Random Culture

Why Sh%t Matters to Design

Great outtake from the PSFK conference in New York, featuring Allan Chochinov from Core77. While he's coming at things from an industrial design perspective, these are clearly words of wisdom that anyone working in a creative field can take heed of.

Link via Fresh Creation.

Love TED? Try BIL

You know I'm a fan of the TED conference, as I post videos here whenever I can. I'd sure love to attend sometime, but the invites are rare and the pricetag is high. BIL is a TED conference alternative that's completely FREE. That's right... all you have to do is show up.

And yes, you can speak, too... learn more at: www.bilconference.com.

New TED Talk: Lessig on Creativity and Law

Filmed in March 2007 at the TED conference, but posted this month, Lawrence Lessig gives a great presentation entitled "How creativity is being strangled by the law."

View the video of the presentation here.

What is Mainstream?

Beth Comstock, the President of NBC Universal Integrated Media, spoke at the American Magazine Conference on Monday, saying that we're in the "Golden Age" of media. She referenced the explosion of online video content, and anyone who's paying attention should come to the same conclusion... this is indeed an important time in the history of media.

But what struck me about her talk was something that Advertising Age mentioned in their coverage of her talk... the "40% Rule." According to Comstock, technologies can't be considered "mainstream" until 40% of houses adopt them. Using this litmus test, video games are considered "mainstream", but MP3 players are not, as her research has them only at a 34% reach. I hope this doesn't mean that Comstock is saying technologies that haven't reached "mainstream" levels aren't worth paying attention to... because something in the assertion that the iPod hasn't reached enough critical mass is absurd to me.

What's more, there's a larger discussion that this spawns. Namely, that businesses or technologies no longer need to reach ubiquity to be important. The Long Tail, anyone? I would argue that technologies are worth paying attention to long before they meet the standards of the "40% Rule", and that using it as a benchmark for importance can limit early opportunities to get involved and reap the benefits.

So what's the magic number? Simply stated, I don't think there is one. You have to look at more than just household reach. Who's being reached, even if it's only 5%... and how fast is it growing? Even if a technology plateaus at 5%, if those 5% are your most important target, dive in... don't wait for technologies to become "mainstream", you may just miss the boat.

Read the full Advertising Age article here.

Link via AdPulp.

QBN Sessions Video: Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey speaks at the QBN Sessions in Los Angeles at the Getty Center.

Speaking in Dallas: AAAA New Media

I'll be speaking at a one day event for the American Association of Advertising Agencies, "Connectivity and Stickiness": Keeping Up With the Changes in New Media. The keynote speaker for the event is Gordon Crovitz, publisher at the Wall Street Journal, and I'll be part of a round table discussion at the end of the day. If you're in Dallas, the event will be held at the CITYPLACE conference center on October 4th.

View more details about the event here.

Influx Ideas Conference

The folks at Influx Insights, who publish one of my favorite blogs, are hosting a conference. The event, Influx Ideas, is taking place on October 19th in San Francisco, and is sure to be a great one. The speaker lineup includes Kent Nichols from "Ask a Ninja", Jonah Bloom from Ad Age and the CMO from Charles Schwab, Becky Saeger, to name a few.

In addition, those who register are given the opportunity to speak in a special session of the conference. Once you've registered, just visit the participants section of the site to propose a topic.

Creating Possibilities: AAAA Planning Conference

It's been more than 24 hours since I got back from the 2007 AAAA Planning Conference in San Diego, and I've had time to digest everything. Rather than give a play-by-play, I thought it would be appropriate to focus on the things that stuck with me.

Opening Keynote: Sir Ken Robinson
If you watched the videos from the TED conference, you may have seen Sir Ken Robinson speak. Sir Ken is definitely an inspiring guy, and he used those inspirational skills to address a topic he specializes in, creativity. He talked about the dangerous division we've created between creativity and intelligence, and challenged us to be "farmers" of creativity... setting up the ideal situations for others to find their creative medium.

Seven Deadly Sins
This first breakout session I attended featured Gareth Kay of Modernista! and Mark Lewis from DDB. As stated in the description, this session was a "provocation about new ways to think." Each "deadly sin" made sense, such as operating under unchallenged assumptions, self-importance and thinking only big things matter, but one that stuck with me was to learn, and then do. Too many brands hang their hat on one campaign, with little testing about what will actually work. As Gareth and Mark point out, none of us knows 100% if our idea will be effective. Why not let 1 dollar out of 20 be used to test several ideas? The Internet has created the perfect test bed. They Office Max as an example, who created almost 20 viral sites last holiday season, one of which, Elf Yourself, which according to AdAge, received 36 million hits in just a few weeks, and resulted in a 20% increase in holiday traffic to OfficeMax.com. You can view the complete slides for the presentation here on SlideShare.

Eric Ryan, Method
Before launching the company, Eric Ryan was a planner. He saw an opportunity in the cleaning product category that wasn't being filled, and launched Method, which became a competitor by breaking convention. More than that, Method embodies all the ideals of innovation and creativity that the conference was all about. Eric encourages creativity in his employees, expects his agency to truly be a partner, and is willing to experiment with the product to actually LIVE the brand promise, instead of talk about it. I highly recommend watching the webcast of his speech here on the AAAA website.

The Third Eye - Seeing Opportunity
According to Adam Morgan of Eatbigfish, our jobs shouldn't be about finding innovation, they should be about finding opportunity.

Know who invented the Cheeseburger? It wasn't McDonald's... it was JWT. They had Kraft as a client, who wanted to sell more cheese. JWT saw an opportunity to pair the product with the most popular food of the day.

Truly, seeing opportunities is a "mindset", being open to information, how you think not just about communication, but about the business, the category, assets, distribution and more. Sadly, we often only think about these things in the new business phase, but Adam challenges us to really be a partner, and be catalysts for opportunity.

Massive Change, Bruce Mau
The perfect rallying cry for the end of the conference came from Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries. Massive Change is all about a revolution of possibilities... It's not about crisis, but about optimism.

We design everything around us. Energy economies are designed, information economies, market economies and more. Bruce asserts that we should intentionally use design and technology to solve the problems in our world.

He may have convinced more than one planner to take a different career path.

Stuck in the middle
Overall, the general sessions were hit and miss, and the breakout sessions were good. I didn't attend the conference for the digital content, which is a blessing. Apart from a breakout session from Brandon Geary, the director of planning for Avenue A | Razorfish, interactive was represented by sales executives from Yahoo, Google and Facebook, who offered little insight into how digital is being integrated into the planning process and the agency world at large. I would have liked to see interactive planners from agencies like Goodby or R/GA, rather than "vendors." The planning world, like the agency world at large, still doesn't know what to make of interactive. It's an exciting time, and I feel that excitement, as I'm building an interactive planning group at my agency.

There seemed to be some uncertainty about the future of planning, and certainly a "call to arms" for planners to be more innovative, to examine our roles and re-evaluate our practices. I'll be interested to see the fruits of those labors over the next year.

AAAA Conference

I'm in San Diego this week, attending the AAAA planning conference. There looks to be some good sessions on the docket, including some interesting breakaway sessions on integration, and a talk by Ed Cotton from Influx Insights, one of my regular blog reads that you'll find as a familiar reference here.

I'll be posting here about my thoughts on the conference, so stay tuned. And if you happen to be attending, give me a shout!

Can Planners Really Be the New Creatives?

Interesting video from the PSFK conference in London.

Click To Play

Future of Online Advertising: Free Passes

Congratulations to Chris... as the only person who submitted a video, gets a free pass to the Future of Online Advertising conference. I may have overestimated the ability for people to create their own videos.

There are still 3 free passes left! So I'll be giving those out to the first 3 people that send me an email. This should be a great conference, with folks like Jim Coudal, Steve Rubel and Jeremy Allaire speaking. They're $900 value free passes to the 2-day event in New York on June 7th and 8th.

Future of Online Advertising: Video

Yes, the lighting is bad... and yes, I had problems with my lapel mic recording in only one channel. Since I was asking all of you to submit videos, it was only appropriate that I create one as well. Here's my video:

Make sure to submit your video for a chance to get a free pass to the Future of Online Advertising conference in New York on June 7-8. Once you've uploaded your video to YouTube and tagged it "futureadvertising", submit a link to the video in the comments section on this post.

Free Passes: Future of Online Advertising

The Future of Online Advertising Conference is a 2-day event being held in New York on June 7-8. It looks to be a great conference, and I'm planning on attending. The organizers were nice enough to give me a few free passes to pass along to you, the reader! I only have a few, so I had to figure out a fair way to distribute them. So here's the challenge...

1. Create a video about the future of online advertising and upload it to YouTube
2. Tag the video "futureadvertising"
3. Post a link to your video in the comments on this entry

On Friday, April 20th, the 4 videos with the most views on YouTube will be awarded with a pass to the conference! If we don't get more than 4 entries... well, if that happens, I'll have to figure something out.

SXSW Interactive Podcasts

The SXSW Interactive conference began last week in Austin. If you're looking for the latest updates from the event, check out the official website. For more in-depth coverage, the organizers are posting podcasts from the event, which you can download or subscribe to here.

DEMOfall 2006: uControl

uControl is one of a select few companies that were invited to present at the prestigious DEMOfall conference this week in San Diego. Over the last few months, I've been lucky enough to work with them. They truly are poised to revolutionize the home security industry. If you have a home alarm system and VoIP, check them out! If you only have a home phone line because you have an alarm system, check them out! If you want to make sure that your home is REALLY being monitored, check them out!

You can learn more about uControl by:
Watch video of the uControl presentation at DEMOfall
Visit the uControl website: www.ucontrol.com

I'm also excited that uControl has decided to become involved in the blogosphere. They recently launched a blog at: blog.ucontrol.com.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006

Here's a great video clip of Seth Godin speaking at the Gel Conference (Good Experience Live) this year on "This is Broken." It's an interesting presentation about why things get broken or don't work, and the seemingly logical, but often overlooked opportunity to make them better.

Link via Coolz0r.

Ad:Tech San Francisco Tomorrow!

Ad:Tech San Francisco is kicking off tomorrow. You can view a full schedule of the panels here. There are certainly some great folks speaking. If you aren't able to attend, make sure to visit the official Ad:Tech blog to get the latest updates. It also looks like they might be covering the conference on ad:tech radio as well.

Speaking at Refresh Dallas

If you're in Dallas and interested, I'll be speaking at the monthly Refresh Dallas meeting this Thursday, April 13th from 7-9pm. Refresh Dallas is "a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical and professional aspects of new media endeavors in the Dallas area."

I'm part of a roundtable talk entitled "Get Small Fast:  Microbranding & Next Gen Social Media." For more information, visit RefreshDallas.com. The other folks at the roundtable include Brian Oberkirch, Blake Burris and Jake McKee.

SXSW Interactive Podcasts

SXSW Interactive is podcasting... Check out the complete podcast coverage here. Not sure how often these are going to be updated, but a couple podcasts are already up. Hopefully they have more than just the few listed. There's also a SXSW community blog worth checking out.

As a side note, Click Here's own Pete Lerma will be a speaker on one of the Interactive panels today (Monday the 13th), "Selling Big Ideas to Big Clients." If you're in Austin, drop by the panel and say hello.

PSFK Future Marketing Summit Videos

The folks at PSFK hosted the Future Marketing Summit this last week in New York.

At the coBRANDiT site, they've got a few great video interviews with industry luminaries such as Piers Fawkes himself, Alex Bogusky of CP+B, Benjamin Palmer of The Barbarian Group and a few more.

Hacker Conference Videos

22C3 is happening this week in Berlin. It's basically the premier European hacker conference, and it's been going on since the 80s. But the definition of a "hacker" has changed over the years. It's no longer synonymous with "criminal" behavior.

This is a conference worth paying attention to. At 22C3, they're addressing a wide variety of issues, including copyright, privacy, search engines and many more topics with an eye towards the future.

And guess what? They're putting videos of their presentations online! Check out the complete list of presentation video downloads here.

Here are a few worth paying special attention to:

• Keynote from Joi Ito
  you'll have to grin and bear it through a mundane conference introduction first
  
  
• We lost the war - Welcome to the world of tomorrow
  Great presentation on the war for privacy
  
  
• On working memory and mental imagery - How does the brain learn to think
  The human brain: The ultimate personal computer

Is Ad:Tech Sucking?

It seems to me that the coverage of Ad:Tech has been pretty light. No one talking about anything that interesting or mind-blowing. That's got me a little worried. I can only assume that no one is talking about anything interesting or mind-blowing because there's nothing of the sort there.

However, B.L. Ochman points out the following on her site:

"The action at this conference is definitely in the hallways and on the hyper-kinetic and mind-bogglingly crowded and loud exhibit floor... many sessions have been sparsely attended, despite good content."

Sounds to me like Ad:Tech needs a kick in the pants.

Ad:Tech Bloggers

Ad:tech is kicking off today in New York. There are more than a handful of people blogging about the event as it happens, and I'm sure we'll be talking about it over the next couple days. Get started here:

www.adtechblog.com
Official blog written by Adrants and MarketingVox

www.whatsnextblog.com
B.L. Ochman is blogging live from the event

Identity 2.0 Keynote

Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity gives an amazing presentation as the keynote for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention on the idea of Identity 2.0. I can't stress enough how great this presentation is...

Here's the Identity 2.0 presentation
And here's Dick's blog for more information.

AIGA Conference Podcasts

Wow... a ton of great podcasts of presentations from the recent 2005 AIGA Design Conference. You can view the complete list on the resources section of the conference site.

Not only are there great podcasts, but in many cases, the accompanying presentation materials as well. Some of the great podcasts featured: Stefan Sagmeister, Milton Glaser and Nicholas Negroponte.

Conference of the Future

The Social Customer Manifesto has a great writeup of AlwaysOn conference. They've done something interesting at the conference, displaying a screen with live text chat from people in the room, as well as people remotely attending the conference via the streamed webcast.

Is this something we're likely to see in future conferences? I think it's an interesting way to conduct a conference. I also like the way it empowers attendees.

E3 Goodness

E3 is officially underway, and as you can see from today's quick links, there's plenty going on in the war between Sony and Microsoft. But there's a ton of other stuff going on as well, including some new announcements from Nintendo that are getting talked about. So in addition to the E3 Insider site, which includes on the floor video, here are some other game sites offering good coverage of the expo:

Shacknews has a great Moblog from E3
Gamespot's E3 coverage
IGN is defaulting to E3 coverage

Circuit City Blog: E3

Circuit City has set up a blog to cover the events at E3... Well, sort of... They're calling it a blog, but as Steve Rubel points out, it "lacks certain structures."

Here are a couple hints for Circuit City:

1.) Set up an ACTUAL blog, complete with structures and all...
2.) How about a unique URL?
3.) Actually PROMOTE the blog on the main video games page on your site!
4.) RSS feeds, maybe?
5.) The scrolling frame thing is awful...

Link via Micro Persuasion.

E3 2005 Coming Soon

E3 is just around the corner, starting next week. The E3 Insider site is a must visit as the event is going on, offering a "from the floor" look at E3. Although they won't start posting content for the 2005 show until Monday, right now you can check out news and info from E3 2004.

Speaking of game announcements... the OurColony countdown is almost over. New Xbox 360 details will be announced to build anticipation.

AD:TECH San Francisco

My vacation in San Francisco was wrapping up just as AD:TECH was starting. I would have loved to attend, but I'll have to settle for the next best thing: online coverage of the AD:TECH conference. Visit the AD:TECH Blog for more information on how it went down. The conference is wrapping up today.

37 Signals: SXSW 2005

37 Signals has posted their presentation from SXSW 2005. It's called "How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams." Best quote in the presentation: "Build half a product, not a half-assed product."

DEMO Conference: Jotspot

I've actually been pretty disappointed with a number of the technologies I've seen coming out of the DEMO conference. Too many of them reek of ideas straight out of the bubble in the late 90s... Of course, at this DEMO conference, there were a number of companies trying to capitalize on the popularity of blogs... many of them with unoriginal ideas.

However, the DEMO conference did have a few shining stars... One of them, I thought, was Jotspot. It's an application that allows the easy creation of wikis. I can think of about a billion things to use this for, from both a personal and business perspective. They're taking Beta requests right now...

DEMO Conference Blogging

I mentioned the DEMO conference in the last post, so let's dig in... There are a number of people blogging from the DEMO conference, and many are doing it real-time. Here are a few of the better ones I've come across:

BloggingDEMO.com
This is the real-time blog from Jason Calcanis and the Weblogs, Inc. crew.

Robert Scoble
Robert's blogging from DEMO as well.

Jeff Nolan
From a VC point of view.

The Official DEMO blog
I actually think the content on this one isn't as great as the other blogs mentioned here.