘jobs like mine’; what they are, what they used to be, what they might look like in the future), and along the way learning about a man whose name wasn't immediately familiar to me - but whose career I found fascinating.

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From the Archives: Falling Giants

Originally posted on my old (now-defunct) website in April 2013. (Lightly edited here for grammar/spelling etc.)

Prompted by a warm-up question at a conference panel about what major industry developments we didn’t see coming; my answer was that it wasn’t the rise of new companies/technologies that surprised me, but the fact that the tech giants of 2003 like Microsoft and Nokia seemed virtually irrelevant in 2013.

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Back to normal - part 4?

Life is still some way from normality yet- making plans involving travelling abroad still feels like a bit of a gamble, and its anyone's guess whether we'll get a similar Christmas to last year with last-minute lockdowns, or the Christmas we expected to get. Societal norms for things like when you should wear a mask or how much space you should give strangers in public are still a bit fuzzy - masks on trains, the underground and shopping centres are starting to become conspicuous by their absence. I haven't noticed the lingering smell of hand sanitiser for months. "Protect each other" seems to have fallen off the agenda. We're still in a ‘reevaluation’ stage - the "new normal" might be in sight, but not quite here yet.

But that means that what we can do (which we couldn't when we were still adjusting to life in a pandemic) is start getting ready for it. The big question isn't "when will this end?", but "how will we continue?"

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What can we learn from "The Dress" today?

"#TheDress" is an interesting thing to think about because in itself, it doesn't matter. In 2015 it was a social, viral, publishing phenomenon. In 2021, at best, its the answer to a trivia quiz question in a loosely defined "the internet" category. Nobody really cares about it. (Except possibly that person who had the tattoo...)

But it tells us something about how people come together on the internet in a way that they didn’t just a few years previously. And that is something that does matter.

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Back to Normal

its become pretty clear to me that this (#gestures vaguely around#) is "normal" now. No, we haven't gone "back to normal", whatever that might mean (I don't think it really means anything in this context, other than the fantasy of a world without SARS-CoV-2 and all that it entails... which is basically everything that has happened in the last 6 months or so...) But I think we can say that whatever this (#gestures again#) is is "normal" now.

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