Hey ,

I hope you had a great week! The weather wasn't great, but I was happy to be fairly productive this week and I have a few new leads for upcoming work - nothing confirms but more than one lead is positively balmy compared to the past year in general.For the French readers I wrote a piece about brands and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), that I may or may not translate soon. I generally intend to do both languages but it's tedious and takes a long time. Even this article was supposed to just be a quick and short thing that ended up taking hours."NFTs : buzz du moment ou vecteur de croissance long terme pour les marques?" You can read it on my blog and on Linkedin. Funny enough I made a jest about creating a fictional brand named "Willems Wow Burgers" in the post, and a day later students in my Branding Foundations class who have a team assignment to create a new food brand old they were a bit lost and asked for guidance, so guess what? I spent a good part of this weekend actually creating the Willem's Wow Burgers brand (well, the name did perhaps fortunately change mid way through).The slides are linked above and here is a 26 min video - it's unlisted on Youtube for now. If you check it out I'd love to hear what you think, and whether I should make it public. I may well do that in a few days. And please subscribe to my Youtube channel! I think I'm 38 subscribers away from having a customisable url.As usual, I had brilliant conversations on Teaching Tangents with James D'Souza last week, the question was: "Is there a "personality" type to have to work in communications? A way of being that you should have to blend into the sector? Is there a place for both extraverts and introverts?" And you can find the episodes in audio form as well.James and I both journal, I do so on my laptop using Roam (and Evernote before that), and he recommended I get a couple of others paper ones he uses. I started Mindjournal this weekend. This one is dedicated for guys, and is designed as what seems to be a really interesting and empowering programme. We're thinking or maybe creating our own. Best,Willem

 Weekly Combo Typically a mix of playful and strategy flavours. 

Signal Tries to Run the Most Honest Facebook Ad Campaign Ever, Immediately Gets Banned 

(Gizmodo, 2 min read)

(Inverse, 5 min read)

Obviously, I just wanted to write about my getting into film noir, and the video game was a good excuse, though in case you're not following the relationship with the link above, the Signal vs. Facebook ads thing sounds like a bad whodunit mystery, doesn't it?

PS: Mention to my sci-fi and tabletop RPG enthusiasts, this review of the new Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG is worth a read (apparently based on, or somehow licensed with the new movie). It does not look like the game to get into roleplaying games though, comes across as the opposite of user-friendly. I do love Dune though, so I might have a look at some point.