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This letter from Myki helps the reader learn how to touch on and touch off while they travel (via @njayharris)

Watch this fascinating interview with Tony Davidson of Wieden+Kennedy.

Somewhere in your product, or in your business, there is a ‘difference’, an idea that can be developed into a story so big, so vital, and so compelling to your public as to isolate your product from its competitors, and make your public think of it as distinctly a different kind of product. J. Walter Thompson, 1917

Cool guys don’t look at explosions.

unhappyhipsters:

You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation.

(Dwell, February/March 2006)

reblogged from unhappyhipsters

In Web 2.0 jargon the words “friend” and “community” are severely abused. Unless a brand has a cult following, there’s no “community” around the brand, just customers and prospects. And unless you can call on your friends in a time of need, and they you, they’re not friends, they’re faces with bios and semi-frequent updates. Maybe you see them in person once in a while, maybe you don’t. It’s a dark, cynical world where we allow things as near and dear to us as friends and community to become less than they are. What starts as a semantic trick quickly becomes the new paradigm. Ultimately, I think we have a responsibility as professional communicators to speak honestly and think critically. It’s easy to slip and let things like “engagement with the community” get in the way of what’s truly at work. Let’s call things by name and name things correctly. Customers are customers, friends are friends, and community is the place where you live. AdPulp.com (via somethingchanged)

reblogged from somethingchanged

Fuck yeah protesting sharks.

via grelg: rubitues: fakemustache: monkeyknifefight : fujiidom : creewillow

reblogged from grelg

I think I’ve just figured out why it annoys me when people trivialise the conversations that take place on Twitter and Tumblr as merely ‘talking about what you had for breakfast’. Mostly I find these are the same people who quite happily sit around for hours and hours engaged in the most inane, insufferable real-life small talk. Where they ate dinner last night, what their hotel in Noosa was like, how their favourite sport team is going.

In contrast, the conversations I encounter online tend to be more interesting than most of the conversations I have in real life. At their best these conversations are far from small talk. They explore issues that don’t belong in mainstream discourse, in far more depth than real-world social interactions normally allow. They show an intellectual curiosity that defies the shallow expectations of our culture.

Trivialising these online conversations as merely being about early-morning epicurean tendencies reflects a naivety and disconnectedness that I’d suggest says more about the speaker than his subject.

Me (after, well, a few glasses of wine)

[President] Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist. Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it. Bob Herbert, “Obama’s Credibility Gap”, New York Times

Interesting take on the modern day advertising organizational structure from Mother NY:

The agency’s account people-less structure (a key Mother London trait that was passed down), Karlsson says empowers creatives, who end up getting more involved in clients’ businesses. “(Account management) is a discipline that everyone in that group shares,” says Karlsson. “It’s one little thing but it forces everyone, including creatives, to not just be in their own world.” And along with dedicated account managers, Mother eschews a top-down management style. “We think that no one else should represent anyone else’s point of view. If you have a question about something that was written you talk to the person who wrote it. That engages the people who work on an account.”

Creativity Agency of the Year 2009: Mother New York - Agency of the Year 2009 - Creativity Online (via seij, connerhuber, dennisdemori)

reblogged from dennisdemori

unhappyhipsters:

The octopus was full of judgement.

(Dwell, October 2009)

reblogged from unhappyhipsters

By whose authority do the Standing Rules of the Senate govern the Senate? By the Senate’s alone. But what is the Senate, exactly? It is part of a larger entity, the Congress, that expires every two years after the entire House and one-third of the Senate stands for election. We currently have the 111th Congress. In Jan. 2011 we’ll have the 112th. In Jan. 2013 we’ll have the 113th. And so on. The first step in exercising the nuclear option, then, is for the president of the Senate (i.e., Vice President Joe Biden) to state, in effect, “Previous Congresses can’t tell this Congress what to do. Senate Rule 22 has no force because it was never agreed to by the current Senate.” Biden would then state, “Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, this current Senate may ‘determine the rules of its proceedings.’ I say we change Rule 22 to eliminate the filibuster. A risky parliamentary procedure might get health reform through the Senate. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine (via indefensible)

reblogged from indefensible

Love this idea from Ogilvy London!

neilperkin:

Idea Shop is a pop-up ad agency brought to you by Ogilvy Group UK. For three days we are offering our services free of charge to small businesses, community projects, arts groups, and other organisations and individuals in the Lambeth area.

reblogged from neilperkin

The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.

I really agree with this. It’s potentially an even bigger problem for digital agencies than it is for pure-play product companies - in an agency the developers are often so many layers of account service and client management away from the end customer that they can very easily lose touch with their users’ needs and problems.