Famine City

Work meet personality

At times, we’re a branded voice. At times, we’re a voice of brands. Yet still, on occasion we’re a solo voice. This post is about a band of voices, my work team @bridgeworldwide. Bridge Worldwide, my employer, won a Cannes Cyber Lion Gold for Pringles Can Hands banner ad last week. It’s a banner ad. Yup, it’s a DAMN good banner ad. While I appreciate the award and love the banner, what stands out to me is the team that helped create the piece and their personality. Their personality made it into their work and it is delighting lots of people.

If you are a creative at an agency, you probably know what I'm about to say, but if you’re not familiar with a creative/advertising agency and thinking about getting in the industry, read on.  Creative work is hard. It’s time consuming, takes a specialized talent and dedication to a craft, like painting, art or music. You have to put thousands of hours to be just mediocre. Rarely do phenoms exist anywhere in life. Most are a product of hard, diligent effort and creative-types fall into this category. Everyday creative-types put their heart and soul into something that probably will not make it out of the trash can. They are probably in a career where they never saw themselves in the first place. Now let’s get a little deeper. Their work gets judged with ferocity at an agency—too much this, not enough that, doesn’t meet brief, not sure it’s on strategy, not feeling it. Most people hate criticism in any form and creatives put their work through the ringer daily. It simply isn’t easy work.

As I reviewed our award winning work, I was (obviously) proud. I knew exactly which wittism was written by who, and could see individual contributions come to life in the banner—meanwhile in the name of our client, Pringles. Even the most cynical fark readers had some great comments about the piece. Again, at the end of the day, what I see are the personalities of the people that I work with, unabashed, comical, amusing and clever.

It’s interesting to me that so often we seem to lose our personality in our work. We lose ourselves in our work. Even though it’s always for the client, it’s us. It’s our personality they are paying for. Our uniqueness. Our individual viewpoint on the world we live in. It’s not so often when I’m able to see that much of our own personality come to life in the name of the brand and I like it. This banner ad serves as a proud reminder that there can be an intersection of the two.  Congrats to our team at Bridge Worldwide.

follow me on twitter @marty_b
#pringles
#canhands

MTV = Reality TV Programming | YouTube = Music Videos

MTV is a shadow of it's former self. It's morphed from a once music television station to something else called reality television-where nothing is real and everything reeks of fake-authenticity. If you're looking for music videos, go to YouTube. I recently posted how YouTube is preserving music history, but equally important, YouTube has overtaken MTV as the best place to locate your favorite music video(s).

Want to remember what MTV used to be like? Insert irony here. 

Below are some of the top all time videos, take notice that over 2/3 of the top 15 videos are related to music. It makes perfect sense this no longer belongs to MTV. People used to congregate around the TV to watch the top ten list to see a video at a specific time. Recall there were actual premieres of videos? Remember Michael Jackson's Thriller? I would love to see how many times the Thriller video would have been watched if YouTube had been around--not to mention 25 years later it has over 37-million views. Were YouTube around then, Thriller would be the first video to hit a billion views.  We're a now society and MTV just can't deliver it in the old format, nor do they (even) try. 

I don't watch MTV or one of their subsequent channels.They used to be the middle ware between music, music videos and their audience. We're a right now culture. MTV doesn't have a right to own the audience any longer where you wait for videos. However, I do think they jumped ship pretty quickly. At last memory, the last time I remember an actual music video on MTV when channel surfing is somewhere around 1996. You can call it forward thinking or you can call it the adoption of Jerry Springer mentality: Create the lowest common denominator of programming and watch viewers flock. While I recognize they had to change their model for a lot of reasons, MTV today reminds me of watching Jefferson Airplane morph into Jefferson Starship--you just don't recognize it any longer. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Mobile technology winner: LBS (location based services)

I'm a big fan of mobile devices and technology. Outside of pure interest it's also my career as a tech guy at an advertising/interactive agency. Simply put, I'm an enthusiast in my personal and professional life. One of the questions that I get most often is this: "which (mobile) thing is going to stick?" If I were a bettting person, I'd say location based services are here to stay. In fact, this technology is exploding. 

LBS defined (Wikipedia): A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. 

I started giving this some thought over the past weekend. My family and I were driving to Lake Cumberland for some much needed respite. As I was driving, I was noticing during our drive to see who was using a GPS device in other vehicles. Overall, through about 100 cars and counting, I was about 35%. That's not hard science, but directional enough for my purposes and in case you're wondering, yup, I'm a dork. So overall, I will say that GPS and location aware devices have began creating the connection between location and service for consumers over the past number of years. My TomTom is filled with tons of useful information aside from maps, but it's in a passive way. In other words, it's providing much information simply based on location. I think this is important as just a few years ago, people may have believed even that was too big brother'ish. In other words, I believe the influx of smart phones and GPS only hasten our acceptance as consumers being OK with our devices knowing where we are. That was perhaps the most important hurdle to cross. 

After the initial penetration or hurdle of users being aware that you're tracking has occurred, the challenge is value back to the consumer--there isn't a shortage on our location based needs right now. There are tons of these apps growing everyday, ranging from G-Park (locating your parked car) to Virtual Graffiti via Graffitio, all immediately available from the App Store. Simply said, we've broken the seal seal on location based technologies. There's nowhere to go but up in my mind and if I'm going to place my bets people are going to adopt this technology by leaps and bounds because off direct value they provide in our lives. You can often replace many of the things your GPS did with a phone, though I believe dedicated devices serve a need much more efficiently. 

My dream, please give me a map of your store. Any store. Any mall. Any grocery store. Then allow me to Google what I'm looking for in the store. In fact, let me know which aisles each of my list of stuff is in and I will be your patron for life. I was looking for pearl sugar the other day for Belgian Waffles, no luck. Though three separate people swore to me they had it, I'd rather Google than go on the disgruntled employee hunt. 

Obviously, outside of the iPhone there are far more challenges to getting applications deployed, but developers are smart. They'll figure it out. Meanwhile while everyobe is trying to figure out how QR codes, bluecasting or location based services get rolled out, remember you heard it here, location based services will be a huge industry and has the most upside for all of us. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Have the yellow pages been reduced to this?

I am sitting here having my tires looked waiting and reading a book. I look over and notice the magazine rack. It's a normal magazine rack like at the supermarket with the rental magazines, job mags and so forth. Then it caught my eye, the Yellowbook. I remember that as the yellow pages, maybe I'm wrong on the brand. I am dumbfounded that a once valuable home resource is now, well, useless (at least for me). I remember the last one dropped off my house. I took it directly from the porch to the recycle bin. I've replaced it with (guess) Google. Another once useful item rendered useless by a better tool and changing consumer behavior. Wow. Simply astonishing to see what it has been reduced to in our lives.

Follow me on twitter @marty_b - this is a mobile post.