A Moving and Articulate "Manifesto on Interactive Advertising Creativity"

I simply had to share this with everyone.

It happens to be one of the most profound and articulate manifestos I have ever read about "Interactive" it is a MUST read for anyone who is serious about this business and its future.

"A Bigger Idea":
A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising Creativity

Enjoy! ... and pass it on!

Thank You Randall.

Internal Review

The nature of a recession typically is to help reset an economy that has gone awry and to help reestablish the momentum and processes that may have caused things to have taken a turn for the worse. This can be due to either rapid growth, corruption, lack of standards, loss of focus or differences within an industry that may strangle its progress.

Our industry, the interactive industry, is no different than any other.

Because of the pace we travel at, interactive professionals, tend to go through the hills and valleys more often than most. There is constant turn over, talent shortages and surges, new technologies to adopt to and trends that change per second.

The results are typically a more refined crop of professionals that are seasoned and nimble enough to take things to the next level and meet the demands of the never ending web.

Ab incunabulis to ad finem (from the cradle to the end) we explore and engage everything we get our hands on and like survivors on an island we are trained to look into every crevice and corner for new ideas and trends in order to survive.

Survival of the fittest in its most primitive form in the most advanced technical age ever.

The onset of most niches within an industry can sometimes be a bit of a free for all. When something new and exciting is unleashed into a ravenous world it can sometimes be over hyped and in many cases over valued.

This is a trapping that can blind many business owners and professionals into thinking that what it is that they are offering is some sort of cure for the woes of the world.

The Internet sets all kinds of unrealistic expectations that on some level do manage to be met on a daily basis, however after meeting each expectation another even greater one is waiting at the gates.

This is no business for a simple mind and someone who needs a calm and peaceful atmosphere. It is the chaotic world of the creative mind that can thrive in such a tumultuous landscape. To remain human while keeping the pace with the every changing trends in design and technology.

Many of the digital shops in our industry have enjoyed a rapid growth based on the novelty of many of the new trends we uncover and expose to clients and the public who are less digitally inclined.

However the pace of the maturation of the industry renders those novelties less impressive within days of their release. What this does is create a very unstable face value for the services we offer our clients.

Loading up on interns and junior talent is a way for smaller shops to keep salaries down and to infuse a youthful energy into the work that is being created, however it also perpetuates the vicious cycle that we tend to get trapped in.

That trap being lack of leadership, maturity and understanding. The elements that will hopefully help stabilize this industry and help form a solid foundation based on real strategy and ideas formulated to last.

With a stable creative and technology core and a leadership group of seasoned veterans who have been doing this from the very beginning, clients can be assured that they are communicating the right messages and that they are getting the most bang for their ad buck.

And not just some fly by night trend that will cause everyone to take three steps back every time we take one almost cool step forward.

We live in uncertain times. Things do not stop progressing and in many cases they accelerate during these times. However, there always seems to be a settling period.

The point in time when over inflated expectations come crashing to the ground and the humble and truly creative come crawling out from the ashes to help clean up the mess.

We seem to be embarking on this period now and while the smaller shops and larger agencies all compete for the same work it will be the real hybrids who come out victorious.

Kind of like Superman who is defeated by the very rock that formed his home planet, us ad folks sometimes become enchanted with our own poison.

We can sometimes becomes so caught up in nonsense and over hype that we fail to see the shaky ground that is under us.

This explains why there seems to be a renaissance of the old guard that helped start this industry coming back to reestablish its foundation. With a mixture of traditional creative know-how and a craftsman approach to introducing new technologies, without flooding the trend radar with over hyped copy-catting and pounding round pegs into square holes.

It is like a virtual Shaolin Temple of Flash masters who first saw this medium as a means to tell more engaging stories, people like Vas Sloutchevsky, Samuel Wan, Marc Stricklin, Chris Andrade, Gabriel Mulzer, Brian Limond, Pete Barr-Watson, Mickey Stretton, Josh Levine, Jessica Spiegel, Hoss Gifford, Manuel Tan, Amit Pitaru, Ross Mawdsley, Erik Natzke, Joshua Davis, Eric Jordan, Yugo Nakamura, Brendan Dawes, Adam Phillips, Billy Bussey, Anthony Eden, Aral Balkan, Moses Gunesch, Keith Peters, Colin Moock and many others who knew very early on that interactive multimedia was so much more than an over hyped and really technical mathematical and physics platform.

No one knew that it could very well be the demise of the traditional ad agency. But those early masters did see it as a new tool that if fully understood and integrated into the ad world, could change the landscape of communications forever.

So now we stand at a new frontier.

Everyone is stepping over the hill and we are collectively trying to figure out how to ascend the mountain that stands before us. Traditional is still holding the reigns but the grip is not as tight. Digital is frothing at the mouth waiting for the opportunity to take those reigns and lead the big brands to the top of that mountain.

We all struggle with various aspects of the business where the digital artisans and the number crunching traditionals all need to see eye to eye and communicate for the sake of the clients.

We need to have a moral and an ethical responsibility to step out from behind the curtain and to work side by side with our clients. This is accomplished by educating them in what we do and listening better to how they want us to help them communicate their messages without getting tangled up in the entrapping of trends and regurgitated ideas.

We need to address the economic crisis and figure out a way for everyone to come out successful and by doing this our young industry will thrive by us establishing a unified and glorious foundation.

Bowl of Cherries

The highly anticipated and extremely underwhelming Super Blow ads have aired and, at least in my circles, Monday morning is a time to review not the game but the performance of the ads.

The Super Bowl has become the stage where advertisers bring out the big guns and pay top dollar to impact their audiences' perceptions and purchasing habits.

Advertising is obviously the backbone of a capitalist society that thrives on consumption in order to keep the blood pumping through the veins of the public. This is something that we all know in the back of our minds and in accepting this lifestyle we combine our greatest yearly sporting event with an injection of marketing elixir that will ensure that our appetites for domain names and fast food are met throughout the course of the year.

Coke came out the big winner this year with a flurry of animation and visual candy featuring more natural and familiar subjects like grasshoppers, ants, ladybugs and bees trying to steal a sip of its bubbly, caffeinated goodness from a snoozing picnicker.

I felt that it was the most well balanced, socially conscience and refreshingly natural (in all its computer generated glory) spot during this years game.

In a pool of horny horses and horny domain name registrars, 80s cartoon movie revivals, the emergence of Hyundai as the economical choice of wheels and lots of beer and chips, there were two spots that really made me take notice.

The first would be the almost embarrassing pairing of the legendary Bob Dylan with the Black Eyed Peas front man Wil.I.Am. While the spot was well conceived and actually a nice juxtaposition of the "now and then", I felt that some of the comparisons were insulting to the greatness of those who have laid down the foundation for todays posers who eat from the fat that has been accumulated from the greatness of the pioneers of the past. It just didn't sit well with me, however I remember it on Monday morning so it must have been effective.

The second spot that stuck with me was a name I had not expected to see during the game. Pedigree ran a pretty well done spot for something called The Pedigree Adoption Guide, the VO says - "Maybe You Should Get A Dog?" - ...maybe you should get a dog, so you can buy more dog food? It was really the first time I had seen something like this during the big game. A dog food manufacturer telling people to get a dog... I will let that set in for a bit.

Coke remained consistent this year with some very cool spots that I thought resonated really well culturally. Avatar is by far my favorite spot from them this year. It is well written and spot on in terms of the convergence of digital into our culture. Its official folks! When Coke ads feature digital avatars and cute characters living harmoniously with humans, now you know that whatever it is you think is cool, is really cool.

In the second Coke spot named Heist we are witness to some more great computer generated life all pining to get a sip of some carbonated water, lots of sugar, phosphoric acid, fructose, corn syrup, caramel, color, natural flavors, and caffeine.

What else would "nature" want to drink?

In perpetual second place is Pepsi with some pretty lame and violent ads trying to sell men diet soda. Cheetos, SOBE, Gatorade and Frosted Flakes all rounded out the line up of the staples of the American diet.

Cars and tires made their perennial appearance this year with the usual disappointment expected from the diminishing auto industry.

My two favorite breakthrough spots had to be Alec Baldwin for Hulu which made watching TV on the web supremely better than watching TV on TV. The tag line? Hulu: An Evil Plot To Destroy The World, well done NBC!

The second had to be the Cash4Gold spot featuring none other than MC HAMMER and Ed McMahon pawning off all of their worldly possessions for some cash. The spot had that "dirty" effect rendering it cheap and lowly yet was obviously backed by some big bucks. I am not quite sure what to make of this spot, kinda sad that pawning is now big business.

I always try to put the entire line up into some sort of social perspective where I judge our great nation based upon what I see in these Super Bowl commercials.

This year it was obvious that the economy has taken a real hit. Jobs and food seemed to be the stress. What I didn't see was a focus on the new administration, looking towards the future, a chin up and a chest out attitude. I would have liked to have seen more of that kind of messaging to both ride and enhance the momentum of the recent elections and changing of the guard.

I think that the opportunity was lost and hopefully next years batch will be more optimistic and hopeful.

Le futur de la vidéo sur le Web est ici

Absolute genius! This is one of the very first sites that I have seen a really seamless and harmonious convergence of video and internet come together as one.

Finally a video website being treated as a website and not some awkward production.

Video and the web kind of had this weird junior high school awkwardness that made it endearing but held back how sexy the two can be.

The honeymoon is over and these two mediums have grown as one.

This is one of the few sites I have seen in a while that is truly a foreshadowing towards the future of productions on the web.

It feels right, its comfortable and flows so well.

Hats off to Emakina.

Originally saw this link on TheFWA.com

Check out the site here ---> click!

Completely Loaded

We live in the age of self promotion and personal branding. Everyone and everything is a brand, the brand you, the brand us, the brand them.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter have us scrambling each and every day to come up with a witty twit or a twitty wit or some contrived status update message pertaining to our current condition. We are at a new social impasse.

Our community here in Interactiveland is no different.

We are the specialists, we created this stuff. However now that everyone is a marketing expert, our jobs should be to take advertising off of the socioeconomic plane and blast it off into the astronomic so that we at least have some sort of gap between creative storytelling and selfless promotion.

Each one of us is a concentrated, jam packed, chock full o promotion.

We now live in the Digital Advertising Age. An age where our President is a web celebrity who won the election online. Our brands have all become mini celebrities creeping and crawling all over the internet. Everyday people have become micro-celebrities, choosing to display their lives, thoughts, ideas and neurosis online for all to see.

I am not sure if I was kinda loaded or perhaps just PRETTYLOADED when I first saw this new "curated" site by Big Spaceship.

Its a web site featuring pre-loaders, yep that's right, those annoying little buggers who sit there and remind you that you are either on a really slow connection or the load sequence on the site wasn't programmed properly. A little device conjured up to distract us from the fact that our instant gratification isn't being met as instantly as we like.

Right now it is simply a showcase of SODA members Big Space, Firstborn, Odopod and AgencyNet but I am sure they will let others play too.

I am not sure what I make of this contrived attempt at coolness through recognition of a small nuance that seems to not have gained its proper place in the 15 minute slot we call fame.

The preloader is sort of like the SMPTE color bars on a TV.

Its purpose is to serve as a waiting pattern while something else is happening in the back. Sure they can be cute, adorable, fun, interactive and they serve a very important role, however some things need to remain unsung, a hero in the dark.

Self promotion is a great thing. Trust me I am guilty of it each and every day.

Especially in the age where it is as important as breathing.

But in this case I would rather these four shops created those funny puppet characters that said those funny things and danced around the screen like they did when they were playing ping pong and foosball against one another.

I loathe watching preloaders when I come to a site and the thought of a site dedicated entirely to those nasty little buggers makes me cringe.

Good try Big Curator.

Maybe the next exhibition can be a tribute to the Form Field or a retrospective of the Send Button.

Busted

It takes a single moment.

A single incident.

A minuscule fraction of time to change a whole industry and turn it on its side.

The buzz has been rampant about the economy and the digital shift, the fact that agencies may or may not survive the transition.

All kinds of discussions about who is taking over the reigns of the ad world and so on and so fourth.

The chatter has finally come to a head and a major agency has been busted for over billing on digital work.

Leo Burnett in Chicago has just been ordered to repay the Army (of all clients) 15.5 million dollars.

Ad Age writes.

"Burnett was treating the work of its own internet unit as if it was performed by a third-party contractor, as well as inflating the costs of subcontractors it worked with, in order to increase its profits."


Tax payer money! In a failing economy and the client is the U.S. Army, can it get any worse?

Finally the veil has been lifted.

I can't even imagine how often this goes on all over the place. Clients are getting reamed for millions of dollars and subcontractors never see a quarter of that money.

For years traditional agencies have been paying digital shops fractions of what their clients expect them to spend on their projects.

Leo Burnett just took a really hard fall and the domino effect may ensue. We all kind of saw this coming but no one was sure when it would hit and how it would start but I think it has started.

It will be very interesting to see what kind of ripple effect this has on the industry and if clients will start to come directly to the digital shops for fairly priced work.

Home of The Brave

I started this new blog site so that I would be able to speak directly to a very special group of people.

The Interactive Producer is what I consider a new breed of media producer.

A hybrid of many talents.

Today's Interactive Producer is a maniacal cross between between Don Draper, Malcolm Gladwell, David Ogilvy, Sigmund Freud, Douglas Merrill, Adam Sandler and Mel Brooks.

In the film industry the producer is usually an executive of the studio often overseeing the financial, administrative and creative aspects of the production, though not technical aspects.

The role of Producer in the interactive industry is a true convergence of the creative and technical worlds, just like the industry itself is a convergence of so many different medias.

Many people confuse the role of Project Manager with Producer.

I will set the record straight right now, Producers are NOT project managers.

So what is an Interactive Producer?

The producer is the spark, he or she initiates, co-ordinates, supervises and manages schedules, budgets, hiring talent and overseeing deployment and PR. The producer is involved in all phases of the interactive process from idea, to design to development and on to completion of a project.

Being a Interactive Producer requires so much more understanding of so many different things.

The industry as a whole has witnessed the accelerated evolution of its talent. In less than ten years the one dimensional designer who lived in Photoshop now is required to have skills in Flash, 3D applications, some coding and video skills as well.

Legendary creative directors now wake up in a cold sweat just knowing that kids are coming out of school with a mastery of a number of disciplines that they themselves would never be able to catch up to.

The torch is definitely being passed in all realms of our industry.

The role of Interactive Producer has taken on its own evolution. It is being a business development specialist, a project manager, a team leader, clergy, friend, advocate, evangelist and mentor.

The voice of reason within the chaotic tumultuous and emotional process of hyper-creativity.

Someone who can weather the storm of a highly creative, super technical, below budgeted, ridiculously dead-lined, fast paced, ever changing, always evolving, super charged, late night... OK, I need not go on because if you are one of these people you already know what the hell I am talking about.

So on that note I will say welcome and thanks for joining me in this new endeavor, I hope to be a good resource and sounding board for our kind. I promise to keep each post relevant and insightful and I hope to make this blog as meaningful and insightful as I possibly can.

Check it out here <---

Digital Manifesto 2009

There is a custom that defies tradition, location, culture or religion.

It binds us as intelligent beings.

A custom that is not only a unifying thread but one that seems to be deeply ingrained in each and every one of us.

A custom that is totally instinctual, it permeates our character like the very cells that make up our physical bodies. Like migrant birds we naturally think of change every time our calendars reset.

This custom is a component of our primitive aptitude for survival and has been refined over many generations as our society has become more exacting and complex.

It is an impulse, a predisposed tendency that starts to ferment around the holiday season and it finally reaches its anaerobic conversion by New Years.

No matter what calendar you follow, be it the simplest of lunar positions or the most complex distinct interlocking Mayan calendric systems, you still have a start and an end to every year.

As we all take a huge collective deep breath and start our decline out of what seemed like a very long and tumultuous 2008 and head into the incline of what is a hopeful 2009 we should all tap into this custom and think about how we can all make the new year one of positive change.

The economy has always been a great catalyst for change. From the times of the famines of the bible to the Great Depression, the economy has always been a reliable agent of change regardless of how it swings.

In 2008 we were stung with some harsh realities about our perceived notions of social, political, environmental and economic sustainability and their ability to weather even the most bizarre of adversities.

It was the year that the threshold had finally given in, the world was thrown into economic uncertainty.

Politics and economics were the reality show of the year and history was made while the world watched it unfold, online.

One by one the largest financial institutions fell, the auto industry crashed and the curtain was called on the political stage. The rich were getting bailed out by the poor and the playing field was once again leveled for emerging ideas to take root.

Every single move was documented on the web by literally thousands of websites following every angle of the climate changes that took place in 2008.

In 2008 the combination of the environment, politics and the economy all played a huge role in how the web is now perceived and ultimately was more embraced as the preeminent platform in today's social and business worlds.

History is a rerun and you learn something new every time you watch.

The Great Depression was a time that can offer us some unique insight into the power of brand advertising during times of economic crisis. It represents the plowing of the field where the soil is turned for new seeds to grow.

Our own recent history has proven that during times of economic uncertainty, brands that maintain creativity and innovation in advertising during these hard times actually help to maintain the morale of the nation and come out even stronger on the upswing due to "hangin in there" and sticking with their consumers through good times and bad.

What I find personally fascinating is that the very nature of this kind of dedicated and innovative advertising during the Great Depression actually accelerated the growth of radio broadcasting and print media, today we are seeing a similar effect where the web has now been thrust into the spotlight and is the new field of advertising innovation.

The impact of the economy on our industry is more relevant than ever and we are seeing the absolute accelerated shift of both advertising and entertainment making their primary homes online.

Its difficult for me to look at things in such a negative light when so much good is coming out of these hard times. There is a concept in mysticism where the current good must be destroyed in order for a better new good to emerge.

2009 is going to be the year of that emergence.

So for 2009 my own personal business resolutions are to keep evangelizing our wonderful medium, to help educate and inform our clients as to how to best understand and use the medium to its fullest potential.

To help brands understand the value of a smaller agency that will think digitally and provide more bang for the already tight buck. To continue to help to bring innovative ideas and to push the limits of the web.

To help build better relationships and help to establish our industry as a cohesive unit and a powerful social voice that is more intelligent, responsive and community driven.

To be part of something big and help contribute to that on my own small level.

My main resolution for 2009 is to really embrace and appreciate the times I live in and acknowledge the fact that I am lucky to be a contributor to an industry that is emerging as the global social media platform.

In the words of my favorite writer Henry Miller,

“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”

Happy New Year!

Happy Birthday Noble Warriors

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BARBARIAN GROUP!

You guys are the leaders of the pack and a true example of success. Our industry is so convoluted in terms of proper definition and roles but you guys embody what this industry is all about.

The perfect hybrid between ad agency and digital shop, creative genius and technological minds, social visionaries and digital dynamos!

TBG is all of that and then some.

TBG has redefined what advertising is all about. You have helped reshape communications for the new digital age and has helped all of us achieve what we all are so passionate about.

A Barbarian is a pejorative term for an uncivilized person, either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage.

In idiomatic or figurative usage, a "barbarian" may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person.

Take all of those attributes and focus them towards the absolute positive and passion for everything digital and what your left with is the ideal "noble savage" for the industry.

What better way to celebrate than to be named Creativity's Digital Company of The Year!

THANKS BARBARIANS!

True Love

Digital production shops Big Spaceship and Firstborn unveiled some healthy competitive spirit today with a very funny takeover of the Big Spaceship site by Firstborn.

The two shops engaged in some foosball, basketball and ping pong to celebrate the holiday cheer that is permeating the air.

Putting design and development prowess aside they competed in some physical competition that gave Firstborn the bragging rights to the phrase "We Sank The Ship".

The result is a rather hilarious depiction of the top dawgs at Big Spaceship in caricature shooting out some comic lines that I thought was pretty funny.

Its nice to see some inter-industry camaraderie amongst competing shops to liven things up a bit. Healthy competition creates a good feeling all around.

Some Change

Change is the moniker of our generation. We no longer classify our times with the single letter X or Y.

We have grown past the one dimensional descriptions that limits us to a single marketing demographic.

We are now about change. Change is good. Change is a modification, an adjustment and in some cases even a revolution.

Today, one of the the oldest ad agencies still lingering, a throwback to the days of scotch and cigarettes, JWT (founded in 1864), has made an announcement.

Typically when ad agencies make an announcement its heard "round the world" because ad agencies are designed to be the loudest voice in the room.

Its what they do, they advertise. So when a directorship position is announced, especially one that oversees a world wide operation, its pretty big news.

These announcements are typically saved for creative directors or the traditional roles that have made up ad agencies since that founding year of 1864.

However today marks a notch in the belt of a new age. It signifies the recognition of the tectonic shift that has been taking place in the ad industry over the last few years and it has also signified the rapid change that is taking place everywhere.

The Digital Revolution.

Joe Mandese over at Online Media Daily writes:

"With the pomp and circumstance that it might have announced a new creative director in days of old, one of Madison Avenue's best known full-service ad agencies, WPP Group's JWT, this morning announced that David Eastman has been named its worldwide digital director, responsible for the strategic oversight and management of digital advertising campaigns within the agency, and all its subsidiary companies. "

This paragraph so succinctly states that what "was", now isn't, and what "is", is.

The words World Wide Digital Director reads like music to my ears.

Its a recognition that digital has fully arrived and is here to stay.

That the digital revolution has overcome the traditional resistance and assisted by a faltering economy and the rapid advancement of technology, is becoming the main cog in the advertising and entertainment machine.

Upon anointing this new royal appointment, Sir Martin was quoted, saying:

"I think there is a little bit of a misunderstanding over our digital businesses," Sorrell told analysts, investors and journalists attending UBS' Media Week conference in New York this week. He said that digital marketing services now account for about $2.8 billion of WPP's revenues, or about "23% of group revenues," and said that WPP currently is about "three times the size" of its next closest agency competitor - Publicis - in terms of "digital prowess."

This is going to really change the landscape in terms of who will be left holding the reigns.

Bravo Sir Martin, Bravo!

Sign of the Times

This new post is a response to a recent New York Times article penned by Virginia Heffernan describing why traditional media (content) must evolve along with new forms of digital expression and technologies.

In her aptly titled piece, Content and Its Discontents, Virginia delves into the subject of how traditional content and the new media landscape are quite different and how it is the old that must now change for the new.

You can read the article here <--

My response is as follows:

The medium in and of itself is a new frontier in both expression and a more complex means of communication. Traditional “storytellers” have been shoving their round pegs into our square holes for ten years now and have completely missed the point of how powerful the new media landscape truly is.

Traditional agencies have been blindfolding their clients into believing that they can translate their brands online and have been grossly misguiding them into a realm entirely unknown by the agency and employing professionals who have been trained to simply copy whatever the latest template is.

This is not entirely the fault of the agencies themselves rather the brutal reality of immediate transition to a new medium that has quickly emerged due to the speed of technology, the veraciousness of the web and a struggling economy looking for more bang for its advertising and entertainment buck.

Over the past ten years, smaller digital agencies (sometimes referred to as vendors) have been carrying the workload in developing these new expressions for a fraction of the cost that the clients are paying their traditional agencies for. These smaller digital shops have been the primary source for the growth of this medium in both design and development and have been the ones to set the bar for standards of excellence.

The online experience is a much more concentrated and intimate one that, if executed properly, will not only completely immerse the end user with the content but deliver to them a message that is so much more powerful than any we have known in the past.

Snippets have replaced pages, animation has surpassed the static image and video accompanying text has become the norm in storytelling. The traditional static and its partner in crime, the analog, ways of story telling and brand building of the past are now lingering like a defunct eon waiting for its evolutionary replacement.

Traditional content simply doesn’t fit the digital mold and its forceful application only makes it even more clumsy and undecipherable.

Both the advertising and entertainment industries need to realize that a new breed of creative professionals who are both equally creative and technologically savvy are needed to properly codify their messages in a way that live harmoniously within the pixelated world we now live in.

The smaller screen calls for more intelligent and visceral executions of the tale being told. Rebroadcasting traditional content online is a futile attempt to monetize on a medium that screams for original content created specifically for its voice.

We need to all take a collective step forward and hand the baton over to those professionals who have been reared online, we are no longer vendors, computer geeks or web designers.

We are artisans who have trained ourselves to tell more compelling stores.

We are craftsmen who have been imbued with the ability to live in a world where multiple forms of media converge and are retold as a single and powerful digital voice that reverberates through to billions of small screens all over the world.

We transcend the demographics and local markets, we think globally, we are both localized and global at the same time. We think in more concentrated one by one pixels that are in tune with physics and precision all driven by exacting and in many cases user generated data that is endless.

We are NOT nephews or babysitters, we are NOT hermits and introverts. We are the new face of both entertainment, advertising, journalism and art.

We are both the voice and the originators of these new ideas, we think in pixels, in technology and in innovation, our ideas expand themselves across an almost infinite network and remain strong enough to ring true in the hearts of people in the most sacred and intimate corners of their existences.

Our audiences choose us, we don’t force ourselves onto our audiences like the finite selection of channels that all seem to be saying the same thing. We are unique in every way and our uniqueness forces us to find more and more ways to remain that way day in and day out.

Everything can be translated into this new language called digital, you just need the right people to do it.

Perennial Analysis

Took some time to pen a year end roundup on one of my Favourite sites, The FWA.

2008 was a great year and some amazing work was done.

Enjoy this review and get inspired for what looks like a powerful 2009.

Click Here To Read <---

Fowl Play

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year thanksgiving is riding the momentum of the nation, a new president, a teetering economy, a cultural shift and a world at war.

Us Webicrats sometimes lose site of what is going on "out there" because we are so busy "in here" designing, developing, programming, strategizing, and telling stories.

We sometimes get competitive, harbor anger amongst one another over accounts, clients, projects, work, whatever...

We are very fortunate and should be thankful that aside from the crazy deadlines, budgets, long nights, fickle clients and creative challenges we do what we love and live in relative peace and comfort, we are surrounded by toys, computers, and "kids" like ourselves who get to sell things by having fun.

There are now 125 dead, 327 wounded in attacks in India.

Lets all be thankful for everything we have and do each and every day.

Thanksgiving is a great way to head into the end of the year on a positive note so that the new year begins with a cheerful outlook and brotherly love amongst all human beings.

We should all reflect on everything we are thankful for, and internalize that thankfulness so that we may reflect it upon others around us.

Have a happy and a meaningful Thanksgiving holiday and may this season of change be for the good.

FWA SOTD

ThoughtPile won today's FWA award!!!

There is also an article published on The FWA to accompany the achievement.

In addition to ThoughtPile we also partnered with Mono to create this absolutely cool product site for the new Embody by Herman Miller.

Check it out here: Embody Micro Site

Both these two sites represent a kind of reconnaissance in interactive design. Designed by Vas Sloutchevsky, both employ 3D and all of the latest technologies yet the design is completely classic, I really enjoy the lack of sizzle and corporate brand bling that usually bloats a good idea.

Congratulations to the entire Mono and Freedom + Partners teams for a job well done.

Elfed Myself

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

My Hero

The buzz in the industry this year has been swirling around the concept of story telling.

In an "ad age" where the old guard is passing the torch to the new, where advances in digital media have not only propelled the industry into the future but has also set it on a unchartered path, where the web has become the central storytelling hub for a many industries.

Take a breath, OK, continue...

Michael Eisner was quoted, saying “YouTube is to the Internet what a nickelodeon is to the movies. It’s the preliminary installment of what is to come,”

So what is to come Michael? his response is “Great, creative storytelling.”

- Michael Eisner says to AdAge.

Then in the famous interview heard around the ad world, Lee Clow was quoted on this topic as well:

“Online advertising is still semi-nowhere. It’s very intrusive and annoying and kind of the worst of our business in terms of pop-up and flash, and jump up and down”….”The ability to use the Internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The Internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the Internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter.”

Story telling is what is going to save the web from its intrusive and annoying toddler stages. It will be the maturity that the web will eventually grow into and will become a giant field overgrown with thick, lush, dew-laden, story telling in the most creative, technologically advanced, and impressive ways we have ever seen.

Right now we are NOT there yet.

That nagging top header, that annoying left nav and that over bloated center table doesn't seem to want to die just yet. The hyperlink and the rollover are still lingering in our interfaces and we are still tripping over stingy footers.

However! Do not despair!

Today's FWA SOTD award went to Cookie a shop from Poland who in my opinion showed us one way to tell a story online.

The website is called Day To Day Hero and its super!

Check it out here: Day To Day Hero

Lukasz Twardowski and team Cookie did a superb job showing us how fun telling a story online can be.

Definitely check out this site.

Crossed Thoughts

I monitor the web like a freak.

I have trained myself to hone in on the latest and greatest sites out there so I can be a better evangelist for our industry.

I try to examine every detail of any site worthy of examining so that I can better inform our clients as to what will succeed and what will fail.

Many times I see two sites that launch around the same time, designed and developed by two completely different shops, and they have such stark similarities in both their concept and design, function and genre that I often wonder if information leaked into each one of the agencies as to what the other is doing.

I know I know, its called a trend, but what happened to me today finally enlightened me to how this occurs.

Freedom + Partners recently put out a site for Herman Miller called ThoughtPile. It is a really neat site that is a data visualization of various thoughts that people have about various topics concerning the world and how to make it better.

Firstborn Multimedia recently put out a site for AT&T called Speak In Thumbs. It is a really neat site that is a data visualization of various thoughts that people express using keyboard shortcuts on their Samsung Propel Smart Phone.

Now I know for a fact that none of us speak, yes I did once work at Firstborn, however there has been no sharing of creative, ideas, nothing, yet these two sites are almost identical if you break them down.

So now I finally get to be in the eye of the storm! I get to see how this happens.

Lets examine...



ThoughtPile starts off with a standard text intro that explains the site which is pretty standard, nothing so glaring about that. But then when we go into the site we start to see the similarities.

ThoughtPile has a question of the week at the top left hand corner of the page, a circle in the middle displaying the thoughts and then an orange plus sign on the right hand side that is used to add new thoughts.




Speak In Thumbs has a text instruction on top left hand corner of the page, a circle in the middle displaying the expressions and then an orange plus sign on the right hand side that is used to add new thoughts.

So I ask myself, how? Are trends that powerful that they permeate the industry by filling the heads of creative directors, designers, coders and agency partners?

The answer must be that we all think alike, we must all have a unified intuition that binds us as web professionals.

I can understand how popular trends force designs to look alike and dictate how images and video are treated but to wire frame two totally separate sites to be so similar is mind boggling.

Well, both are great sites by two great teams, excellent executions that speak volumes about both studios.

I am glad that I was finally able to be involved in this anomaly that had been confusing me for so long.

Its interesting to see that there is some sort of greater connection between digital agencies that cause sites to sometimes mimic one another.

Obama.com

The celebration from this weeks election results are still reverberating throughout the city (I live in NYC) and cities all over the world. People are suddenly alive with chatter, intelligent, emotional, and critical chatter about the new President elect Barack Obama.

Obama means so many different things to so many different people.

Obama is a candidate that truly embodies the nation he is serving. Just look around at the faces, listen to people speak, gauge the atmosphere around yourself and you will see why Obama was the obvious choice for President.

We live in very uncertain times and in many ways Obama is a very uncertain choice for President.

A black man is now President of a very young nation that very early on in its history was a bastion of slavery and racial intolerance, that sometimes still lingers in many parts of the country.

As a nation we elected a man who has little high office experience, often preaches over inflated promises and is a mixture of races that leaves him sitting just outside both black and white lines. A man who is full of potential and who instills the desire in a nation that wants to help him realize that potential.

As a nation we have decided to break loose the grips of conventional wisdom and let a man who is more about the future than a patriot of the past. A man who is looking forward, not back, to an America that realizes its true place amongst nations.

His campaign has cured this nation of its apathy and has re-injected a new interest in how we are perceived amongst other nations. The reality of his very being is proof enough that we are a nation in transition.

Obama is a man who represents the hope in all of us.

He is the culmination of everything we want from a nation that promised us all a dream.

Obama is no super hero. He is all of us, his mixture goes beyond race, his honesty and courage is rooted in the desire for those very attributes in all of us. His determination and his rise to success from the very depths of community service is what draws us to him so closely.

We have become an empty nation and an empty people.

Our spending habits, pop culture and banking and education systems have all deteriorated due to neglect and over consumption. We are losing our houses, our jobs and our security into old age.

The nations to the east and to the south are like hungry wolves waiting for the right moment for us to weaken from the fat that we consume on a daily basis. We are fat from every aspect of our lives. Fat from gas, from money, from food and from consumption.

The past eight years have been spent dealing with the realization that we have lost our luster. Our respect and our prominence has worn off and we are now tangled in a ball of critical issues facing our country. We were left licking our wounds and trying to figure out how to clean messes rather than how to prosper.

Obama may not be the cure but he is a remedy that will lead us to a cure.

His desire for truth and for facing the issues head on through constant communication and embracing the nation wholly.

This is not a political article, and what I am about to write is not entirely political in nature.

What amazed me the most about this campaign was Obama's ability to recognize, understand and embrace the web as a tool for communication. He not only validated the publics desire for change but he also validated the power of the Internet as a means to help bring about that change.

Obama understood the the Internet was his bull horn, it amplified his voice, his persona and his soul to the furthest reaches of the planet.

From Facebook to YouTube from Google to Yahoo, CNN and ESPN. News clips, SNL and MySpace. Widgets, RSS feeds, banners and blogs.

The digital frontier was Obama's campaign trail conquered!

We no longer recognize those purple mountains majesty and from sea to shining sea is a vague term to the youth of today

Emails, websites, Sarah Silverman viral video-sites, iPhone apps and digital downloads.

Obama knew that he would be heard the loudest through the Internet and through technology that is embraced by all.

3 minutes before Obama emerged to give his historic acceptance speech in Chicago, every one of his supporters got a personal email thanking them for everything they have done to support his landslide win.

From the very beginning of this campaign there was a very futuristic feel to how Obama was speaking to the public. It was llike nothing else we have ever witnessed.

The Internet has changed the way we do lots of things in our lives and now it has changed the way elections are won. It is the new stage for politics and the most powerful communication tool known to mankind.

What impressed me was Obama's familiarity for the medium. His campaign trusted and executed flawlessly on every technology, trend, application and information platform. From design to function and beyond.

You think your popular because you have 998 friends on Facebook?

Well Obama has 2,712,479 and counting.

Names and faces of real people, real supporters, real users who feel a connection closer than any connection to any other past President. These are people who can speak up and feel that they are being heard, people with hopes and dreams and a people who wants to know that those hopes are not going unnoticed.

Democrat is now a brand.

I am a Mac = Democrat

I am a PC = Republican

Its amazing how the threads of pop culture and society mimic one another so subtly yet so obviously when put side by side.

We are obviously a nation divided by a checkered past and an unknown future.

What was is now and what is now is almost gone.

The speed of communication has accelerated us as a planet and is now forcing us to go beyond and transcend, to evolve.

Obama is the face of that evolution.

He is global, he is both sides of the coin.

His lack of experience is a strength because there is less for him to undo and more for him to grow into.

His leadership will succeed based on how committed he is to keep that light burning so that we as a people can navigate through these dark times.

His tenacity is what we will need to push through these next eight years. Hopefully he surrounds himself with the right people so he can focus on keeping that smile burning across his face. That smile that smiles for all of us.

His race, his facade, is simply that of a people who have always struggled for progress. His face is the color of adversity and overcoming it.

We all now struggle for progress, we all need redemption from our mistakes and now we all move forward together as one nation to climb out of this hole we have found ourselves buried in.

Obama is the first President in the new age.

The continents of the Earth have gathered as one Pangea once again, as it had started millions of years ago. The Internet has bridged the great oceans and has created dialog, both good and bad amongst the people of the world.

Obama is the first President of the first generation of an evolution.

The Internet Age.

As the community who designs and develops for this great voice to be projected to the entire planet, we should all be proud that the medium we love is what made a difference in the world.

UPDATE:

Today, November 17th, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.

The address will be taped at the transition office in Chicago today.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night.

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Sudden Impact

The web offers the ad industry tons of potential in terms of options to market a brand online.

So much so that it can get confusing or even impossible to nail down which methods will work for which brand.

Brands require experts who monitor those trends on the internet and who understand what is working at any given time in specific areas of the web. Trends change daily based on new technologies and more interactive ways to tell a story.

The experts are the ones creating the new technologies and innovations on the web as a means to stay competitive.

They are the digital agencies.

As ad agencies get more proficient at identifying and in some ways codifying these various techniques we are starting to see more and more interesting websites being launched. But those sites are not necessarily successful.

It is often the case where ideas and the technologies don't play nicely together.

Today these new techniques come and go almost daily and the rule book changes with every new site launched. This is confusing to agencies and by the time they think they get it, they don't.

If you take a look at a cross section of the more successful or popular sites that have been launched recently you will notice that most of them lack one important component, and a trend that is becoming more and more popular today, that is critical for a successful online campaign.

I will get to what that is later in this post.

Imagine you come up with an idea, and you sell it through to your client but in the back of your mind there is nothing that says that the idea will surely work. Its a gamble, like anything in life, you just have no real facts to say that something will be a hit.

You familiarize yourself will all the latest trends and work with the best digital agencies out there to make sure your site will be prefect for launch.

The copy is airtight, assets are beautifully created and the site is the definition of digital harmony.

The ad buys are in place, banners are everywhere, even a TV spot driving traffic to the site.

Your psyched, your client is psyched, everyone involved is feeling great and you've already drafted your awards acceptance speech.

The day has come, the site goes live.

Then...

...nothing.

What I am getting at here is that culturally traditional ad agencies are just simply out of sync with what the public wants, expects and needs from the web.

The web insists that those who are creating media for it stay much more abreast to what its capabilities are and unlike the past new technologies are adopted much quicker on the web than the more static traditional platforms ever had available to them.

Over the last ten years consumers have been re-trained to think faster, react immediately and receive their reward instantly.

Apple's iTunes is a great example of that. Who would have thought that Apple would emerge as the top seller of entertainment media like music and movies and now mobile applications.

We are the instant gratification generation.

We click we get.

So the question that weighs heavily on my mind is, why would an ad agency that specializes in traditional marketing endeavor to strategize a web campaign for their clients when their staff is not geared for this kind of work and why would brands pay them millions to do work they are not specialized to do?

One of this year's biggest stories was the outburst by Big Spaceship owner Michael Lebowitz. He spoke up regarding his shops credit snub at Cannes.

The issue was credit, and the topic was definitely newsworthy, but what also happened was that it helped usher in the emergence of the digital agency.

It was a new voice speaking up and saying HEY WE EXIST!

Brands typically rely on their AOR to strategize a marketing campaign that they expect to be evenly distributed across various media platforms based on where they will get the best consumer response.

Now that the web has become one of the, if not the, most popular places to advertise we are seeing ad agencies starting to struggle with how they are executing more traditional ideas on the web.

There is no doubt that traditional ad agencies are tremendously talented at coming up with stories to tell based on brands and that ideas are in no shortage but taking those ideas and translating them online poses a new challenge to them.

I do not believe that the agencies were able to foresee the speed at which the industry would shift, the veracious impact with which digital would gain prominence as well as the rate of expansion of the web.

Agencies were simply to big and unable to see how quickly the web would become mainstreamed and how the new media marketplace would be completely redefined.

Most of the larger traditional agencies have not adjusted to the shift.

Only a few agencies have changed culturally. The agencies that have sprouted up during the dot com years were lucky enough to have built digital capabilities into their core services. Older agencies are now trying to simply acquire it.

Brands expect their agency to be able to execute across all media and inherently understand the nature of that media and how to integrate with it.

Smaller digital agencies had already bought into the new culture in the mid 90s, they have been doing this for over ten years now and over those ten years have accepted their roles as second fiddle to the larger agencies but at the same time waiting patiently, and learning from the mistakes that agencies made, for their time to come.

Digital agencies live and breathe and experiment with new media and digital storytelling in ways that traditional ad agencies cant. Digital agencies are naturally more curious about the medium because they created that medium and are always trying to improve it.

Digital shops have been learning from the mistakes made at larger agencies, smaller digital shops have identified that in order to grab the reigns they must know how to own and then integrate online media across a larger media marketplace and are doing so quite nicely.

As brands now shift their dollars towards the web the looming question is who should be getting the big bucks?

Digital shops have been doing work with agencies for some time now and like any close relationship each of the participants have rubbed off on one another.

Digital shops had to learn how to communicate with agencies by adopting a lot of the traditional processes that agencies have had in place for a 100 some odd years now and large agencies have had to step up their techno-jargon in order to jive with the hip smaller digital shops.

The result is that digital SHOPS have now become digital AGENCIES.

Growth is critical in any industry and evolution is unavoidable.

Now that media technologists and ad folks have intermingled and digital shops have realized that they too can come up with creative and innovative ways to market a brand, especially online, there seems to be an inherent shift in where brands need to be turning to drive their next campaign.

Any smart brand manager should realize that going directly to a digital agency will not only help save them money, because digital agencies tend to be much smaller and more nimble, but that they will be putting their money behind the people who are not only following the trends but actually creating those trends.

With limited budgets digital agencies can only go so far.

Digital projects suffer because the pie is being eaten by way too many people. By the time the people who are actually doing the project get the brief most of the dollars have been eaten up by the layers of bureaucracy at the AOR.

But if the budgets for digital campaigns were to be put directly in the hands of the digital agencies it would help to create not only more innovative executions but also help to finance the emergence of new technologies on the web and more exciting stories being told.

I mentioned earlier in this post that there is a missing component that traditional ad agencies lack.

That component is real time media tracking that is both accurate in terms of understanding audiences and identifying what user behavior patterns are successful and acting quickly on those findings.

Digital shops not only understand the inner workings of new media, they created this media, and intuitively understand what ideas will work online and which ones will fail.

Imagine a small digital shop who has been working every major traditional agency for ten years, learning from every project. Learning how each one of them communicates, comes up with ideas and tackles problems. Then they go ahead and apply that to their vast digital knowledge and then wrap that up with killer creative. The perfect model for the new agency trained by the old guard.

The digital shops were and continue to witness and learn from every success and mistake made by a cross section of large agencies.

Its like spending ten years in grad school being taught by the best professors.

Now that our country is facing financial introspection and money needs to be spent wisely, brands should reconsider where they distribute their ad dollars.

Digital shops are now more than capable of quarterbacking a campaign.

Ideas born from within the digital culture will have a better chance of surviving the fast pace of the web and in turn will give brands more bang for their buck. They will offer brands solutions that will enable the campaign to shift based on what users want and expect at various points of the campaign life.

One such execution, in my opinion, was launched this year for NBC Universal by digital shop Freedom + Partners. It is a very unique website created for the show The Starter Wife.

The site can be seen here: http://www.tswlife.com

What set this site apart from other sites I have seen this year is that it is loaded with potential for what the new face of the web will look like once more digital shops starting leading campaigns online.

With time and budget limitations, Freedom + Partners was able to execute a site that was a true convergence of media platforms. From book to mini series to weekly episodes to website every part of this property lives on a separate and appropriate media platform making it a truly diverse brand that speaks to a multitude of audiences.

NBC Universal was brave enough to take a chance on a digital agency who understood how to get immediate feedback from its audience. In partnering with Freedom + Partners, NBC Universal saw the potential for giving users new content immediately following an episode of the show and using that information to provide them with a better overall brand experience every time they came back to the site.

The site is now an evolving media platform that will give NBC the ability to see what their audiences want and how they react to what they are already giving them.

There is no exact science for success on the web, however putting your projects in the hands of those who are most intimate with it is one step towards success.

Go Digital!