tell the tube you've had enough

Starting a movement when the world got their entertainment through the tube was as simple as giving a good speech. But now everything is a moment or is attempting to start a movement. We're all mad as hell and yelling out the window is pointless, no one would be able to hear you over their ipod headphones or ringing cellphones. We're all in our own little movements standing for what we believe in, even if we don't really know what the hell that is. Insanity ensues.

What's especially neat about this clip is if you go to Youtube and look at the comments, it's making people think. It applies ever more today and we still don't know how to respond or take control of the messages we are receiving.

colorful emotions

First post of 2010!

Just found this book called We Feel Fine that explores emotions through blogging. Beautifully done. One of the 10 trends to watch in 2010 according to JWT is new forms and uses of visual data.

merry christmas!!!

We didn't have a tree, so I made one out of construction paper on the wall. Merry Christmas to all!!!!!!

static no more

Love the old adage "art work is never done" and think it is applicable to websites, which are constantly updated. Successful webpages are not static likes posters, they are real-time. They allow motion around and in and out of the site (links) satisfying the basic needs of the reading audience.

However, websites are often not open and malleable for the internal audience. We perfect for the outer audience not taking into account those who form the organization that a site represents.

For example, a school's website acts as a representative of those who attend the school. Take my alma mater, the VCU Brandcenter - the website is like a poster that you can move about. The students have no way of altering it or adding functions that they desire*. So, it is most useful to outside sources. However, a different school, Yale's school of art is changing the way to look at school webpages. Here's what their page says:

Beautiful. Not what you'd expect from an Ivy League. But constantly a way for that community to be actively recreating itself.

The background to one page was hilarious. Either someone intentionally put up this message from photobucket, or their account actually ran out.

This totally makes sense for the animal that an art school is. The creative work its' students exhibit is what makes it intriguing to other perspective students and the general art community.

*Now let's clarify: I understand why this has become protocol. Due to limited capabilities and resources, we know that a website cannot do everything. However, I don't believe that structuring our thinking about the potential of the web around CURRENT limitations is wise. What is currently impossible will be laughably easy in the future if we find that it is necessary for us to put our brain waves on it.

planning comms based on unemployment

Working on an insurance account and a funny/relevant comms planning idea just occurred to me. We plan communications based on what media vehicle they will roll out in or when a consumer along their journey will encounter the communications. But watching the unemployment rates across the country, would a smart comms plan for something like life insurance or a bank include geography based on unemployment rates?

Think about it, your communications in an area like Detroit, which is still reeling and grasping for jobs needs to be very sensitive to their situation. Northern Virginia on the other hand hasn't been hit as hard thanks to the number of government jobs that are held in the area. Communications in that geography for a national bank would be vastly different.

A map showing unemployment rates across the country:

will wave be the new twitter?

Twitter has been overrun by spammer crap. Meaning that users will get fed up and head elsewhere. Another problem that I've been having with Twitter is that I can't converse/reply to Tweets unless I have direct messaging open with someone. I don't want to bug those who follow me with short replies to friends. Lists have helped us find Tweets that are most useful/catered to a particular purpose.

But with Wave I can have conversations with friends and the convos are as private or open as I want them to be. All of my Waves are saved and quickly accessible so the convo can start/stop whenever I feel like adding to it. I can write notes to friends for them to read at a later time (yeah, like an email) and it's all within the same Wave.

I kind of see public Waves as a combo of old aol-style chat rooms and Twitter-lists. They can be catered to a specific interest - I'm in the "planner wave" and anyone in the world can join. But with the use of profiles and the links that people post to their multi-faceted web-presence, it's less creepy than a chat room.

Could Wave some day replace Twitter? Seems unlikely, but then again...

I have a few invites to the Wave, if you'd like one leave me your gmail address.

moving along

I am leaving my role in trendspotting at JWT and heading to TAXI to be a planner there. I am soo excited about this move!! I've enjoyed working at JWT, there are a lot of great people there. Wish me luck!

please leave the dancing to the Gap

Just because a brand can move its' feet, doesn't mean they can dance.

Dance in marketing/advertising is usually a pretty good schtick for getting me interested. BUT. Jumping on that booty-shakin' band wagon just because you know how to make a youtube video and can press play on a stereo is not the way to go about it.

I'm referring to Microsoft's recent non-trad attempt in their new California store. The Apple store wanna-be retail spot created a 4 minute video of their employees doing the electric slide in the store. It was wild, it was crazy, there was clapping, there was sliding, over and over and over again. For 4 minutes.

More than 300,000 people have now watched the video on Youtube and it has a 1.5 star rating. I rest my case.

See for yourselves:

social web game and inter-office smack talking

I have been competing for mayorship of JWT on Foursquare with some guy whose name on the program is Aface K. I tried to figure out who he was by looking through the company's address book with no luck. After I managed to steal it from him twice, he decided that he needed to figure out who his competition was. He called the receptionist and asked who "Katie F." was. He just walked up to my desk and said "you keep stealing my mayorship and it's not cool!" Haha! Some day I'm going to gather all 4 of us at JWT who play this game so that we can compare points and smack talk.

I recently commented on Gareth Kay's blog about a post he wrote concerning befuckingawesome.com. It's an online game where you gain points for doing good deeds, volunteering, etc. The points that you gain on BFA and 4SQ are fairly meaningless. You don't really win anything by playing, but frequent users are obsessed. Foursquare I was told a few months ago had an active user base of 50 percent - which is huge. 

These games keep it simple, they play on the competitive spirit and the human desire to win. Behavioral psychologists have found that competition in sports helps people become better athletes. So is competition in social media helping us become better at social media? Better at using it, better at building it, better at analyzing it?

i would research

Need to start an on-going list of things I'd like to research (though will likely not have time to do), like my on-going stream "why i love."

If I had time, I would research:

Since graduating from grad school I have been asked numerous times "is the job market harder to day than before the recession."

My answer is: Since I headed straight to grad school after undergrad, I don't have any real experience job searching outside of a recession to compare today to. What I have experienced is real support from those in my position. My peers, who are also desperately seeking work, are hooking me up with people they know and sending me job openings they’ve seen. They are consoling me with their own personal stories and giving moral support.

My hypothesis: Those in the Millennial generation are helping one-another find job opportunities more than any previous generation helped their peers.

The Millennials are savvy, connected, and optimistic. Tough times are their motivator and digital skills are their arsenal, where opportunities do not exist, this generation will create. I also think that the idealism that often influences Millennials’ decisions will lead to many trips and falls along the way.

If anyone's done research on this, let's chat.

cloud computing's where the money's at

At a beer festival, a friendly stranger asked me what things he should invest in, assuming that since I do trendspotting I must also know how to work the stock market. Right.

Well, what I told him to watch for the expansion of cloud computing and for opportunities to invest in that arena. He had no clue what I was talking about. I said that given that people are creating endlessly larger amounts of digital data, much like we need trash dumps to store our garbage, we need spaces to store our digital junk. At this point we buy gigs or terabytes of external storage space to keep all of our stuff. Eventually though, the average Joe will be annoyed that he doesn't have his external with him when out and about or that he has multiple externals that he has to search through for one darn file. Joe will begin to wonder why all of his files aren't accessible in the way that his emails on Gmail (who uses cloud-computing) are. He will head to services like iDrive who do remote data backup or cloud computing.

I was proud of my prediction today when I read in a Wired Magazine article, "The Good Enough Revolution," that Microsoft is moving into cloud computing. Apparently Office 2010 will be largely cloud-based. To add to it's cloud-computing operations, Google is developing a cloud-based operating system that will work in tandem with the company's Chrome browser.

Who knows? Maybe I could do alright in the stock market game.

tech ed.

Loads going on in the academic space using technology that's changing the academic world.

Just read that several universities are participating in a pilot program with Kindle Readers. While this will certainly help students' backs, will reading all their textbooks on a screen hurt their eyes?

VCU stopped giving out university emails this year. Instead students have Gmail accounts. I can see how this would be easier on VCU servers. But I wonder what kind of deal they've had to make with Google?

I also read that Google Wave has been made available to a few universities. I recently started using the Wave and while I think it is a useful chat program, I'm not sure how often uni students will conduct meetings, building documents over it?

Another thing I noticed about the academic space with regards to the Web is the utility of websites created for them. True that most are awful, Blackboard and pretty much every mail server made me want to throw my computer across the room. But, going through the list of entries for the Adobe MAX Awards this year, I noticed that the entries for academic space seemed 10 times more useful than those done for brands. It's pathetic really. I hit on this in another post about brands creating websites that suck. Below are a couple screen shots of academic sites and brand sites, may be hard to judge from these small images.You may want to read the descriptors on the site.

Games by brands:
2 games that involve driving a car around, one involving a digital claw-machine game.

3 educational sites. One that charts a students progress, one that is a network for educators around the world and the third a piano-teaching program.

ford – profiting despite it all

Ford posting a profit of $997 million in the third quarter comes as a surprise especially given the fact that it took no bailout money from the government. The Cash for Clunkers program helped create this profit without a doubt, but Ford has also made major changes internally, cutting operational costs. Strong product launches have also helped, the F-150 doing especially well next to competitors. Less incentives have been necessary to offer in order to sell the cars, which is a good sign as it shows that consumers have faith that a Ford is worth the price. While there's still much to be done, the 3rd quarter results are the light at the end of the tunnel for Ford.

Ford has a history of prevailing in the face of great global challenges. It has weathered the storms of the Great Depression, two world wars, the gas crisis of the 1970s and a few recessions before this one. It defined a new form of industry when Henry Ford invented the moving assembly line and taught us that you can’t always ask the consumer what they would like.

Perhaps the rebound shouldn't be such a surprise, coming from a company whose history of resilience has a way of repeating itself. The battle cry of ‘prevail despite it all’ is a needed one during this period of doom and gloom and one that would be smart for a company like Ford to shout from the roof tops.

irony in simplicity

Hope everyone had a lovely Halloween. I got stuck in the rain and ended up getting shoved into NYC's Halloween parade while trying to cross the street.

I loved the costumes that were simple and ironic. I contemplated being a potato because I knew people would over-think it. A friend of mine was a bush - the plant version, not the presidential one. Halloween is a chance for us to take on the shape of something or someone new and sometimes the simpler you make it, the more ironic it can be in a sea of overly complicated costumes.

Thinking about this in the shower this morning, I started to apply this to the packaging design around me. In the packaging world, sometimes being a more simple design can make your product a winner - think about Method products for example. It's funny then that packaging designs are so complicated. They shout every benefit the product could possibly provide in a flashy, sparkly font. Why does it have to be "vitamin enriched, volumizing, shine inducing" shampoo? Why can't it just be shampoo?

I would like to design refillable packaging that simply states what it holds - shampoo is "shampoo" and hand soap, "hand soap." I feel like it could surprise visitors to your home.  Would they feel unnerved and ask what brand your hair spray was? 

 As it goes 'being a good designer means not adding as much as you can, but taking things away until only what is necessary remains.' We've all heard the phrase, but rarely do brands apply it.

in any language

This explanation through anamation leaps over the barrier of language that 350.org's message may reach around the world. It's a creative move for getting around that challenge and a short and sweet way to explain the problem and desired action of the viewer to spread the word.