Ira Glass (the genius behind This American Life), shares techniques for telling amazing stories.
July 28, 2010
2
Bear with me a moment
By Stephen in communicationWhy do we sometimes say “bear with me” as we begin a story? Why do we sometimes ask an audience to hold their questions to the end of a presentation? Why is it important in some instances to communicate without interruptions?
Or is it because we want to reach the conclusion of the story as efficiently as possible? Is it because we know we are about to tax the attention of the audience, and feel a need to ask for their patience, indulgence or forgiveness? Are we trying to avoid distraction or derailment that might cause the audience to forget some of the points? Sometimes one or all of these are true. However, I think there is often something else going on in these situations — something more important and also more interesting: many times when we say this what we are trying to convey is a holistic idea. Intuitively we understand this calls for special conditions around our communication, and it is these conditions we are requesting.
What is holism? Read the rest of this entry »
July 28, 2010
0
The Big Ad Gig 2010
By Josh Webb in AdvertisingMy mom always said if you’re good at something, don’t give it away. But hey who cares, it’s for the ad council.
July 28, 2010
0
A Spirit of Good
By Josh Webb in Change, Industry, News
If you haven’t noticed recently, there has been an encouragingly large amount of good being done in organizations. The Pepsi refresh project is a platform that allows causes to submit their ideas and they are voted on by a community. The winner gets a fairly large donation from Pepsi. American express has also joined the good with their Member’s Project with a similar system.
So what is with all the good? Is it just a PR stunt to make them look… good? There may be some of that there, but I also think there is more. A recent study has shown that 50% of the brands recognized by consumers as inspiring outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 45%. Earnings per share of companies with high employee trust out performed low trust companies by 186% (WatsonWyatt.com).
So there seems to be a connection with brands that make great products with happy employees and having a system of good embedded within the organization. It is most likely because they are working for more than just a paycheck or glory. They are working for a company that cares about the world and proves it through their actions; which in-turn makes an employee care. This can then have a domino effect that leads to better designed or built products, better customer service and happy customers. Sure it sounds idealistic, but it’s being proven true.
So what can we do as marketers? Look for ways to integrate good into our organizations. Not just giving money to some org that you can get a tax write-off a PR for. But create a tie-in between your employees performance and how you give back. Create internal rewards in the form of giving. Create internal platforms to allow your employees to set goals and compete against other departments. It will become a virus that inspires your company and in the long run will increase the bottom line.
July 28, 2010
0
ColorMatrixFilter Power!
By cwalburn in Labs, flash, technology
The ColorMatrixFilter is a really useful filter for color manipulation of an image in Flash. It is basically a 4×5 matrix that allows you to change the RGBA value of each pixel based on its current RGBA value. You can look at it like row 1 is R, row 2 is G, row 3 is B and row 4 is A. Columns 1-4 also represent R G B A and column 5 is the offset value. The new value for each RGBA component of the color is calculated from its respective row. If R G B and A denote the result values and r g b and a denote the source values and a cell of the matrix is denoted mrow col , then the new value of the pixel can be calculated by doing some matrix multiplication:
| m1 1 | m1 2 | m1 3 | m1 4 | m1 5 |
| m2 1 | m2 2 | m2 3 | m2 4 | m2 5 |
| m3 1 | m3 2 | m3 3 | m3 4 | m3 5 |
| m4 1 | m4 2 | m4 3 | m4 4 | m4 5 |
*
| r |
| g |
| b |
| a |
| 1 |
=
| R |
| G |
| B |
| A |
If you are not familiar with matrices, the result can also be written:
R = m1 1*r + m1 2*g + m1 3*b + m1 4*a + m1 5
G = m2 1*r + m2 2*g + m2 3*b + m2 4*a + m2 5
B = m3 1*r + m3 2*g + m3 3*b + m3 4*a + m3 5
A = m4 1*r + m4 2*g + m4 3*b + am4 4*a + m4 5
In this post I’m going to talk about how we can use the ColorMatrixFilter to desaturate/supersaturate images and how to make them fade towards a specific color. Read the rest of this entry »
July 27, 2010
0
The future of the Multi-Touch web
By Josh Webb in Innovation, digital, technology
So multi-touch is no longer the Minority Report of the future. The iPhone, iPad and iEverything else has helped pave the way for mainstream uhhh… touching. This is all cool and everything, but currently designers are tied to making an application when they want to design for multi-touch. With the release of the Magic trackpad and multi-touch being integrated into so many devices, when will I be able to design a regular website for multi-touch? We are currently in an in-between phase where regular websites needs to be more minimalistic to play nicely with the iStuff and I’m ready to allow our imagination to go wild without having to think about the apple store or multiple platforms.
July 24, 2010
1
Technical Management in Digital Advertising
By Charles Duncan jr. in Advertising, Innovation, Inspiration, News, People, technologySince my transition from developer to manager of developers 4 years ago, I’ve been fascinated with art of technology management within an advertising agency environment. While technology management is well documented for software development companies, little exist for the development of complex web applications within a creative based environment. Below are a few high-level thoughts I’ve considered when approaching the art of technical management at an agency.
Organization within an Unorganized Setting
Where as the software development life-cycle is based on months and years the agency development life-cycle is often based on weeks. This is made even more challenging considering requirements tend to be more loosely defined and effected by non-technical stakeholders (the client). The agency environment forces you to have a more of a “run and gun” mentality. While you want to have: objects, requirements and goals clearly defined up front, timelines and bandwidth don’t always allow for it. One true rule of development is that clean organized code is necessary regardless of the size or scope of a project.
Letting Developers Develop
Probably the #1 goal of anyone managing developers is to make sure your developers have everything they need to write great code that can be delivered in a feasible timeline. While management requires the ability to sit in hours of continuous meetings daily, developers need the ability to write code for continuous amounts of time. Being brought into unnecessary meetings or forced to hunt down project status or assets is a huge detractor to this. Doing these things for the sake of code being written requires a very selfless mindset.
Ownership of Technical Failure or Success
With a waterfall method being the easiest and most dangerous process to follow, it’s easy for technology to be the last informed of project progress and status. Early in my career there was a situation where I was told not to attend a meeting by the organizer since “development was not being discussed so you would be wasting your time”. When I told the my boss afterwards he stated in similar situations to tell the organizer that “unless you want to be responsible for the technical success of a project I should attend this meeting and determine if it’s appropriate for myself”. From initial requirements gathering through QA there are enough moving parts to warrant ownership from one individual. For the sake of the project success that person should be technical in nature.
Fighting Upstream
Combined with QA, development is the last stage in the overall process. This results in being the last informed within the project. Within technology management you have to always make an effort to seek project status and information particularly when you know the project is active. You have to be willing to walk into meetings that you weren’t originally invited to and challenge deliverables from other departments.
Promotion of Innovation
Unlike others areas of the advertising industry, digital is totally based on constantly progressing technical mediums. Rather the output is: desktop browser, mobile or native os applications, there are numerous considerations beyond the design and content which can attribute to the success or failure of a project. Innovation requires a understanding of theses constantly evolving platform so known boundaries can be challenged. The technical management lead needs to be at the forefront of these trends.
Tags: Innovation, People, technology. management
July 10, 2010
1
Getting Wise to Sweet Talk
By Tony Quin in brand
Just finished the annual Society of Digital Agencies meeting in Vegas. Lots of great thinking. Biggest take-away for me is the need to redefine what we mean by brand. Consumer empowerment in the digital age has changed the game. Consumers are not only in charge, but know it. So what defines a brand has gone from what brands say to what they do. It’s not that persuasion doesn’t work anymore it’s just that the points of persuasion have to have some tangible value in a consumer’s life. That means anything that better enables a consumer to achieve their goals. This is all very well, but we need a mental framework to think about this. I like the idea that a brand is like a person you meet. The basis for the relationship rapidly moves from first impressions to personality, character and consistency; real stuff with real value. Brands have to create real relationships now, the days where they could rely on their good looks and a little sweet talk are gone. Consumers rightly expect more.