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Maybe the hardest part of leadership—be it leading a company, a family, a relationship or simply your own life—is that often times you don’t know and you still have to act. The Monster In Your Head (via fred-wilson, wearethedigitalkids)

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WWF campaign via szymon

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Wallpaper from Anthropologie

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Buffett always likes a sweetener, and Burlington gives him one in the form of information. He learns about wallboard demand from USG and consumer-credit trends from American Express, but Rose has called the railroad a kaleidoscope of the economy. Rail traffic patterns are a window on commodity, wholesale, consumer, and international trade flows. Buffett is adding this kaleidoscope to what his other CEOs tell him about the “reset of the consumer” to a lower level of spending. They feed him data from Berkshire’s portfolio of companies—sales of building materials, jewelry, furniture, real estate, credit, fractional jets, vacuum cleaners, fabricated steel, newspaper ad lineage, and other products and services. He may now command as much information about the state of the U.S. economy as anyone, including the Federal Reserve—and probably gets his faster. When CEOs Have Warren Buffett in Their Boardroom - BusinessWeek (via rickwebb)

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I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there. Jennifer Egan NYTimes.com (via somethingchanged)

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Works of art are among those peculiar commodities whose appeal grow as their prices rise. They are Veblen goods, named after Thorstein Veblen, the economist who posited that conspicuous consumption has an inherent purpose as a signal of status. They work a little like that short-lived “I Am Rich” iPhone application, which for $999 flashed the picture of a red gem. Evolutionary biologists argue these conspicuous purchases do the same job as peacock tails — signaling to peahens that they are fit enough to expend an inordinate amount of energy on producing colorful feathers. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that aesthetic choices are social markers with which the powerful signal their power and set themselves apart from other, inferior groups. Anybody can buy stocks. Hedge fund managers can buy pickled sharks by Damien Hirst. The Power of Art NYTimes.com (via somethingchanged)

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Godzilla Haiku via nevver

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My favourite photo-blogger, Nat Ma. He’s a Melbourne boy living in New York and working at JWT.

Age groups across social networking sites (via Michael Lebowitz)

This is what my blog looks like as a mosaic. Thanks Jessica for the link!

Remembrance of things past

Alex Campbell, Strategic Planner at DTDigital / Ogilvy Melbourne

No topic has captivated the imagination of advertising people around the world quite like the “the agency of the future”. Conferences are held to discuss it. Blog posts abound. Twitter is abuzz. Countless articles are published. Almost every agency shamelessly proselytises their “new model” and the supposed glory it can bring to their clients, complete with new job titles and everything.

It has become a cliché to point out that we could have all solved a lot of important problems for our clients in the time we’ve spent debating what the agency of the future will look like, how it will be structured, or arguing over whether agencies in their current form will even exist in the future.

I can’t help but wonder if the answer to this question lies not in our future but in our past. There was a time – not all that long ago in the scheme of things – when advertising agencies were invaluable to their clients business. The days of David Ogilvy, of Leo Burnett, of Bill Bernbach. An age in which choosing the right agency was one of the most important decisions a CEO would make. An era when agencies drove the agenda with clients through real insights and innovation. When clients went to agencies with business problems and agencies came back with business solutions.

Of course it could never stay this way for long. The easy profits agencies made in the early days would never survive as so many new agencies entered the game, and the balance of power between agencies and clients would soon be restored. Along the way the work that agencies do became a commodity. Clients internalised the strategic role that made agencies so essential, and agencies became order takers rather than order makers – their main purpose became taking detailed briefs from clients and turning them into ads of the specified format.

No doubt the industry has been broken for quite some time, but the financial turmoil of the past 18 months brought this into sharp focus for many agencies. At best clients demanded more for their buck, at worst they wanted even more for even less. When you’re in a commodity business, account pitches come down to who will offer the required services at the lowest multiple. Any pretention of caring about strategic or creative value subsided with the times.

I have no idea what the agency of the future looks like. What I do know is that the rise of the internet and technology has profoundly changed the way brands engage with consumers, just as television reshaped the way that brands engaged with consumers in the days of Ogilvy and Bernbach. Everyone is scrambling to catch up with these changes. More than ever before clients need agencies to help them navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.

While ‘legacy agencies’ keep thinking that a 30 second TV spot and 1200 TARPs is the answer to every imaginable problem, let’s get in there and help our clients innovate and connect with their consumers in new ways. Let’s drive the agenda with clients through real strategic thinking – not just in their communications but in their products, in their distribution, in their packaging, and in every area where they interact with consumers.

Agencies that ‘get it’ right now are in an incredible position. We can help transform our clients’ businesses to make sense in the digital age, and reap the rewards that follow. The blueprint for this was established half a century ago - it worked then and it will work now. We need to take back our seat at the corporate strategy table. We need to re-learn how to speak the language of CEOs and boards. We need to build their trust and respect so that when they come to us with a problem, it’s a business problem rather than an advertising brief. We need to think and work laterally across all areas of the client’s business to solve the problem. Just like those who came before us.

At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his actions, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about man you can touch him at the core of his being. Bill Bernbach (via dtdigital)

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Beautiful work from Goodby Silverstein for Tostitos.

Hilariously shit Christian rock music video seems to have gone viral.

Not sure why but I found this quite hilarious. Is it the sound effects? Perhaps it’s the cardboard cut outs dancing around? Maybe it’s the vigorous movement involved in the creative brainstorming process? Or it could be the bad-ass ECD who steps half way through?

It’s in Cantonese but even if you don’t speak the language the explanation makes about as much sense as most discussions on agency structure do.