Hey ,

I hope you had a good week, wherever you are!Mine was pretty good, lots of work with my students at ISCOM, coaching calls with the same class for their personal research projects (a year-long marketing communications personal research project), and the last session of the "micro-agency" programme.In the latter, they're organised in mock agency groups, working with a client on a live project, and next week they have their final presentation in front of a jury of professionals. That's what I did all day Friday, I was on a jury of professionals with students in the French-speaking programme, listening to student presentations. I also had a bunch of inspiring conversations with people, via Lunch Club, and catching with friends, family, work acquaintances.If you'd like to check it out, the question on last week's episode of Teaching Tangents with James D'Souza was: "Do you have any advice for students who want to start entrepreneurship?"As usual, I'm looking at a few things and feeling behind on all the various projects I have going on. One of those is to look at Substack for the newsletter, given a bunch of have migrated there, but I still haven't looked at it properly to figure what's good or better about it. Happy to hear from you if you know (or not, happy to hear from you anyways)! Otherwise it was "Blue Monday" this week, and I felt it a little. I caught up with friends and family, and updated my finances to get out of the funk on Tuesday. I'm just mentioning this because these are still rough times for many people. Check in with your friends and family.Finally in better, or more reassuring, news (at least for me), the United States have a new president. That's about it for today, on to the links!Cheers,Willem

Obviously the internet has been having a field day with Bernie Sanders and his mittens at the inauguration.

 Weekly Combo Typically a mix of playful and strategy flavours. 

Spire: The City Must Fall - RPG Review (Andrew Logan Montgomery's blog, 11 min read)

Spire RPG is a beautiful and original tabletop roleplaying game published a couple of years ago by British authors. It is set in a punk dark fantasy world, and focuses on the massive city of Spire, a fictional mile high hive of a city, originally settled by the Dark Elves (or Drow), but conquered by the ethereal and alien High Elves (or Aelfir) who control the city and have subjugated the dark elves. In the game players interpret dark elves who have joined a paramilitary cultish organisation called "The Ministry," vowed to overthrow the oppression of the High Elves overlords. 

There is lots to be said about this weird and beautiful game, and the blog post above sums up a lot of my own thinking so far. I only tried it once but would happily play it again. And thinking about picking up my podcast again this could be a game I'd like to play test or even play or run a campaign of, at some point.

Usually at this time of year all the ads space available during Super Bowl has already been sold out for months, but not this time around. So if ever you have a few million dollars lying around, you could buy a Super Bowl spot (I'd recommend giving the money to me instead, I can manage it too - or better, maybe give it to a charity doing useful stuff for people in need, say who are hungry and/or homeless, for example). A bunch of the usual advertisers are keeping their cash for now (like Coca-Cola, Hyundai, Ford), and other businesses who are either regularly featured in the Super Bown, and/or have been thriving during the pandemic are taking their businesses to the next level (or hoping to) with a Super Bowl ad. As mentioned in the article, It justifiably seems one of the big questions is about the kind of message to feature:"Each brand will be forced to find the right tone during a difficult moment unlike any other, says former New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott. “The Super Bowl is going to require a real gut check for marketers in terms of whether they'll be able to walk the tightrope between striking the right tone and misfiring by alienating people with the wrong approach.”Big challenges and I can only imagine some tough conversations in meeting rooms with agencies and advertisers about the right tone and message to adopt. We'll see what they come up with in a couple of weeks!