An Impassioned Plea

My blog is typically reserved for the outré geeky, divinely techie, obnoxiously smart advertising insight and digital deliciousness but today a different passion overcame me and I needed to wax about a topic that is very close to my heart.

Basketball.

My love of the game started at a tender age, from sun up to sun down there was only one place I could be found, either warming up on the half courts or running full on the main court. When not playing I was in front of my television screen watching my beloved Knicks playing every game like it was game 7 of the Finals.

I was born in Brooklyn, a basketball town to two huge basketball fans. Both my parents imbued in me the torturous agony of being a Knicks fan. I idolized individual players like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic and Reggie Miller but was taught to save my utmost affection for our hometown Knicks.

Year after year I watched Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, Doc Rivers, Xavier McDaniel, Greg Anthony, Larry Johnson, Gerald Wilkins, Mark Jackson, Kenny Walker and an assemblage of other players constantly fall short to the superstars of the league.

As if adolescence wasn't tough enough.

I will never forget that summer afternoon watching the Knicks and the Pacers clash it out when suddenly O.J. was absconding in the passenger seat of a white Bronco.

My mother immediately stood up and threw her empty cup onto the living floor in complete outrage and disgust, she was right in the middle of a tirade against Reggie Miller as she was going into detail about how Reggie Miller's family must have been Rhodesian and that Rhodesia was now known as The Republic of Zimbabwe and it was because of his ancestry that Reggie had acquired his lanky frame and lighting speed.

Her outrage wasn't at the murderous villain who was fleeing from capture along a Los Angeles highway, it was that our beloved Knicks had been interrupted right in the middle of a classic battle with one of our arch enemies the Indiana Pacers.

Neighbors came down, people came out of their apartments, the phone started ringing and there was suddenly an uproar, the entire neighborhood was in distress and it had nothing to do with O.J. as a matter of fact no one could care less, it was all because we were missing the game.

No other city in the world focuses its energy on its hometown team more than Knicks fans.

Imagine how abominable their play has been over the past decade, how gruesome the situation has become. We were raped and pillaged by a man who decimated our team both physically and financially and if your a New Yorker, spiritually.

We have become reduced to a side show that can barely beat the Maccabi Tel Aviv team that comes to play annually.

Sure we have the Yankees who are a pristine dynasty. They have brought us some comfort but the real die hard New Yorker knows deep in their hearts that until the Knicks win we cannot rest.

We now have a chance to sign a legitimate cynosure, the real deal, a certified kosher superstar! Someone who would soak up the lights, become the toast of the town and give us fans a reason to cheer again.

The Garden would once again become the Supreme Mecca of basketball and the great people of New York would once again ascend 34th street with pride night after night to catch a glimpse of the hero we so desperately pine for.

That hero is a young man who was destined to play in this city. He payed his dues to his home town, he gave them a taste of what it is like to win but was unable to bring them a title because of a slew of reasons that all boil down to one. This basketball king was meant to claim his crown on the largest basketball stage in the world.

Winning a title in Cleveland would have been like winning the Battle of Brandy Station as opposed to winning a title in NYC, akin to winning the Battle of Gettysburg. What Lebron doesn't understand is that destiny is playing its hand and it isn't ready to show.

How can one man so naturally gifted and so destined for basketball greatness settle for bringing a title to the Rust Belt? A city whose national fame is based on the fact that it was ranked as the best city for business meetings, with nick names like "The Cleve", "Sixth City" and "C-Town". Don't we have a supermarket chain named C-Town?

Lebron, the time is now. There is no other place in the world where you will bask in the glory of the greatness that is NYC. No other city will shower you the praise and the honor you have earned. Consider Cleveland your college years and now step up into the big leagues and "make it here".

Watch as great actors, prolific musicians, comic geniuses, political dignitaries, eccentric artists, renown writers and brash billionaires all dedicate their evenings to watching you crush the competition.

Savor the city that will cater to your every whim. Come into your own in the cultural capital of the world and stake your claim to the throne that awaits you in Midtown.

You will not only amass great wealth and admiration but you will re-inspire a city that has been dormant. You will ignite a basketball renaissance that will reverberate throughout the world and will bring prestige back to the American Basketball.

Winning a title in any other city will always be second rate to the millions of fans who will line the Canyon of Heroes as you glide through to the sweet tunes of a custom written song by Jay Z that will define you as a champion year after year.

Throngs of people who "make it here" will be screaming your name and you will be the toast of the town.

Tell me what other city can offer you that?

Social MEdia

Social Media has officially eclipsed search as the most popular activity on the web.

It consumes our attention and has become the one of the most central focuses of everything we do.

Personal sharing.

People are rabidly addicted to themselves. We are our own biggest fans and the fact that we can now build and interact with whole communities that we custom build around our own self interests and with people who can add value to our lives gives us a renewed sense of confidence and purpose in the world.

It is what I call REVOLUTION ME. Indulging in one's own self for the sake of growing and bringing value to the community you so desperately want to be an active member in. On the surface social media seems like a very self centered activity but in reality it is an activity that empowers a collective that gives back to those who contribute to it.

"No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better." Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. p. 393.

We have long outgrown the simple avatar and short bio and are now represented by a complex series of personal entries.

Hundreds of thousands of moments recorded using a mixture of media such as text (long winded blog posts and spurts of short messages), pictures, videos, hyperlinks and even our whereabouts.

Devices such as computers, smart phones and netbooks, digital cameras, MP3 players, eBooks and gaming devices give us the ability to feed and access these social networks anywhere and anytime we wish.

We now carry with us a sizable network of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, experts and and stragglers who all help us make decisions and are a sounding board for whatever it is that is swirling around our minds.

We are arm ourselves with a village of people who can help us make decisions at any time of day from what to order on a menu to signing a huge business deal. We can take a photo of a shirt and share it with 400 of our closest friends and get instant feedback before we buy it.

Everything we do we now do collectively.

A flurry of new start-ups are now enabling people to shop, conduct business and disseminate information in all kinds of new ways and with much larger and targeted audiences than ever before.

The early promises of the internet are now starting to become realized and it took social media to ignite that revolution.

No great change ever came from the top down (sorry Obama), great change is usually the result of the masses collectively deciding that something must be done.

I am excited and anxious to ride the wave of the next generation of businesses that are cropping up and being fueled with the fire that is social media.

I really didn't intend this blog post to be informative or educational I really just wanted to express my excitement and anticipation for what I think is going to be one of the most exciting times in history.

I will leave you with this wise and prophetic quote from Malcolm Gladwell.

We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't."
— Malcolm Gladwell

Let's all make more people make it!

Small Talk

In 1923 the study of small talk was pioneered by a polish anthropologist named Bronisław Kasper Malinowski who postured that a "phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information."

Malinowski explains that small talk is nothing more than conversation for its own sake, or "…comments on what is perfectly obvious."

Malinowski insisted that all anthropologists have daily contact with their informants if they were to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that was so important to understanding the culture.

The "imponderabilia of everyday life", a term that has for decades been a subject that was incredibly difficult to define and even harder to employ in the study of social behavior.

Until now!

I am the furthest thing from a scientist but I feel somewhat confident in saying that based on Malinowski's criteria for adequately recording the "imponderabilia of everyday life" I may actually have some expertise in this particular area of anthropology.

In today's advertising world social media has become a necessary focus and its trends change by the minute. It is a living target that must be communicated with at the speed it is traveling.

We can no longer rely on the trusted billboard, the reliable circular or the memorable television commercial to speak to an audience. We must now communicate and interact directly with our audiences and in many cases even include them in the critical functioning and the overall success of our marketing initiatives.

As marketers we no longer have to spend countless (billable) hours trying to guess what the deep inner thoughts of our audiences are. Working in huge groups and spending millions of client dollars trying to hit our targets while blindfolded and hoping to get as close to the bulls eye as possible.

Today we live in a new world, a digital world with an ocean of "imponderabilia of everyday life" flowing rapidly across our eyes and every current in that ocean brings with it the vision we as marketers need to communicate with our customers.

Before social media took the grand stage we were an industry dominated by advertising shamans and persona like Don Draper whose strength and charm would give license to conjure up campaigns from deep inner wounds, giant egos or some mysterious connection into the consciousnesses of the public. The bravery to express those ideas against mostly unfounded assumptions were often awarded and then were copied again and again because they slightly resonated with the general public.

There were no questions or arguments, no forums for feedback or criticism, the general public trusted the techniques of advertisers because they believed that advertisers knew how to communicate and that if it was on TV then it must be important.

A new age has dawned (its so cool that I can actually say that).

An age where everyone has a voice.

There are 500 million people, all connected, that are expressing and exchanging ideas, praising and complaining, competing and supporting and buying and selling from one another.

Gathering virtually, all day, every day to form new and unique groups and societies, thriving on the social web while living simultaneously and performing necessary tasks in the physical world.

We are communicating constantly and in our own natural environments that shift as we shift. Advertisers must now also shift if they are to remain relevant voices in the"imponderabilia of everyday life."

The only way we can expect to communicate with our audiences today at the pace they are living is in short succinct and informative dialog. What I would like to call Small Talk.

Now you may be questioning my decision to attach such a mundane and even annoying moniker to such a monumental shift in society and are probably thinking it should be called something more along the lines of The Great Conversation.

But if you recall at the beginning of this post I introduced an anthropologist named Malinowski who explained that small talk is nothing more than conversation for its own sake, or "…comments on what is perfectly obvious." What he calls small talk.

Those "comments on what is perfectly obvious" amongst one another are the secret formula we as advertisers have been yearning for all these years. It is our direct line of communication with our audiences and the source for which we should base our marketing strategies.

There was a time when commerce and daily life was driven by conversation.

Consumers lived in well defined communities and completely relied on the trust of the community and the ability to engage in dialog regarding every aspect of that community.

The products these consumers desired to purchase were often used by other people they knew and the reputation of the products would be woven into the daily chatter.

If the goods were defective customers knew exactly who to complain to and if they were in high demand it was immediately recognized by the peddler selling those goods.

The source of these goods were usually supplied by a man with a cart whose ability to make a living was based on a keen talent for listening and responding to the needs of his customers. Being an active voice in the community.

Everything happened in real time, no check out lines or customer service reps, it was advertising and selling in the midst of a bustling life that was vibrant and exciting.

Everything returns in new incarnations.

Today there are virtual communities are all over the place, each one of them with very specific needs.

In an article written by Moses Ma, a partner at Next Generation Ventures, Moses writes "These social networks act to fill a deep psychological need in our society. The reality is that customers are starved for real community. Consumer's brains are wired to operate within the social context of community - programming both crucial and ancient for human survival."

Brands must now rejoin the societies they supply. They must once again become part of the ecosystem and re-establish the meaningful connections of the past through the powerful medium that is the future. In short succinct messages (140 characters perhaps), not huge special effects or sexy flashy models but speaking as the community speaks, in small talk.

Buenos Tardes 2009

The digital decade is coming to an end.

A decade shrouded in uncertainty.

It began with a fright, the Y2K scare had those who would eventually usher in the digital revolution uncertain if the the time would even come, like a sort of stage fright for what was to be one of mankind's most progressive moments.

When the year 2000 stepped into the spotlight and we all blinked for a second to make sure everything was ok, what happened in that blink was the beginning of a revolution. Something did actually happen, we just didn't instantly realize what it was.

Everything went digital.

Vinyl vanished, analog moved along, information sped at us on the superhighway, music metamorphosed and relationships reignited. By the end of the decade we were all instantly connected via the social web.

Everything we did was digitized. The places we went, the people we met, the things we saw and what we thought at that exact moment was to be shared by everyone everywhere with access to the internet. We were armed with devices that would enable us to share every moment of our lives and exchange them with others like a social currency that would redefine the caste.

The result of the digital revolution was a new hierarchical division of society according to Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections.

At its onset it was the decade's abolitionists, its digital ambassadors, who were thought by many to be destroying the physical threads of society. The phone, the television, the printed word and all forms of media were all being harrowed so that the seeds of improvement and efficiency could flourish.

Suddenly we were able to store our media in the heavens and have anything we desired rain down on us at the push of a button, the click of a mouse or a tap on a screen.

The 2000s was a decade where our lives all instantly synced. At the end of the 20th century our grandmothers couldn't program their VCRs and digital displays were blinking endlessly like a beacon calling for help. In the beginning of the 21st century suddenly grandma was able to set up her email and is now forwarding powerpoint slideshows, mom shops online, dad is on Facebook and Twitter, teens are sexting and kids are programming smart phone apps and becoming millionaires.

We do everything online, and as we move into the next decade of the digital revolution that convergence is going to become more intimate, more fluid, easier, faster, more integrated than we would ever imagine it could be. Our new technological world will be more tangible, more tactile, easier to control and at the same time so much more complex than it has ever been.

2000 is about to update its profile to 2010.

Incalculable Probability

Throngs of digerati who have been chatting online since the days those creepy rooms opened their digital doors in the what seems like ancient halls of AOL, have been priming themselves for this very moment in time.

Message boards, instant messages, blog posts, dating websites, multi-user RPG games, Craigslist, Friendster, even email have been the "boot camp" for the new social media expert. Years of early forms of social media have sharpened the online digital social skills of geeks everywhere.

Bill Gates who became the poster boy for success in the digital age said in the year 2000 "In the years ahead, the Internet will have an even more profound effect on the way we work, live and learn. By enabling instantaneous and seamless communication and commerce around the globe, from almost any device imaginable, this technology will be one of the key cultural and economic forces of the early 21st century."

That was a pretty bold prediction in 2000 and pretty much exactly what is happening now.

Bill went on to say in the same essay "All these advances will soon create a ubiquitous Internet--personal and business information, email, and instant messaging, rich digital media and Web content will be available any time, any place and from any device."

We live in a world where the social bar is becoming less about looks or money, success or intellect, its how many followers you have on Twitter, Facebook friends or how many comments you can generate on a blog post.

In the past month there has been a bit of an apprehensive backlash against those who claim to be social media experts. People who charge money to brands in order to help them navigate the murky waters of social media like a digital tour guide helping to make sense of what is going on in the landscape.

It seems kind of weird for people like myself to imagine that brands are paying for what we do each and every day. Paying for the witty snippets, great timing, passive aggressive pokes and overinflated praise, the hook-ups and the super secretive"DM me" via the @ or the RT, the #FF or the open conversation about the success your having and flaunting every second of your life over a number of social networks that equal to the second or third largest population in the world.

Napoleon Dynamite had a scene that for me immediately summed up how much confidence social media can give someone like Napoleon's brother Kip (prototypical social media expert).

Kip represents the forefather of social media "experts" the guy who was so desperate find ways to assert himself into society, despite his physical and other lacking, that he immediately jumped on to the social web to sway his hidden swagger and land himself the woman of his dreams.

When Napoleon complained that Kip "...stayed home all day and eat all the frickin chips" his response was "Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know that I'm training to be a cage fighter."

Chatting online and becoming a cage fighter, in that simple statement Kip explained to us how invigorating social media can be and how empowering it can be for someone like him to even consider himself for such a unattainable goal as cage fighting.

Social media levels the playing fields. It gives everyone an opportunity to have a voice and to express who they are from within.

Granted, its behind a screen and somewhat anonymous, but its no different than the facades people put on and social games they play in real life but only now its your digital prowess that gets you up that ladder.

So now its the eve of 2010 and a new social landscape is upon us.

Brands want in big time.

Brands want to take hold of the conversations and ensure that their carefully crafted messages translate in the social media world as they once did in the regular world. Brands want to monitor and react based on the ambient awareness that they are paying these social media experts for. In return brands want results, they want the same results they used to demand of traditional campaigns. That is impossible.

I will explain why.

BusinessWeek published an article on December 3rd entitled "Beware Social Media Snake Oil" in this article it warns the public of so called experts who may or may not be what they claim to be.

Steven Baker concludes in his article "Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment."

It is those "harder-to-quantify" things that bring us back to a time where we trusted people to do what they do because only they can do it.

It was a time when a rainmaker sold products or services not based on some book or some scientific business method but on his charm and the intangible understanding of society and the way to navigate influence it.

It was a time when there was a role where someone who intuitively knew where the herds were running not because he or she was part of that herd but because they were helping to direct it through a methodology that was nothing more complex than just something they were born with.

Today's social media experts are no different.

Some will promise the world and scam you out of every dollar you have and others will lead your brand to that social media pie in the sky.

They will shepherd your brand into the awareness of millions, maybe even billions of people in a shorter time and with a fraction of the advertising budget. The right person can create a world wide conversation that could make or break your brand, they can kill it, resurrect it, re-birth it and refine it almost instantaneously.

Social media manipulation is not an art, its not a science nor is it something that can be fabricated or coerced the way traditional advertising did on TV, in magazines and the early web.

It is a digitally amplified version of the world we live in where the fast, the witty, the nimble, the intelligent, the verbose, the passionate and even the somewhat anti-social persona is what draws the most attention.

The future will bring us more tools, more channels and more ways to perfect the persona that we all want to portray online.

New tools and applications, services and ideas that will give the public more power to control the world around them and to shape the social media landscape to their exact specifications. Digital refinement.

The "experts" will be more like anthropologists than programmers. They will be less artistic and more articulate.

They will be those castaways who now control the velvet ropes into the hottest social networks on the web.

It is the Kip's who labored all day knowing that somehow this technology was going to reveal the superman within. They knew that there was a fire hidden beneath those glasses and wiry frames. They knew that there was an "expert" hidden below those thin mustaches and buttoned up collars and they were right.

Social media experts have indeed arrived, some fakes and some true.

When considering a hire have them show you their world, describe their day and talk about their successes. Not every social media campaign is going to produce exacting results, rather it is an ongoing step in the social ups and downs of living and breathing in a social network online. There is no end, death maybe, but an ongoing brand story that everyone may or may not want to be a part of.

Your next "expert" is going to help your brand live that life and communicate and navigate a whole new world.

So when the question arises in your next strategy meeting if social media experts really exist you can rest assured that they do and in many many different forms.

Scary. But Fun!

Very Clean

The industry has been turned upside down with the announcement of brands now going directly to digital shops for work.

It is a truly historic time that I personally feel very privileged to be part of.

There has been a great debate brewing as to if digital agencies were ready to lead.

Daniel Stein of EVB sent me a link to some work that has made me more of a believer.

A conte so succinct and perfectly executed in every way. A video, simple, charming and completely engaging made by EVB for Orbit.

Digital is not just a website, its not just a microsite or just a banner. Its not just a touch screen display or an interactive kiosk. It is the next generation of advertising, storytelling and entertainment.

This latest piece is mature, charming and absolutely perfect in every way.

Are digital agencies ready to lead?

EVB certainly thinks so.

Social Environmentalism

It is no secret that I am a Twitter fanatic, I am continually fascinated with every aspect of the technological and societal impacts that Twitter has had on our digital and social landscape.

I came across a new site from GetTRASHED.org and McKinney that is using Twitter to save the planet and cyberspace one tweet at a time.

The site is www.recycledtweets.com

The concept is to recycle your boring Tweets.

The site allows you to recycle all the boring tweets polluting your Twitter feed with Re:cycled Tweets.

Take your friends’ cyber-garbage and turn it into cyber-gold.

And that’s not just clever wordplay: for every tweet you recycle, McKinney will donate a penny to getTrashed.org.

Think about it. You recycle your followers’ boring tweets, get all of your friends to recycle their followers’ boring tweets, and that’s a lot of birdseed for getTRASHED.

To participate simply follow these steps:

@reply to someone who posted a lame tweet.
Copy and paste their lame tweet, and add #recyclethis.
then Click reply.

Recycledtweets.com will recycle it and send them a new, transformed tweet. They’ll learn what an interesting tweet is. You’ll add another penny to the total being donated to getTRASHED.org.

But it’s up to you and the rest of the Twitterverse to take part of this initiative to help better social media content and the planet.

So get busy and take out the recycling—one tweet at a time

Getting Baked with Bogusky and Winsor

I recently got my copy of the new book Baked In by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor of CP+B fame.

Ad folks writing ad books is nothing new, David Ogilvy's legacy is probably better recognized by the books he has authored than any of the campaigns he had mastered.

What kept me intrigued about this particular tome is that it not only focuses on the tectonic shifts taking place in the ad industry right now, but it is also an honest assessment of where advertising is failing because of these drastic shifts in consumer engagement.

Baked In's focus is trying to teach brands how to make better products and to educate consumers to have higher expectations from these products so that the claims they make match up with what they actually get and in turn these products will simply advertise themselves by living up to their claims.

Who better to tell this tale than two ad execs who are at the top of the advertising game. It is either meant to make their jobs easier or render them completely obsolete.

Social media's meteoric rise has obviously spurned the need for a book like this and I was impressed at how relevant it read based on what we are seeing today.

However the shelf life (no pun intended) of this book may not last more than another few months as things are changing so rapidly.

Baked In initially started to read like a religious manifesto, talking about brands as if they were deities.

My rebellious mind immediately started to think about how these ideas would apply if the advice laid out in the book was being given in relation to starting a cult and it sort of matched up well.

My aversion to brands dictating social culture and dominating the social conversion may have skewed the way I am reading this, however I am trying my best to put that bias aside and accepting what the reality actually is, they do dictate most of our conversations.

With that said, the brilliance behind this book is that it's so passionately written and the experience behind the advice is apparent.

Both authors obviously believe in branding as more of an integral part of a social philosophy rather than just a means of selling stuff to people.

I get a sense that the authors believe that products are more than just things we want or need, that they are more of a promise that will make our lives better in some way.

An avowal that you will be better off if you own this product or use this service. Especially the ones that they help to peddle.

The book is full of repetition, reminding us a lot of what we already know.

I enjoyed the repetition of the "mixing marketing and product design deep within their culture" message because it is as simple as that and when adhered to it really can clarify the way we communicate those messages to the public.

By saying it over and over again, through real world examples, is a powerful yet subtle way to fasten this message into the minds of those who should be reading this book, marketers and consumers.

It is the expectations of the consumers that will ultimately be dictating the output of advertising from this point on.

Social networks and the internet today is far too powerful a voice to let any brand use marketing to get away with trying to correct the issues the product creates.

It's this extreme passion that when strained through the rational mind that turns every word on the pages of this book into well founded and quite practical advice.

But what else could we expect from two of advertising's great spin doctors?

The Pendulum Rest

When a powerful industry is uprooted from its long standing position, it is subject to a restoring force due to the natural laws of gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position.

However what is unique about the situation we find ourselves in here in advertising is that the acceleration back has actually altered the original equilibrium position.

What was once known as traditional advertising (print, radio, TV, outdoor) has been replaced with digital media. As the pendulum is settling back into place it is experiencing an altered equilibrium state that is quite different from where it originally started.

When released, the restoring force will cause it to oscillate about the equilibrium position, swinging back and forth. That dizzying oscillation is what we had been experiencing for about 8-10 years now.

The entire industry had been thrown into a flurry of definitions and a tug of war for the right to claim supremacy over the prevailing creative platform that is what we now know as Digital.

Perseverance and a new form of communication were both the sword and the shield wielded by digital creatives and technical professionals everywhere. Once considered nothing more than a service, we now stand tall looking out toward a new frontier.

An economic meltdown and new forms of social media helped usher in this new golden age of advertising. What was once thought to be an impossible battle soon became a truce, not a bloody victory, but a truce of sides willing to work together in order to thrive in this new environment.

Digital is not a revolution but an evolution.

It is creativity plus time.

Creativity thrives in free spaces. The onset of the web was about trying new things and failing for the sake of experience, like a toddler taking its first steps. It was a vast wide open space where ideas could be nurtured and matured.

But now the web is dominated by social media, news and entertainment and it is in those annals that we find fertile ground for our creative ads and capitalistic allure.

Powerful creative ideas compete powerfully when they are doing what those ideas are supposed to do, which is to provoke our audiences to not only be entertained, but also to think, to react and to interact. That is how advertising has evolved.

Digital is a repartee.

A succession or interchange of clever retorts.

The brands are now the straight man and the consumers are part of the act.

It is our job to set them up to retort not just for the sake of retort but for the sake of engagement and that engagement will eventually lead to loyalty and trust through allowing that conversation to take place.

We have been swung back in time.

Back to an age where the merchants engaged in conversation with their customers.

Like a digital souk where yelling and response both stimulates and excites all the shoppers into a frenzy, a lively center of commerce where the marketplace is the platform for socialization and communication.

Digital has converged advertising and the marketplace back into one area, back into a souk where people gathered to do business and to share ideas, crowded, bustling and exciting, the way it was meant to be.

The time for one complete cycle is a left swing and a right swing, that is called a period.

A new period has begun.

Digital Dumbo - 150Days

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Space150 hosted a very entertaining Digital Dumbo last night that gave us a glimpse into the next 150 days of digital. I like digestible chunks... 140 would have been more appropriate considering Twitter was the unanimous winner amongst what everyone thought would be all the rage, but 150 is the brand.

Well done guys! Thanks for the event, free drinks and the Tron trailer!

News Twitter Style

MSNBC has released an amazing new free iPhone application.

The app itself is nothing new in terms of what it does but the amazing part is how it does it.

The news is served up in Twitter sized chucks. Part of the set up process is to login with your Twitter username and password so that you can easily tweet any headline instantly.

Best Buy is the flagship advertiser on the new app. As part of that partnership, Best Buy is running a new mobile campaign that provides links to its deal of the day as well as the company's Twitter feed.

Twitter has changed the culture of communication and both entertainment and news as well as big brands have quickly adopted this new method of communication to interface with audiences.

The impact Twitter has had in such a short period of time is a refreshing sign that adoption to new and better ways to communicate and implement technology are taking place and that the digital space is continuing its rapid growth.

Understanding how to harness these new platforms will be a challenge but seeing some of the creative ways its being executed is great.

Definitely check out the new MSNBC iPhone app for a glimpse into the future of reporting and disseminating information.

I Heart Twitter

Erik Natzke is an interactive designer who is constantly trying to blur the lines between design and technology. Erik (@natzke) recently ran a contest on Twitter where a random person who mentioned the hash tag #NatzkeFreePrint would win a free signed print of one of his amazing pieces of artwork.

I WON!!!!

I have watched You Tube, Google, Facebook, and many other web mainstays emerge and submerge and I must say that Twitter is by far the most immediate, exciting and interesting of them all.

The sheer volume of content, feedback, interactivity and potential is endless. The surface of Twitter hasn't been scratched and I am really excited to see what new ways to aggregate live awareness emerge.

I wanted to make another mention of a new website that has blown me away with its innovation to use Facebook as a content aggregation, it is a new site called Prototype-Experience (http://www.prototype-experience.com) it is for a new video game of the same name. Check it out and see what the future holds in store for social network content aggregation.

Anyways, thanks Erik!

What's the Time?

I realize that the conversation pitting traditional Vs digital has been going on for some time now and that it has probably gotten to the point where the mere mention of the topic induces nausea and anxiety.

If I had a nickel for the amount of times AdAge and AdWeek have featured articles on this topic plus the various blog posts, commentary and panel conversations not to mention a certain bubbly society that prides itself on this very distinction, I would be a very rich man.

However I am going to go against my better judgment and speak about the topic because an amazing analogy came to me that I feel best describes the situation we find ourselves in now.

The Set Up: Definitions taken from Wikipedia.

Traditional advertising is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling overall marketing and branding strategies and sales promotions for its clients.

Traditional ad agency clients include businesses and corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies. Agencies may be hired to produce an advertising campaign.

Vs

Interactive agencies differentiate themselves by offering a mix of web design/development, search engine marketing, internet advertising/marketing, or e-business/e-commerce consulting.

Interactive agencies rose to prominence before the traditional advertising agencies fully embraced the Internet.

The digital agencies offered a wide range of services and grew very rapidly, although some have downsized just as rapidly due to changing market conditions.

Today, the most successful interactive agencies are defined as companies that provide specialized advertising and marketing services for the digital space.

Now that we are clear on the distinctions lets move on to the "Vs" part.

Traditional agencies have been farming out digital work to the smaller digital agencies for 10-12 years now pretty much keeping them afloat in terms of large budgeted projects and the infusion of how to service these larger clients from a creative production standpoint.

The smaller digital agencies have been assiduous in learning how the larger agencies function and have adopted many of the same practices in hope that they will slowly evolve into one of these larger agencies with digital as the core and in time start to compete with the larger agencies that have been keeping them in business all these years.

The larger agencies provide their clients with a multitude of other services that are critical to formulating an entire campaign and require the ability to manage hundreds of people and tasks that a smaller digital agency would be overwhelmed with, making the larger agency the ideal starting point for the brands to formulate its message.

The smaller digital agencies are fast and nimble and can complete similar tasks, but not all, in half the time because they have been bred to work faster and turn around very complex technical and creative work in a very short amount of time.

Now as I thought about the two I wanted to apply them to a real world example that would help me better understand the relationship that the clients had with the two worlds.

Then it hit me. A Watch!

Think about it... what do most people have on their wrists to tell time?

I would say most people who appreciate fine time pieces that are accurate, stylish and expensive are walking around with an analog watch. A watch that has been built in a similar way for ages and a watch that has thousands of moving parts each one of them interacting with the other all to perform one small simple task. Telling the time.

Kind of like a... Traditional Agency.

How many digital models does Rolex make?

Why wouldn't someone who could afford a fine timepiece choose to get a geeked out digital watch?

Its just as accurate if not more accurate, it can be synced up with a satellite or a database, it has the ability to provide many other functions all in the same form factor and can be encased in gold, platinum or any number of metals.

A digital watch can be made to do virtually anything its buyer wants yet everywhere I look I see analog watches on the wrists of those people who I would consider in the same bracket as the decision makers at the big brands.

It seems that people choose the more traditional analog watch that has that reassuring ticking sound, with clear backs that display thousands of gears all moving at once all to serve one purpose and one purpose only, to tell you the time. I guess the psychological advantage is that each and every one of those gears is there to serve you in its own way.

Sure from time to time you have to wind it up or shake it or change its battery, but most people enjoy the small effort that they have to put into this seemingly complex object. In the mind of its owner it is a precise instrument that is worn on ones wrist so that they can better manage their lives.

Not that different than a traditional agency, don't you think?

Thousands of people teeming all at once doing this and that in order to come to the very same conclusion that a smaller digital agency may be able to come up with using a quarter of the people in half the time. The digital agency has all kinds of functions, animation, design, data, social media, it is plugged in to all kinds of data and can instantly expand things into a million new directions, yet clients seem to prefer the reliable gears all turning for the single purpose of servicing them and them alone.

It makes total sense to me when I think about it in these terms.

Why should advertising be any different? Why wouldn't the head of a big brand want the prestige of a Parmigiani over the geeky sleekness of a Rosendahl?

Now lets look at the price differences between the two.

You can get a digital watch from Timex, Rosendahl, Abacus or Garmin that is Bluetooth-enabled with caller ID that will tell you the weather, act as a USB drive and locate the nearest WiFi connection for under $200 dollars. WOW! (see that excited me).

OR

You can get a Lange and Sohne, Alain Silberstein, Audemars Piguet, Blancpain, Breguet, Franck Muller, JLC, Parmigiani, Patek Phillipe, Ulysse Nardin, Vacheron Constantin within the price range of $5,000 - $2,000,000. These watches have hand finished mechanical movements and some additional mechanical complications like moon phases and power reserve indicators to very subtle ones like correctly handling all the obscure conditions of the Gregorian calendar.

Starting to see the comparisons?

Traditional agency Vs. Digital agency...

I admit that I personally do not wear a watch and I usually whip out my iPhone to tell me when my next appointment is.

And if I were to wear a watch I certainly would not feel comfortable sporting something that costs more than my buddies house. Nor would I want to have some geeked out digital watch that is solar powered with 8 selectable radio channels and 38 subcodes per channel and LEDs to indicate the hours and minutes in binary format.

So what is the solution?

Well, thats not for me to decide, but what I wanted to do here was to just present the situation against something that may help make a bit of sense to those who had some struggle with the whole Traditional Vs. Digital quandary and to put it into a little bit of a better perspective.

I will let you the reader decide what the answer is.

The Runaround

Navigation is one of the very first words that I had encountered when I started designing and developing websites in 1998. It was and still is the very foundation of what sets digital apart from traditional. The navigation is what gives our audiences the wheel in order to make their own decisions and to decide how and when they were going to interact with the brands that we put in front of them.

Web design is not advertising nor is advertising slowly becoming web design but what bridges the gap between the two is how we hand over the wheel when we design and formulate a navigation system to our now rich and complex online campaigns.

When I say navigation I am not just referring to that left hand down or that top centered line of icons or text. I am talking about how we take our audiences through the experiences that we build.

There are clients who will jump on the band wagon and throw millions of dollars towards whatever the hot new trend is right now because they want to take advantage of the immediacy of the crowd and its various waves.

The draw back to that is that a strategy needs to be formulated on the spot and executed flawlessly as to not seem like it is band wagon jumping and to also completely interpret what that wildly fast trend is at that exact moment, not so easy.

Then we have clients who want tried and true, a website or a digital campaign that embodies the very core of digital standards, upright information, clean sleek design and absolutely none of that horse play that goes on all over the web.

The safe route. Playing it safe in a dangerous world can sometimes be quite dangerous.

Then we have clients who are always a step behind, they want the best, they want to experiment and be the absolute cutting edge but due to not being guided properly and tending to fall in love with what has already been done successfully they simply end up missing the mark and looking tired and old once their shiny new digital campaign has launched.

Then there is the trend setter, the brand that has the digital eyes and ears to navigate the yellow brick road without falling prey to the disasters that ensue along the way.

The web is so vast and so precise that it is so easy to get it wrong. You have to stay one step ahead without over jumping that step and maintain a strong and steady grip on this bucking broma bull we have all mounted.

I read Ad-Age and AdWeek each and every day, the NYTimes and the Wall Street Journal and countless blogs (just see my blog roll on iPro, yes I do read all of those) and what I am experiencing is similar to the picture at the top of this post.

That Scarecrow that keeps pointing Dorothy in every direction and at the same time in no direction.

AdWeek will feature some CEO talking about the revolution that is Twitter and then follow up with another CEO bashing the social media trend. Yet another who says traditional isn't dead and then the very next day some famous Creative Director swearing that every single dollar must be put into digital, then another COO claiming that Facebook will raise the dead and yet another saying that Television is about to explode and then another saying that.... STOP!!!!!!

See what I mean?

I'm not saying that any of our prestigious publications are not doing their jobs, they are. But it is up to us to decipher what is and what inst the right direction to go in for our clients.

With so many options today it is extremely important that we try to stay away from just slapping on a trend and calling it a day.

The way of our business is that everything happens fast. The pitch takes place at lightning speed, and that sets up unrealistic expectations because we promised the client the world. The agency then wins the account and starts bidding out production, then the production shops have to all fight for the right to execute those unrealistic expectations against a crazy time line and zero budget - you can imagine the end result.

Lets remember that there are a hundred answers to every problem and each one of them need to be carefully examined before dumping tons of money into a campaign that will prove to do nothing more than scratch that digital itch.

As an industry (digital) we need to help navigate the deep channels that are now dominating our client's attention and guide them carefully as to where their money will be best spent.

The first step is carefully understanding each one of those channels and knowing how to wrap it around the right brand so it accomplishes the goals that the client sets out to meet. This involves having the right people who can hit those moving targets when the time comes and get the brand positioned with the channel that fits them best.

So the next time you read that "this" is dead or "that" is hot or "this" is dying or "that" is emerging. Keep in mind that everything comes and goes and that the web is a giant life cycle that keeps on feeding into itself as it gives birth to new and more interesting ways to navigate its waters.

Don't ignore what has been or what will be and keep in mind what is now and what works best for your brands. That is the beauty of this medium. Unlike print or TV it is never canned or done, it is an evolution that is constantly morphing as we morph within it.

Imagine a digital campaign that lasted forever, slowly evolving and taking on various incarnations but all seamlessly and effortlessly flowing through the same vessel as its changes. No new website, just an evolving digital idea, a story that intensifies and changes over time based on the terrain that it navigates over.

Now that's digital!

Digital Dumbo #5 - Freedom + Partners Rocks The House

Digital Dumbo - Freedom + Partners Rocks The House from Craig Elimeliah on Vimeo.

Digital Dumbo is quickly becoming one of the hottest must attend events in the digital social scene.

Dumbo is the epicenter of of digital New York and is home to many of the worlds best interactive, motion graphics, creative and technological studios in the world.

We get together on the last Thursday of every month for some well deserved drinks and socialization.

Freedom + Partners hosted the past event last Thursday by preparing a flash based audio and video installation that rocked the house all night with music that was all Brooklyn themed.

Community is one of the foundations of our existence and it is important that we are plugged into the digital community as both a contributing partner and active member of our small digital neighborhood.

Enjoy the video.

50 Billion, I mean Million, Visits!

Today marks the day that the FWA is celebrating its 50 Millionth visit.

Quite an achievement for what is now a true institution in our community. The FWA has been following and documenting our industry since 2000 and has stayed true to spotlighting the very best each and every day.

To me The FWA is like a thermometer that measures the temperature of our industry in the areas of design, technology, trends and unique executions. How amazing is it that there is a new site every single day? That alone is a testament to the hard work and dedication that we all pour into our work day in and day out.

Domani Studios stepped up and donated time and effort to throw a party for this milestone. Its heart warming that the celebration is about us, the people, the folks who every day take out a slice of time to check out what the bar in interactive excellence is today.

It is really nice to finally see the faces, the eyes and the smiles, the avatars and the logos, the persona of all the people who make up this industry and the folks who will inherit this industry.

I want to say congratulations to a good man, Rob Ford, who has served our community loyally and lovingly to make sure that The FWA exists, I know for a fact that he spends countless hours making sure that little square is there each and every day without fail.

It has been and continues to be a pleasure watching The FWA mature and grow, now video and photo, who knows what will be next.

Thank you Rob for your commitment and dedication in giving us a place to go to every morning and a goal to reach for each day. I cant tell you how many countless meetings I have been in where clients have said "lets win an FWA on this one", it would make you proud Rob.

Keep up the good work!

Digital Path-O-Gen

Creative Review just posted a great chat with Mr. Lebowitz, of Big Spaceship renown, where the topic is about the “viral category” at the D&AD awards.

When talking about insights as to how people behave and why they pass things along Mr. Lebowitz says “People don’t pass things along because they love brands, they pass things along because they love their friends”.

Just like there are varying schools of philosophy and strains of thought, there is really no right or wrong answer to this particular insight. I am sure with every varying demographic there is a separate rule as to why a particular person may or may not have the need to add to the viral vigor of a particular campaign or item they found on the web.

If we want to have an honest conversation about why people find and then pass things along we need to really examine the motivation behind why they feel the need to share everything they find on the web.

I think that it is really because they ultimately love themselves.

They want to be the one who found this cool video, or upload their face to a dancing elf or to be the one who uploaded their friends picture to the dancing elf.

I don’t know that anyone ever trolls the web for cool things and thinks, “oh I really love my friends so I will send them this”, its more about “I am so freakin' cool for finding this thing, I am going to show everyone!”

There is a sense of claiming an ownership over something you really didn't create just by simply being one of the first to pass it along.

The web is a giant treasure trove, we all look for that unique, rare find that we can claim we found and then spread it to our closest 200-300 followers, oops, I mean friends.

With the emergence of Twitter I think that what was viral before has a much farther reaching but shorter infection period, because people are spreading things at a much faster rate, its no longer about “send to a friend” its now about broadcasting to hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in your personal network. A barrage of links that come at us at a much faster rate and now the viruses must now compete for our attention as to what is the most endearing or funniest or most profound.

I think as technology advances that it becomes more about the mode of transference that will determine what kinds of content has that viral quality.

One very interesting feature that I have found intriguing in Twitterific is NEARBY, where your cellphone determines your positioning and then allows you to “Twit” with those closest to you, not friends, total strangers within your vicinity. The ability to start and contribute to conversations based on proximity. I find the possibilities behind proximity extremely fascinating and it will make the digital virus an even more contagious topic. A new pathogen that gives us an even more precise way to structure and target our campaigns.

Its a great discussion.

Let's Get Back

I want to say that the BBH Labs blog is one of my new addictions and should be read by everyone in our space, its insightful, relevant and has been saying all of the right things.

There was a recent post entitled "10 Reasons Why There’s Not More Great Work in the Interactive Space"

I loved this post for so many reasons.

Digital has suffered because of the relationships that have been formed in the production process.

Smaller digital shops have been feeding off of the low hanging fruits that the agencies have dangled for so many years and have been able to get away with delivering what you so beautifully referred to as MICROWAVED solutions.

These shops have always lacked real creative minds and have stockpiled on flash developers who produce absolutely wonderful work but add very little to the BIG IDEA.

The problem was that in order to execute something online that was compelling, the Idea Folks fooled themselves into thinking that it was the Flash folks who were the only ones to bring those ideas to life because there were so few really good ones and they were all stockpiled in these digital shops.

As we all know that is no longer the case. Now that social media, WP, HTML, Video and other venues have emerged, Flash is no longer the only sexy kid on the block. Digital shops now need to rethink how they do business and either completely submit to the larger agencies or to offer up real idea based solutions as a supplement to the agency offerings.

We all knew this was coming and that in order to create good work we would need to be strategic and think along the lines that our MAD FATHERS thought and to get back to the foot in the door and the fedora peddler roots that advertising originated from. A used car salesman wakes up every day, knowing he has to put on his A game, get his ass in gear and sell the shit out of his lot, to seduce the moms, college kids, down and outs and up and comers that his product is what they need and will provide them with value and usage.

We have all succumbed to the thinking that we are any better than that guy, we are not, we need to realize this in order to set things straight.

There is a humility to what he does and we need to adopt that same humility when selling our clients products.

The web is a very big place, tons of room for everyone to thrive, lets not pollute it with empty ideas. Interactive is revolutionary, it now gives us the ability to get immediate feedback and then act upon that just as immediately. It lets us interface directly with our audiences in a so much more intimate way than ever before.

I agree that the narrative and story telling is what will breathe life into the web and what it desperately lacks. the code/narrative ratio is way off.

There is just as much importance for a great story teller as there is for a great coder or designer, but show me one interactive shop that employs a great copy writer, I have met very very few.

So lets not let the technology of our new medium cloud our notion that old school disciplines like writing and selling are no longer needed, sometimes youth’s ego is its greatest downfall.

All The Rage

The timing could not have been better, just as Facebook and MySpace had exhausted its audiences with an overwhelming flood of information, high school reunions, what kind of dog you would be and what you looked like puking at that party last night, along comes a sleek, streamlined and simple social media tool that is taking the world by storm.

Twitter.

Twitter is so much more than people think it is.

When friends ask me what Twitter is they usually preface the question by saying "oh its like your status on Facebook, right?" and my answer is always no!

The best place to start defining Twitter is the dictionary.

1. Twitter - a state of tremulous excitement.

2. Twitter - to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.

3. Twit - To taunt, ridicule, or tease, especially for embarrassing mistakes or faults.

Twitter is a true conduit of human chatter and a concise and exacting form of communication that forces each and every person using it to get as creative as they possibly can within 140 characters or less.

Twitter is not just a medium but a concept that is being chatted about in every media circle around the world. People are Twittering about Twitter, writing news stories about Twitter, blogging, Facebooking, IMing and emailing about Twitter.

Erick Shonfeld wrote in a TechCrunch article published on February 15,2009 where he captures the true essence of what Twitter is all about. He writes "What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google."

Twitter is Chatter. Chatter is water, water flows and needs to be channeled. Twitter does that by allowing people to create their own chatter channels. In doing so the public creates organic content pools that are worth a lot of money to brands that want to know what people are saying.

Twitter somehow managed to trump Facebook's social appeal and demolish Google's search relevancy. I recently tested how good Twitter could be as a search engine. By typing in a search term I got tons of human responses to the term I was looking for.

After missing yesterday's final four games I went to Search.Twitter.com and typed in "Michigan State" I was BLOWN AWAY with the expressions, the links, the references, the history, the excitement, the drama and the relevancy to the NOW!

I got links to local websites in Michigan that gave me an insight and experience that was so much better than the dry ESPN and CNNSI coverage that Google would have led me to. I got fan reaction, I got pictures from the game and I got a slice of time captured at the exact moment that it happened. To be completely honest, it was pretty exhilarating.

The search is alive, as I looked through the various links and reactions I got a message telling me that I should refresh my page because more results have come in.

I was really happy that I was living in the now and indexing the world as it is at this very moment and not at the mercy of the mighty Google index that does what it wants when it wants and no one knows why or how links get to the top of a search.

There is no mystery behind Twitter, its human, its real, its alive and its growing.

Remember in the movie The Dark Knight, when Batman was looking for the Joker, he decided to use a tool that was able to tap into the chatter of everyone in the city and by doing so he emulated the way a bat uses sonar to see, basically creating a picture of exactly what is going on in the world. That is Twitter!!

I am very excited about what is in store for Twitter, I haven't been this excited in a long time and that lingering question about the Google buster and the next Killer App has just been answered, in less than 140 characters.

Twitter.

Indecent Accolade

Awards are a measurement for the best of any particular field's top work and achievements.

Advertising is an industry that produces so much work over the course of a year that it requires a slew of award shows in order to recognize achievements in the many various categories and channels.

Award shows are the gala balls of the industry and often have pomp, circumstance and drama associated with them. Last year gave us the infamous gripe of Michael Lebowitz who spoke out about credit. This years drama has already started to surface, ill get to that in a second.

Advertising forefather and visionary, David Ogilvy abhorred advertising awards, stating that they had nothing to do with sales or bottom line. He remarked that most awards were trivial, "for best commercial shot on a cloudy day." Ogilvy felt that advertising awards should reflect the effectiveness of the campaign, not it's cleverness or creativity.

In light of a recent spillage of a certain spreadsheet from a major award show's entries, I felt that a dedicated post to awards was in order.

Agencies love awards, its fuel for the fire when going after new clients or brandishing in front of perspective talent that they may be wooing to the agency.

Awards are shiny reminders that the work that comes out of "here" is top notch.

Awards are a great way reward the most creative and successful work, however these days it seems like they have become the ultimate goal.

We are all in the service industry, we service our clients in order to sell more of what they make or to get them more recognition for their brand in the eyes of the public. Our goals and objectives should be the same goals and objectives of our clients, not to fill the space on our own award mantels.

Awards are really nice and when you win, your on top of the world, but the bottom line, especially in today's economy, is to sell sell sell and to make sure creative is communicating the brand story properly.

On March 20th Ad Age broke a story about an accidental list of entries that leaked into the public. It had the names and entries of agencies who submitted work to The One Show. There were 9,795 entries for the awards, at a total cost to the agencies of $3,507,860.

Three and a half million dollars in award entries!

I think that as an industry we need to keep things within perspective and recognize what the ultimate goal is, and that is to service our clients with creativity, dedication and integrity. The work we produce should be focused on the goals of our clients and not the judging panels awarding the bling.

Recessions are a great time to rethink what is truly important and to learn to commit to and appreciate the substance of what we do. It is a time to reflect upon the mistakes we have made and to cut away the fat that we have been carrying.

Perhaps this accidental leakage was no accident at all and a sign of the times and a reminder to all of us that we need to help our clients spend their money more wisely, and to help them re stimulate the economy so that we may get back to filling our bellies with useless things we don't need (joke).

Perhaps the poor unfortunate soul who has most likely been fired for attaching that infamous spreadsheet to the email she sent out is an angel in disguise who has come down to help us fix the error of our ways. Probably not but when viewed as such it makes for a much better story.

I have compiled a list of major ad industry award shows so that you may get a sense of what kind of money is being spent on award shows, imagine what was spent just on the One Show and add that across all of these other major shows:

ACE Awards
ADDY Awards
Advertising Age Awards
Advertising Hall of Achievement
Advertising Hall of Fame
CA Advertising Annual Competition
Clarion Awards
Clio Awards
G.D. Crain Jr. Award
Creative Excellence in Business Advertising
Award
Cresta International Advertising Award
Effie Awards
Ad Age’s Hispanic Creative Advertising Awards
International Advertising Festival at Cannes
International ANDY Awards
International ECHO Awards Competition
Jay Chiat Planning Awards
Mobius Advertising Awards
MPA Kelly Award
New York Festivals
OBIE Awards
One Show Awards
O’Toole Awards
Pro-Comm. Awards Competition
Radio Mercury Awards
Reggie Awards
Webby Awards

Lets all remember in this time of slashed budgets, sparse work, struggling clients and a faltering economy, that what is really important is the substance of what we do and not the bling it gets awarded.