Be Brave and Be Kind

"We are the things we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

Aristotle

 

For a few months, I’ve been sitting a few moments with my daily affirmation at the start of each day. It’s nothing big or time-consuming, but a few notes to myself that I think will make my day better. 

 

It’s been effective for me, so I thought you might benefit as well. There’s no big process. I just scribbled some notes one day and stuck them in my pocket. I’ll refresh them whenever that paper gets worn. Sometimes I’ll write little notes to myself around the edges. Sometimes I'll add a note if it feels like I need something extra, or I’ll delete one if it no longer seems relevant. Here’s what I read this morning.

 

Stay within yourself. Others are acting for their good too.

I added this because I’ve gotten myself in the most trouble by reacting emotionally to a problem or some form of resistance. I still believe that using my emotional engine is important; it just works better when filtered through a calm, rational mind.

 

Don’t be wooed by pride.

Pride leads to overconfidence, and overconfidence leads to becoming stale and ignorant.

 

Be grateful.

You cannot be greedy or angry and grateful at the same time. Starting with an appreciation for things that make me full keeps me grounded for anything else that might come my way.

 

Practice really listening to what those around you say.

This is a comment on presence. I’ve had too many bad interactions because I’m consumed with something outside of the room I’m in. Eye contact and active listening helps me work better with others.

 

Breathe and keep your mind calm.

Return to the breath, my friend. When my mind is out of sorts, everything else goes with it.

 

Welcome difficulty as an opportunity to show your character.

As Ryan Holiday said, the obstacle is the way. The biggest benefits lurk behinds the greatest challenges. So don't deal with them, but seek them out. There is no growth to be had inside of a bubble.

 

Live and work with urgency. It’ll end too soon.

Whenever it ends, it’ll be before I want it to. I’m not interested in looking back on all those wasted moments or wasting anymore moments today.

 

Enjoy this. Every part if a gift.

Maybe most important. The good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent, being here is a gift. Time gets shorter the longer we live. We should appreciate it more.

 

Do the few things that make the most good.

My tendency is to chase after whatever thing is in front of my face. This is a reminder to sit down and write down the most important thing to accomplish. If I only work on the most urgent things, I'll never put energy behind the most important things.

 

Be brave and be kind.

I stole this from Rachel. This the simple summary of all these ideals. I don’t think it needs more explanation.

 

I don’t do them all well, and that’s why they all remain on the list. It should be unique to you, the challenges you face and how you want to grow. But thinking about it every day makes you a more active participant in getting where you want to go.

 

Out and About

The 22 Rules of Storytelling, according to Pixar

#6 What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#18 You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#22 What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

The Greatness of Bernbach on advertising and creatiivity

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUs5-3Y6vxM]

Happiness is being a loser

"Another problem with our reluctance to think about or analyse failure – whether our own or other people's – is that it leads to an utterly distorted picture of the causes of success. Bookshops are stuffed with autobiographical volumes such as the one released in 2006 by the multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis, entitled How To Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom Of One Of Britain's Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs. It's an entertaining read, conveying a similar message to many of the others: that to make a fortune what you need is stubbornness and a willingness to take risks. But research by the Oxford management theorist Jerker Denrell suggests that these are just as likely to be the characteristics of extremely unsuccessful people, too. It's just that the failures don't write books. You rarely see autobiographies of people who took risks that then didn't work out."

Mister Rogers Remixed

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzXaFbxDcM]

Michael Geismar's Blackjack Strategy

"The lesson here is that whether on Wall Street or the strip in Las Vegas, it’s easy to confuse increasing the chances of winning with shifting risk. Increasing the chances of winning improves the amount you should expect as payout. Shifting the risk makes it so that most of the time you get a good payout, but every once and a while you lose catastrophically. As a culture, we should be trying to ensure that the people making financial decisions are looking to do more of the former and less of the latter, especially given the systemic consequences of recent catastrophic market collapses."

The Greatness of Jack Dorsey

"Dorsey is trying to create magic in an industry where people have not previously sought wonder and delight. In short, he hopes to pull an Apple on the entire financial world."

Photos: The Secret City that created the atomic bomb

Phil Dusenberry, Former Chairman of BBDO

"Insights as opposed to ideas. There's a difference. Ideas, valuable though they may be are a dime a dozen in business. That's certainly the case at ad agencies where ideas are the currency of the realm and even the mailroom people spit out ideas as if they were candy from a PEZ dispenser. Insight is much rarer – and therefore much more precious. In advertising a good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials…more than anything else, an insight states a truth that alters how you see the world."

Lifecycle of the Agency

"Brands have value only where consumers have choice." 
Economist definition of brands

I just bought myself a shiny new pair of Warrior shoes. Maybe it's the recent talk of the Chinese factory workers slavishly building Apple products, but for the first time the idea of handmade in China seems really appealing.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/41666240 w=525&h=393]

Which made me wonder where we are in the lifecycle of the ad agency. There may be 30,000 products in your local supermarket or hundreds of thousands of new product launches every year, but we are just scratching the surface of where we will be once the global middle class resembles something more like the Western middle class. The means of production will become more accessible, and we'll get perhaps millions of new products meant for audiences with fresh money to burn, including thousands of which that might break free and find their voice beyond. And as this happens - the notion of brand either becomes largely meaningless or infinitely meaningful in helping us navigate. I suspect there will be no shortage of need for people who understand why people buy, what will sell - and all those points in between.

But the question is, in a world of infinite choice - is that a role for someone representing the brand or someone representing the people those brands wish to attract. My guess is that there will still be a few big guys that help large brands find new audiences. But a vast sea of opportunity will emerge for intermediaries who actively seek new products and help them hone their message for the more well defined markets they act as brokers for.

Things are Interesting

Thomas Edison and the Original Cat Video

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

The Finest from All over the World, Made in Japan
"It used be that the Japanese offered idiosyncratic takes on foreign things. White bread was transformed into shokupan, a Platonic ideal of fluffiness, aerated and feather-light in a way that made Wonder Bread seem dense. Pasta was almost always spaghetti, perfectly cooked al dente, but typically doused with cream sauce and often served with spicy codfish roe. Foreign imports here took on a life of their own, becoming something completely different and utterly Japanese.

...That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards, realizing that the apex of bread making may not be Wonder Bread–style loaves, but pain à l'ancienne."

How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work
"Most likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organization in its corporate mission statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?"

Nextpedition - A custom-made adventure from American Express

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swtq2rHOps4]

The Next Step in Copying will be Physical
"We believe that the next stop in copying will be made from digital form into physical form," The Pirate Bay declares. "It will be physical objects." 

Everything is a Remix, Part 4

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/36881035 w=524&h=295]

Framing Layers

“Because that's what we need to add to so many things, to give them that extra necessary magic. A pretending layer. So it's not just a useful or beautiful or functional object - it's got some little nod to who we're pretending to be when we're using it.”

The pretending layer is the way in which you experience something, not necessarily what you actually accomplish.

Seems rather fundamental really.

I need to buy clothes. I buy Diesel because that’s my pretending layer. I get to be like the model in the store. Or that guy in the band that looks cool in jeans. Meaning we can’t just identify a person that needs jeans, but the projection of who that person wants to be when they wear them. Which seems rather simple and obvious when we’re creating an advertisement for a thing rather than making the thing itself. It causes a forced separation between what it does and what it represents.

But now we’re spending way more time doing stuff rather than advertising stuff. Or as Gareth aptly put – making ideas to be advertised rather than advertising ideas. But as we make the thing – it’s easy to get caught up in the function or utility of it rather than what it can or should mean.

And that’s what the pretending layer does. It’s the added bit that describes how the audience experiences something while allowing us to shift focus from the function a bit.

Take for instance your basic grocery store loyalty program. The core thing is the grocery store experience itself, and what most have done is to simply add a very functional layer to an already functional experience. Buy the right item, get a few cents off. While most tell me how much I saved on the receipt, that’s pretty much the end of it. I can’t access my points or trade them. I can’t show them off to prove my skills. There’s no magic to the experience, just essentially an extension to the coupon.

But then take Chromaroma, the London game based upon where and how much you swipe your Oyster (transit) card. They could have offered deals and been done with it.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22023369 w=525&h=295]

But they added a pretending layer by making commuters feel like explorers. They added a social layer by rewarding you for meeting new people and working in teams. As you peel apart the experience, you get complementary pieces working together in harmony rather than just chunks of one single thing. Slicing into layers may help us construct a whole in much more interesting ways.

photo via erinpurcell

Links and Links and Links

Journalism in Parts
"The group will atomise the process of writing an article into multiple steps which can be accomplished in isolation. (Part of the project is to see how reproducible—or not—such tasks really are.) Tasks might include writing a headline, summarising a chart, or providing a conclusion for a subsection of text. Each component will be assigned to multiple people without allowing them to see what the others have come up with. The collected products will then be sent out again for examination by another batch of eyes, again unable to compare notes."

How Great Entrepreneurs Think
"Master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies. By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it."

The Short History of Hello
"The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of 'hello' goes back only to 1827. And it wasn't mainly a greeting back then. Ammon says people in the 1830's said hello to attract attention ("Hello, what do you think you're doing?"), or to express surprise ("Hello, what have we here?"). Hello didn't become 'hi' until the telephone arrived.

The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison who put hello into common usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say "hello" when answering. His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, thought the better word was 'ahoy.'"

Emotional Engagement Matters

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=brainjuicerfacetraceiesapresentation-final-final-090617094131-phpapp01&stripped_title=measuring-emotional-egagement-with-facetrace&userName=IESA_school_of_management

Staying Stupid in Planning
"That's why I still love it when I'm nervous, when I don't think I quite know what I'm doing. It's those times, when you're Using the Force, when all you've got is your instincts, when you're the most likely to do something great, that no one else will because you won't be doing it like them; for Gods sake, you don't KNOW how to do it like them. I like it when I'm making it up as I go along."

Back to the Future

How the iPad Shifts Reading

http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6=

The Blog Awakening is Coming, But Links for now.

1960's Parody of 1960's Commercials

Good to know we've been mocking ourselves for at least 50 years now. Maybe some day we'll actually put away our cliches for a few years.

The Original Blogger, circa 1580

"Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. 'I cannot keep my subject still,' he said. 'It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.' His writing followed the same wayward path."

The Economics of Seinfeld

Economics theory taught through Seinfeld episodes. Lovely stuff.

The Waste of Waiting for Inspiration

"Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction."

The Facebook of Stuff

Google created the world's biggest search engine by devising the best way to chart the relationships between the billions of pages that make up the Web. Facebook became the world's most important social network by building the best system for understanding the identities and relationships of the people who use the Web. A database that allows users to identify and search every object in the world could be as elemental, and profitable.

Straight out of Comp 101

"This is why I’m so evangelically excited about The Anthology of Rap, Yale University Press’s monumental new collection of rap lyrics. It feels like it was published, exclusively for me, by the vanity press of my own subconscious. It’s an English major’s hip-hop bible, an impossible fusion of street cred and book learning. The anthology spans the entire 30-year history of the genre, from Afrika Bambaataa to Young Jeezy."

12 Timeless Rules for Making a Good Publication

A List of Diner Lingo

Twist Image is Growing

First, I should mention a very fond farewell to Sean Howard, my previous boss and the guy who paved the way for me to take on his old role, quite frankly. He’s moved along to other endeavors, but his contribution to the company was massive and will be felt for a long time to come.

But the real reason for this – the cat is officially out of the bag. With a very unscientific assessment, I think it’s safe to say Twist is one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies in North America. And our little strategy team is growing right along with it.

For now, we’re hiring two more – and we’ll likely be following this up with others not too long after. But one thing about being here, even with the near doubling of staff in the 10 months since I joined, we’re more likely to absorb the work than hire sub-par just for the sake of hiring. So –  we won't be settling, we're looking for the best. We don’t care where you work now, the only thing that matters is what you’re capable of accomplishing and where you want to go. We don’t need attitudes. No professional douchebags. Just passionate people with a curiosity about the way the world works and an intent to make the work better.

Check out the job descriptions below. If either sounds like it could be you, shoot me an email at paul.mcenany@twistimage.com and let’s see if there’s a fit.

Senior Strategist

Strategist, Research & Analytics

Cool things are happening

The Resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon
Somehow a not so independent brand went from a cheap Southern beer to a cheap badge of hipster-ism. Perception goes a long way.

The Object-Idea
"It’s not enough for people to like your product. For them to really LOVE it, somehow they’ve got to connect and empathize with the basic, primal human drives that compelled you create your product in the first place. The Purpose. The Idea."

Experiments in the Laboratory of Consumerism
The history of advertising never ceases to fascinate...

Westerners versus the World: We are the weird ones
"We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food, TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect our brains to be distorted."

Meaningful Objects
"Ask anybody about the most meaningful object he owns, and you’re sure to get a story — this old trunk belonged to Grandpa, we bought that tacky coffee mug on our honeymoon, and so on. The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us."

Department of Cool Music Videos

Lissie - incorporating live weather

Arcade Fire - incorporating your childhood home

Department of Cool Videos

Jeremy Rifkin - the Empathic Civilization

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g&w=520&h=317]

 Steve Jobs - 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&w=520&h=415]

How New Media is Transforming Storytelling

First of All

A blog opens a store

Seems about right. If you know what an audience wants to read, you probably have a pretty good idea of what they want to buy, too.

Adidas opens a diner

Perhaps even cooler. As everything gets mixed and remixed, mashed and mish-mashed, why not retail environments, too?

The Not New of Old Spice

Bud points out what everyone else missed. The much praised Old Spice campaign was probably part lucky and part nurture, but anything but a big change of pace for the brand.

Less Talk More Rock

Fucking thank you. "I'm suggesting that the written word -- and to some extent the spoken word -- is speaking to your intellect. Your intellect has a relationship to the whole mind, for sure, but it's a little bit apart, it's kind of its own thing. It's a great thing, but it's kind of its own thing. Meanwhile, images, sounds, music, patterns, motion -- these things are speaking directly to your whole mind, often without troubling the intellect."

The R/GA Model

Just because it's interesting.