just another blog pressed for words

Seems like everyday there are new tools and apps being created for twitter that seek to make the experience better and more manageable. Conversations about whether or not twitter will be around in the future aside, today it still proves to be a valuable source of interesting information.

Mashable points to a new one that is quite interesting as well- twitter for busy people. Basically it allows you to see the latest tweet from any of the people you follow, so that those who post less frequently don’t get drowned out by the people posting multiple times a day.

Smart and simple way to address the vast amount of info and updates coming at you regardless of what app you use. I sometimes feel like I’m losing out on some valuable thoughts, info, links, etc from people who may only choose to tweet when they have something specific to share rather than a real-time, stream of consciousness post.

Worth checking out if you share my dilemma (twilemma? ah, I had to do it. Tabtabai will love that one).

We had this crazy idea. It’s summer time, we were drinking a few beers, we were talking about how we’d like to work in the beer category. So we wrote a few TV scripts, and we’re putting them up on eBay. Just for fun. We might even do it again for another category.

So, up for bidding, be you CMO or junior CW, are 12 beer scripts written by the Modernista! team and approved by Lance and Gary. Buy ‘em, present ‘em to your ECD or executive board; hell, shoot the damn things. If you’re the winning bidder, they’re yours to do with as you wish.

Here’s the full press release:

This Summer, Modernista! Offers Twelve Pack of Scripts on eBay

Modernista! is auctioning twelve television scripts for beer commercials on eBay. “We’re always brainstorming ideas for categories we’d like to work in, and since it’s summer, we thought of beer. These are some scripts that we really like,” said Modernista! co-founder, Lance Jensen. “We know how hard it can be to come up with good ideas on a tight schedule, and we don’t currently have a beer account, so we thought these might serve as a little inspiration for someone who’s looking at a blank page right now. Here you go. Good luck.”

“The scripts are for :30 TV spots,” added co-founding partner Gary Koepke. “But you have to buy them to read them. Let us know how it works out.”

The starting bid for the scripts is the average price of a twelve pack of beer, about $12.

Interested parties should go to www.ebay.com. The item title is 12-Pack of Beer Commercials. You can review the actual posting through the following quick search reference #: 270414979121

Here’s the direct auction link.

Update: we just got our first bid. Consider the seal tapped.

It’s important to have a life outside work. But when work and life intersect in cool ways to create change, hey – bonus.

Amsterdam creative talents Geoff Lillemon (Interactive/Motion Designer, Champagne Valentine) and Nate Naylor (Creative Director) designed the opening sequence to The Cove, the riveting documentary that won the Audience Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and opens in theaters July 31.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calls The Cove “Flipper meets The Bourne Identity.”

If that doesn’t make you want to see it maybe this will.

The film follows a fearless crew of international adventurers led by National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, and employs military spying techniques to record a horrific practice of dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.

The team is recruited by TV sensation turned activist Richard O’Barry, who in the 1960s was the leading authority on dolphin training, employed by the popular television program Flipper. When O’Barry realized the ecological impact of his work, however, he dedicated the rest of his life to undoing the damage he caused. The Cove tells the amazing true story of how Psihoyos and O’Barry embark on a covert mission to penetrate a hidden cove and shine light on a dark and deadly secret.

Naylor worked with producer Fisher Stevens and editor Geoff Richman (Sicko, Murderball). They strung together credits bound to an exhilarating sequence of high grade thermal imagery exposing the dolphin slaughters. Composer J. Ralph, owner of music house Rumour Mill (whose film credits include Lucky Number Slevin and Man on A Wire) added the emotional soundtrack.

The film continues to generate enormous buzz and positive feedback. Naylor attended the recent East Hampton screening where Alec Baldwin introduced the film, and it was also screened at the Nantucket Film Festival this past weekend.

There will be a special screening of The Cove at Modernista!’s Boston offices in the coming weeks. So if you’re in the Hub, give us a call for an invite.

and…if you feel inclined to find out more, visit this site:

Whether you’re an operational executive, or a creative director, one of your goals is to push out forward-thinking, innovative work. But is process the antithesis of creativity? Is discipline a dirty word? Not at all.

For a while, Google as been synonymous with innovation. The company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren’t part of their jobs. Those “wasted” work days that so many execs would squawk at brought us GMail, Google Trends, and now Google Squared.

But Google has recently taken a further step towards fostering innovation, by establishing some basic managerial processes to ensure employee’s creativity finds its way to high-level management. After all, more than 95 percent of Google’s revenues trace back to Web-based search advertising. It’s been great at launching services like GMail, but Google has yet to have the company really rally behind these services as legitimate products (GMail is still in beta).

The Harvard Biz Review writes:

Google is creating “innovation reviews” where department heads share promising ideas with Google’s top leadership, helping executives focus attention and resources on promising ideas early. As CEO Eric Schmidt said, “We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed.”

It doesn’t seem like Google is walking away from its ideals. Rather, it’s trying to couple its world-class approach to the “front end” of the innovation process with the world-class discipline exhibited by companies like Procter & Gamble. It might yet struggle to bring these two approaches together. But success could allow the company to create an innovation capability that actually lives up to the hype.

The take-away here is that processes which push innovation from the bottom up are good. Remember that saying: “sh*t flows downstream?” All companies need help defying gravity.

We need more of it.

Greed fuels self-interest. And we need more people who put their own self-interest ahead of the interests of other people.

I am not being facetious.

I understand that the common response to a statement like this is one of revulsion. And that is because I believe greed and self-interest to be widely, almost totally, misunderstood, by all levels of society and government, in almost every context.

A quick example, let’s consider Bernie Madoff. A very greedy man, right? Wrong. His “greed” did not fuel his own self-interest at all. His life is ruined. His reputation is shot. His ability to make money in the future is severely diminished, if not totally destroyed. And he will likely be imprisoned. If Bernie Madoff set out to be self-interested, how did he do? When it comes to taking care of himself, he is an absolute and total failure.

From the standpoint of true self-interest, Bernie Madoff took care of himself about as well as drug addict, an anorexic or a compulsive cutter. He looked after himself, his own interest, and the affairs of his life horribly. He’s a cheap hustler. If he were truly greedy, he would have done things totally differently.

In fact, let’s contrast what Madoff did with how a truly greedy and self-interested person would have done things.

Let’s assume the self-interested person would want to make money, get rich enough to afford leisure time and improve their life in such as way as to enable them to pursue whatever happiness they wish, so that when they die they can confidently say they had done everything they ever wanted to do.

With that starting point, and for sake of time, let’s assume also that they have an existing way to make money, like Bernie Madoff.

The truly greedy and self-interested person, you, would first want to make sure to have a long term strategy in place. In this way you can be sure of a long, and hopefully increasing, supply of money. Quite naturally, such a strategy must please all of your employees and clients. If you treat people poorly or lie to your clients to make a fast buck, eventually, nobody will want to work for you, or with you, and you will not get rich. You may even, as Bernie Madoff found out, find yourself under arrest, the money you have made could be taken from you and you could spend a considerable amount of time in prison. Assuming that these things are not on the list of dreams you have for yourself, then it is truly in your own best interest to make sure that people want to work for you, and that people want to be your clients.

How is this greedy? Because greed will fuel the most forward-looking visions on how to realize your selfish ambitions.

A truly greedy, wholly self-interested person will adopt the position that, not only must I treat employees well, I must treat them so well that people line up to work for me. I must treat them so well that they can’t imagine working anywhere else. I must also treat my clients so well that they too are lining up, and they too cannot imagine doing my sort of business with anyone else. I must contribute to my community in such a way as to make my company indispensable to it. And with my greed fueling me, I must not stop there. In fact, I must envision running my company in such a way that my community, my city, my state, my country, my planet, and, as we expand our influence and colonize space, my galaxy, my universe, my dimension, cannot even clearly picture its own image in the absence of mine, thus ensuring that my company is both omnipotent and immortal. And I must make lots of money while doing it. Then I will surely be rich enough and powerful enough to do anything I wish to do in life before I die.

This is a proper long-term strategy.

This is true self-interest.

This is greed.

And greed is good.

The parallel between enterprise and organism isn’t new, but this Booz & Company article explains marketing in that way, and I think it’s pretty insightful. Connecting the idea of biological DNA to corporate DNA, the lifeblood of an organization or organism, but also how ad agencies and marketing services providers all feed off one another.

“An ecosystem is an appropriate metaphor for today’s marketing environment. It is a dynamic, complex, and interconnected community in which marketers, advertising agencies, and media companies depend on one another, to a certain extent, to survive and thrive. But it is also a brutal, competitive arena, where a kind of “digital Darwinism,” or survival of the fittest, holds sway, rapidly distinguishing winners from losers. Companies that possess certain preferred traits in their organizational DNA or that have superior skills of self-adaptation are positioned to flourish in this ecosystem. Those without either face almost certain extinction.

The marketing and media ecosystem has arrived at an evolutionary threshold. Old structures and ways of working persist but are fundamentally challenged by newer, more dynamic, more innovative alternatives. Numerous developments have brought the industry to this transition point. Consumers have more control and choice. Their media usage has fragmented. Many more advertising platforms exist. And marketers are insisting on greater precision in targeting and accounting for their ad spend.

The recent economic turmoil only accelerates this evolutionary transition. Companies across the ecosystem have to acquire or develop three dominant traits to survive: relevance, interactivity, and accountability.“

I’ll say it. The internet is a negative space.

It’s a place where, under cover of anonymity, AssMaster6969 can freely speak words like “gay”, “retarded”, “douchebag” and a myriad of others that cannot so easily be woven into the polite face-to-face conversation which dominates his day as Assistant Co-Manager of WalMart. And he is not alone.

We’re all, as a global society, similarly repressed. And we are, as a species, in the process of letting it all out online.

Online there is little incentive to be positive when it is so much fun to be negative. Why say, “yes” when it is so easy to say, “no”?

Heaven help the one who makes herself vulnerable online. She will be set upon like hungry dogs on a fresh cooked ham.

Even now there is a legion of internet zealots setting their torches alight to come after me simply for speaking this heresy, unaware that they would only be crystalizing my point.

Yes there are pockets of positivity on the internet where everything is puppy dogs and rainbows, but these tend to be homogeneous spaces, “social networks” where everybody has already agreed on having something in common in the first place.

The more tightly knit the community, the more positive the dialog, generally. And all this feel good conversation takes place, essentially, behind closed doors. Username. Password. Play nice.

A fine example is to be found on my mother and sister’s scrapbooking site, Scrapbook.com. Indeed, the most uplifting and encouraging repository of artistic critique I have been exposed to for quite a while.

Reading the comments and encouragement there contained, I found myself wishing that less specialized parts of the internet, like the general advertising and marketing community for example, spoke to each other so sweetly. How different would things be?

Outside of such safe harbors, the internet is a storming sea of put-downs, trash talk and soul sucking.

The internet is going through puberty. It’s a teenager. And all of its high-school angst will eventually run out. When it does, a desire for truly meaningful connection will follow and the internet will undergo the same social revolution that marks the high water line of the 1960’s.

I believe that the internet is soon going to experience its first significant love bomb. A global, cultural shift in dialog where mean people are ferreted out of the general public discourse as a polar shift in attitude takes place. One which so drowns out people who want to leave snarky comments, general discouragement and nay saying so as to regulate them to doing so in specialized social networks, behind closed doors, separate from the main salon of the internet. Username. Password. Vent.

In their own safe harbors of negativity, they will clear the way for the rest of us to sail smoothly on the main internet, in spaces that do not require a username and password, on a calm sea of positivity, encouragement and meaningful engagement.

This shift in energy will be felt in op-ed and critique columns as well as main editorial and its accompanying two-way dialog. Perhaps even in the main stream media as a public hunger for inspiration, encouragement, hope and faith in our own ability takes hold.

When this happens, the human species will experience a truly profound evolutionary leap which has the potential to dwarf any renaissance previously known. And the world really will become a very different place.

Well that didn’t take long. Someone’s already built an amazingly detailed Palm Pre skin for the iPhone. Check out the video, this thing speaks for itself.

Check it out here.

Via engadget.com

At a WIRED event in NYC, Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon, shared his thoughts on how to handle tough economic times. And two things stand out from the recap by GigaOM:

1. Focus on the customer experience relentlessly. It is the lifeblood of any brand.
2. Improve the experience of your employees.

In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Amazon was one of the many Internet companies that saw its stock price dive. As a result, Amazon refocused its energies on the customer.“Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient,” said Bezos.

His tip on managing during tough times such as those faced by Amazon during the bust was to communicate more with its employees. With too many external inputs, Bezos thinks it’s important for companies to be talking with their people more often, easing their concerns.

Not a virus, but an actual bug living in a creative director’s monitor.