Every year major corporations employ some clever marketing firms to create viral Christmas messages. Invariably these videos are better art than what you find in most cinemas and only barely linked to the corporate goals of the companies doing the advertising. And yet many of these videos are highly effective at capturing an emotional and meaningful message about the Christmas season. As for whether they are effective at selling things, it’s hard to tell.
This year a Spanish ad for IKEA has caught my eye and I thought it was worth sharing. It is of a considerably higher quality than every IKEA bookshelf you will find in my house.
That being said, I do have a lot of IKEA bookshelves. So maybe ads like these do work.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We’ve been busy over here for the last couple of weeks and unfortunately I haven’t been able to update our blog as often as I would like. However lots of interesting and important things have been happening over the past two weeks and they are worth mentioning. Check them out below!
What’s good for the investor maybe bad for the economy: There is a demographic shift going on in the Western Developed nations. People are getting older. Not just older, but retirement older, and as a result the economy is feeling pressured to respond to needs arising out of this aging baby boomer trend. One of those shifts is towards dividends. Dividends are traditionally issued by companies to their shareholders when the companies have extra money lying around and can’t use it productively. However many companies, especially large ones that generate more cash flow than they can reasonably use issue regular dividends, such as banks and many utilities. This is useful to investors that are looking to retire or are retired already. Regular dividends help provide retirees with regular and predictable income. However dividends may be bad for the economy. CEOs are often rewarded for market performance, and markets tend to like companies that increase their dividends (Microsoft increased its dividend in September). But companies can be far more useful to the economy generally when they invest in growth rather than give money back to shareholders. That would mean hiring new people, building new factories and generally moving money through the economy. But as much of the population ages and looks for dividends this might undermine the both growth in economic terms and affect choices that CEOs make about the future of their companies.
The Walker Report 