‘Tis the season for all blogs everywhere to dole out  their own highly subjective, widely tweeted, kinda obvious prophecies. I have always been fascinated by the Gartner Hype Cycle methodology – because it acknowledges long-term thinking vs. predicting for the next year. I thought it might be cool to GIF their  hype curves over the past few [...]

There are rooms full of men murmuring “where are all the women?” – from VCs to university deans to conference organizers. Great! Their job is done. They asked the question – what more can they be expected to do? They tried their diversity chops and the unequivocal conclusion was that “there are not enough women [...]

I got the neat opportunity to speak at the 4A’s Strategy Festival last month. It was a rapid 5 min pecha kucha style talk.  Here’s the talk and the deck to go with it. This video made me realize that it’s probably a good thing that I am not a coffee person. Need to calm down. [...]

Back in March this year, New York went a little crazy. For the lottery. Mega Millions drew the largest jackpot ever. Despite platitudes about the chances of being hit by lightning being higher than winning, we bought them tickets. For those few days, that’s all anyone would talk about. You could smell everyone’s secret faith in lady luck [...]

Tahrir on Tweetdeck Past midnight. February 6, 2011: I was frustrated by the incompetence of the coverage of the Arab Spring by most American TV news networks. Tahrir square had turned into a tent city. Andy Carvin‘s twitter account was my primary news source. I had the Tweetdeck app open and Al Jazeera‘s online live feed on my browser. The [...]

Rachael Morrison smells every book in the MoMA Library collection and records the call number, title and a description of the smell of each book in a ledger. This is part of a performance titled plainly Smelling The Books. The performance romanticizes the book: the physical artifact. When I first read about this, it seemed [...]

Internet memes are inherently silly. That does not mean we can’t learn from them. Regardless of their content, Internet memes are spreading far and fast with no advertising budget. They are leading people to land television deals, interviews, book deals, and revived music careers among other things. Sounds pretty nice, huh? We tried to break down why this is happening.

Data is abundant today. In a world where data is easily accessible – ‘data about data’ or metadata and how we manipulate it will become increasingly important. I’ve observed this with the music industry – but I think the principles apply to any form of digital commodity.

We are very liberal with the use of metaphors and models in our language, thought process and problem solving approaches. They act as bridges between concepts and disciplines. But without some vigilance, these metaphors notoriously pigeon-hole us into a partial suspension of reality.

Planners have supposed to have gone beyond digital, made something and figured out our T-shape. But what do strategists and planners do? What is our craft? Every person in an agency is a problem solver. Art directors solve by making things beautiful, copywriters solve by writing and technologists solve by making the interwebs tick. And [...]