I created this image in a digital design class at Boulder Digital Works. The only direction we had was that it should be inspired by the notion of unfiltered information. At work here are some basic blending and layer techniques in photoshop. People in class dug it.
From March 11 – 17 I lived a life in Austin that stretched my limits, brought me much joy, brought me closer to friends and made Monster an integral part of my diet. Here’s what I learned about navigating Austin at my first SXSWi.
I’ll add stuff as it comes to me. Please share what you learned in the comments.
Here is a post I wrote for our Boulder Digital Works 60 Weeks blog. It’s about bow the program is progressing and the work everyone involved needs to do to make the program great.
http://bdw.colorado.edu/blogs/60weeks/2010/02/17/boulder-digital-works-but-only-if-you-work-it/
After Ari Newman of Filtrbox spoke at Boulder Digital Works Idea Studio I had one lingering question. Can web startups that target small businesses continue to do so once large companies move in and begin using the startups’ products?
Filtrbox is a social media monitoring service based in Boulder that came out of Tech Stars. It was recently snapped up by Portland based Jive Software.
Filtrbox started out serving individuals and small companies. The goal was to give them a more efficient and organized way of monitoring conversations in the social space. When the alternative is Google alerts and scouring social media all day, this is can be a lifesaver.
Prices that were once in the hundreds of dollars are now up to $10,000 per year for up to six users. This gives customers unlimited use on the platform.
At last week’s Idea Studio, Ari spoke about now being able to service major corporations. However, this comes with a pricing plan that essentially cuts small business out of the picture.
This is where I started wondering. With any web start there is a drive to first prove the concept, then get users then reach profitability. If you start with small businesses and low cost for use with a good product, as Filtrbox did, you can garner users. Eventually the price has to increase to support the business.
That spurred Filtrbox to move on to larger companies with deeper pockets as their core market because that’s what the company had to do to stay alive.
Does this make small business a stepping stone? Can a company like Filtrbox actually continue to service small business in a meaningful way after the big dogs start paying significant prices?
I’m keeping my eye out for similar stories. Pass them my way if you know of any.
Boulder Digital Works Idea Studio numero dos included Warren Ng and Riley Gibson from Napkin Labs recounting their recent trip to CES and taking some time to talk about their company’s crowdsourcing model.
Warren’s presentation about CES was enlightening. He described football fields of convention center space filled with gadgets, doodads, 3-D TVs, augmented reality and cool remote control helicopters.
He showed video of super thin TVs, TV interfaces you control with your hand, cameras and all sorts of stuff. Warren was overwhelmed at the show and I was overwhelmed looking at all of the gear.
Thinking more about all of the technology on display got me thinking that there should be a Cabinet level Technology Czar. I know all the new stuff at CES is for early adopters, investors, hard-core gadgeteers and people whose job it is to stay on top of the latest technological trends. However, I think for many people, walking into Best Buy feels like CES.
This is how I execute ideas.
Part of the new lineup of offerings in this phase of The 60 Weeks Program at Boulder Digital Works is called Idea Studio. It’s a weekly spot for someone with cool shit going on to come in, talk about it, answer questions and interact with the BDW crew. Idea Studio may or may not be open to the public. That’s still being ironed out.
Up first was Andrew Hyde; entrepreneur, start up guy, organizer and a bit of a rabble-rouser. Andrew’s Idea Studio effort included a run through what drives him, how he operates online, what shiny stuff on the Internet he was likes, his opposition to much of what is being done in the crowdsourcing world and some talk about mashups.
What resonated with me most about our time with Mr. Hyde was his proclamation that you cannot care more than him. Andrew is a driven dude and he claims that it is impossible to care more deeply about ones work than he cares about his own efforts. I both believe him and want to challenge him on this.
It is refreshing to have people out there challenging others to care more about what they’re doing. This forces people to put up or shut up, find something they care about and work to realize their vision.
I have these characteristics in me and I liked hearing Andrew put this part of himself front and center for the world to see.
I think this mindset comes down to execution. There are people who have ideas and do nothing with them. Then there are people who put forth every effort to execute on their ideas. Until that idea is realized, it eats at you to work to get it out.
I execute. I am at BDW to learn how to better execute and how to expand my arsenal of ways to execute on an idea. It was great to spend time with someone who goes at his goals as aggressively as Andrew. It forced me to dig deeper in my own efforts and see just how much I can care and how hard I can work.
An important lesson learned in eleventh grade came back at Boulder Digital Works recently to remind me of its relevance.
The lesson is that ideas, plans, campaigns and arguments must be rooted in truth. Otherwise they are garbage.
A teacher named Joe Zabielski taught me that lesson the first time around in his AP U.S. History class during the fall of 1994. As the first test approached, all of the seniors who had taken the course the previous year warned us the premise of the main essay question would be false. Excuse Me? No Way. This was nothing we had ever come across.
They said, “It’s gonna happen. Be ready.” Twenty of the smartest kids in my grade went in skeptical and then proceeded to bomb the test because the question was very complicated, its premise was indeed false and we had no idea how to answer.
Since we didn’t know how to react and its complexity made us wonder if it was false we put our best bullshitting skills to work and were totally called out. When the tests returned, the cream of Agawam High School’s eleventh grade crop was greeted with 40s, 50s and 60s.
Zabielski inspired me to think deeper than nearly any teacher or professor before or since. Upon returning the exams he said if someone presents you with a question, goal or task that is inherently false you can’t bullshit your way through it. You are obligated to explain why something isn’t true and proceed from that foundation of truth. If an essay, idea or campaign is rooted in bullshit, it will eventually sink. Read the rest of this entry »
Tweeting is a bit like dating. Everyone has their own rules and when you break them, it can be painful. This happened to me a couple weeks ago when I started the day with the best intentions and ended it being called a spammer by two tweeters with a collective following of 10,328 people. This angered me because I’m not a spammer or an automated direct message sender. However, I may have made a faux pas in my tweeting and breeched their rules. Nonetheless I don’t think I’m guilty of being a spammer as accused by @andrewhyde and @LarkinBC.
I’d love to grab a beer with these guys or anyone else interested in talking through what happened, what the inherent issues with twitter are that contributed to the problem and what the best strategies are for getting our message to the people I was hoping to reach.
My career as a twitter direct message spammer stemmed from my organization of a social media effort to launch a video I produced at Boulder Digital Works. The purpose of the video was to let people know what we were up to, what questions we had, what topics were prevalent and most interesting to us, what paths we hoped the program would go down and what types of people we hoped would come in to teach during our remaining time.
My plan for getting the video out to the world included posting the link to the video on BDW’s site, our 60 Weeks blog, all of the students’ facebook pages and our twitter feeds. In addition we each direct messaged people who we thought would be interested in the piece. The list of people we direct messaged included those directly involved with BDW, folks in the interactive/startup/social media community in Boulder and prominent people in the interactive/advertising/social media world from all over.
To be clear – nothing was automated, everyone sent out their own direct messages and no one was meant to get the message more than once.
On December 10, 2010 the first Boulder Digital Works 60 Weeks class will finish. We’ve created a video called The 1210 Project to celebrate this pre-anniversary. You can find more about this on our new blog http://bdw.colorado.edu/blogs/60weeks and you can watch the piece below.
Does it have to be a spot: Or Can Brands solve a problem?
March 9th, 2010Over the past month, two points of view and one Super Bowl spot wove a narrative for me that triggered some big questions. Wieden+Kennedy’s Tony Davidson via Vimeo, W+K’s Dodge Charger Super Bowl spot and design legend Bruce Mau speaking via Skype at The University of Colorado all came together in my head around big questions of how designers and agencies may tackle big problems in coming years and how I can help.
In the first piece, a 30-minute video, Davidson just sits on a stoop and riffs on everything from culture to technology and creativity to how agencies may operate in the not so distant future.
One thought that resonated with me was his idea that at some point agencies may have teams of people who figure out how to solve big problems and then take those solutions to relevant brands who can foot the bill for implementing the strategy. I want to be on a team like that.
Davidson’s thoughts were an interesting juxtaposition with W+K’s Dodge Super Bowl spot, Man’s Last Stand. The moral of the spot is that guys put up with a bunch of shit in life, but it’s all worth it because they can drive the car they want: a Dodge Charger.
The spot was well executed, but in the end didn’t leave me with much. I already knew that a lot of dudes bitch about their wives and like to drive muscle cars. This felt like ground that has been plowed before and overall very safe. Being the agency’s first work for the American car company this probably makes sense.
It’s clear W+K continues to work magic with a 30 second spot as evidenced by their brilliant new Old Spice campaign, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. However, the Dodge spot has since been all but forgotten.
The final piece of my thought provoking triumvirate was Bruce Mau staring down at me and 99 other people during the University of Colorado Innovator series. Mau was supposed to be speaking in person, but had to cancel. From his home office, Mau spoke via Skype of the end to interruption and the dawn of a new type of creative content that actually enriches people’s lives.
A recent and much lauded example of a company providing a utility instead of interruption for their customers is Nike with their Nike+ system that let’s runners measure and save run data via a connection between their iPod and their sneakers. What’s great about this effort is it further embeds Nike into running culture while meeting a need of many runners to capture data about their workouts.
A very different example is IBM powering National Geographic’s Genographic Project. According to the project’s web site, the effort seeks “to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. In this unprecedented and of real-time research effort, the Genographic Project is closing the gaps of what science knows today about humankind’s ancient migration stories.”
The entire project is powered by IBM technology. It includes a robust web site, television specials, and a traveling consortium. As the project expands it provides great brand recognition for IBM and the company gets to show off its capabilities while contributing valuable information that is reshaping what we know about human history. How many campaigns can you say that about?
I bring these two examples up because they seem to be the types of projects more brands will need to be a part of to be relevant to people in the modern world. These types of efforts display product capabilities, enrich people’s lives, and don’t take the form of something that interrupts a person’s media consumption like a television spot or YouTube overlay ad.
When clients come looking for a spot, site, or any deliverable I think it’s time that agencies start asking “does it have to be a spot or are there other more meaningful ways to reach people.”
What if instead of producing their Super Bowl spot, Wieden+Kennedy and Dodge decided to create a campaign based around An American Car Company Reinvesting in America? Maybe Dodge could have sent 1,000 trucks down to New Orleans to haul away all of the dilapidated houses and wreckage remaining from Katrina. To help with the work, they could hire unemployed contractors. Once they hauled everything away they could give the trucks a special paint job and sell them as pre-owned (Saints colors anyone?).
The effort would definitely be filmed and a companion site could launch telling the story of Dodge reinvesting in America after the country bailed it out. In the end you would see Dodge vehicles in action and a company showing its value to prospective customers in a way that actually solves a problem and isn’t vulnerable to TiVo.
I explained this idea to my wife and she thought it was crazy. Maybe it is, or maybe people have just become accustomed to brands communicating in a certain way and anything outside the standard forum is hard to fathom. I just know it would be awesome if brands considered such efforts. I can’t see a reason why we shouldn’t solve real problems and put brands on display at the same time.
It seems there could be much more impact than a few million spent on another Super Bowl ad that fades away in a matter of days.
Tags: advertising, Bruce Mau, Commercial, Dodge, Old Spice, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Tony Davidson, university of colorado, W+K, Wieden+Kennedy
Posted in Industry Commentary | 1 Comment »