Big commercial developments in women’s sport, the world’s most innovative companies, adventures in the hype cycle, the haunting of ghostwriters and the memefication of T-shirt slogans feature in this week’s Trippant Takeaways, our regular selection of stories on compelling communications trends across sport, tech, entertainment and culture.
Raconteur with views of International Women’s Day 2023
Each year, all at once, International Women’s Day is a focal point for brilliant campaigning, provocative debate, empty rhetoric and transparent reputation-laundering.
As brands and media companies marked the occasion again this week, Raconteur gathered a panel of female business leaders to discuss how to best harness its potential and how well the 2023 theme, Embrace Equity, had landed.
SportsPro on the dawn of Women’s Premier League cricket
Fittingly, professional women’s sport has taken another massive leap forward this month with the launch in India of the Women’s Premier League.
The franchise cricket competition – a counterpart to the all-conquering men’s Indian Premier League – has instantly become one of the richest events in women’s sport in terms of broadcast rights and athlete pay. SportsPro talked to senior figures across the game about what else its arrival could mean.
The New York Times on a landmark investment in women’s tennis
When it comes to the commercial development of female sport, of course, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) is one of the real historic trailblazers.
With both the organisation and the game itself in a challenging period of transition, a £125 million investment by private equity group CVC could be a pivotal moment.
The Cut on the fangirls of Formula 1
A new Formula 1 season roared into life at the weekend and after the success of Drive to Survive, it would seem, that is good news for a wider group of followers than ever before.
Among these new groups are the fangirls who are putting a pop-culture spin on the championship and its personalities. The emergence of these new communities is fascinating in its own right, while it also shows how much more freely the F1 story can be told in different ways.
Fast Company on the world’s most innovative companies
As 2023 clicks into a higher gear, Fast Company has revealed its list of the year’s 50 most innovative companies – as well as a sector-by-sector breakdown of those reshaping their own space.
No prizes for guessing the name at the top of the main rankings but the wider cohort runs from the small and the revolutionary to the giants reinventing their operations and public image.
The Economist gets hyped
From blockchain to the metaverse and generative AI, there is always another technological vision going through the hype cycle.
Between peaks of excitement and inevitable, cynicism-induced slumps, how do companies communicate the real value of what they are doing?
AdAge on the effort to rehabilitate NFTs
After exploding on to the scene in 2021, then imploding amid last year’s crypto crash, the NFT sector is grasping for purpose and relevance.
Brands still investing in the technology, including Nike and Starbucks, are aiming to lean into their utility and their role as collectibles and the anchors of loyalty schemes. Speculation is out; new terminology, like ‘stamps’ and ‘virtual creations’, is in.
Quartz on Meta’s ‘year of efficiency’
Meta, née Facebook, has been through a rocky spell in recent years, with new competition, scrutiny over its influence, and its adventures in the metaverse among a range of distractions. Now, it is planning another wave of job cuts and a return to its commercial fundamentals.
The Times on a scary moment for ghostwriters
When Isabelle Oakeshott and the Telegraph newspaper published WhatsApp messages given to her for a book project by the former UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, it set off a huge debate about journalistic ethics and the government’s pandemic response.
And it also put the spotlight on ghostwriting – the practice of hiring professional writers to produce books for notable people, which is no longer taboo but perhaps only patchily understood in the mainstream.
The Guardian on the new age of sloganwear
Gen Z has been getting a lot of questions about its T-shirt that may not, in fact, be answered by its T-shirt.
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