You learn new things every day...

...sat drinking coffee with someone far younger and cooler than me who is a musician and designer discussing his thesis on Futurology / Future Studies.

Now I have always believed the understanding of cultural trends is increasingly relevant in advertising, in particular because I believe advertising needs to illicit response, engagement and dialogue with consumers to build relationships, not just batter them with one way explosions of creativity. This means you need to be cleverer and understand how to trigger peoples touchpoints through humour, love, desire etc the extreme emotions - you need to make them want to engage. When adding the European dimension to that, the ever growing number of cultures each with their own history, behaviour, humour, trends this becomes a pretty complex area.

I was considering hiring a sociologist to look at this but it seemed a little too removed from what we do as a business. A futurologist however seems very interesting. Maybe the world knew about Futurology, but until this morning I didn't. Any Futurologists or Future Studies students looking for an internship? Get in touch...