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Showing posts from December, 2010

Adversity exposes inner fabric as much as character

How we solve a problem says a lot more of the collective than individual  throw money at the problem  - bribe throw people at it - delegate scaret it - authority   ignore it - see it later hide it - conceal it   lie to the problem - all iz well  escalate it - go to seniority  influence it

CITIES

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ads worth spreading

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TED / ADS WORTH SPREADING CHALLENGE 21 December 2010     TED's dialogue with the global advertising community TED   has thrown down the gauntlet to the global advertising community with a challenge to raise the bar. A free-to-enter competition will consider the best work in categories such as Infectiously Compelling, Social Good, Industry Impact and Talk. The deadline for entries is 7 February 2011 and all work must be entered as a video between 30 seconds and five minutes in length. See the full guidelines here .   Chris Anderson , curator at TED, explains the aim of showcasing advertising that evokes as much emotion, thought and action as a TED talk: 'This is the beginning of a dialogue with the global advertising community to nurture a new form of online advertising. In a nutshell, the slogan is: Instead of ambushing attention, amplify it! What

what facebook does

decoding the obvious is more challenging  -  facebook compels a way of life. It is visual. It is a series of likes. it rapidly disseminates ideas and notions. in a world that lacks shelves to put up the glory of lives - facebook provides the rack. it is dual in gender - while for women the past is the future and for men the future is the present - for facebook both tenses demand equal weight-age.    it is breathing dock of life as it unfolds. it forces minds to think in glib. while it provides a lot - it demands a bit.   is one of the most visual ideas to come to life is a platform that elevates - levitates and gravitates collapses the distance between the stars and loosers the voyeur seems like the aware is personality and perception management  digital footprinting - states the obvious  jogs memory both ways - past and future  organizes lives - a live flip-book with moving and connecting visuals (parallel albums - linking albums - who else)  legitimizes visual voyeurism -

glib is good

the elevator pitch has outgrown its original industrial-age metaphor and expanded into mass culture. Terms like biztweet , twitpitch , and twitch are fast replacing Otis’ creaky box-lift, but the idea is unchanged. Of course, some might claim this is a bad thing, that constant elevator-pitching is just another symptom of a sick, overstimulated, hopelessly sound-bitten society in which glibness rules. But an elevator pitch isn’t a sound bite. It’s an idea in miniature: a full three-master built to scale in a bottle. It’s got to be complete, logical, and watertight, stem to stern. A good elevator pitch is the antithesis of a sound bite—and the cure for the common cable-talking-head ramble. Bloviators and professional obscurantists can confuse the basic contours of reality by stringing daisy chains of selective facts into dark webs of bigotry and paranoia. Yet ask them to boil down their conspiracy theories, nebulous prejudices, and voodoo economics to an elevator pitch and

densely vertical

An enigma, a burning desire, a defining ambition - one could describe this city in many ways and yet retain its imposing essence. This city is what it represents – a desire to overwhelm. This is a city, keen to outperform itself and those watching it. It is a sprawling outreach of human imagination, straddling menacingly, stretching and steeping simultaneously.  A city whose nights are brighter than its sunny days. A city bejeweled by its luminaries, where bling gets its bling from, where  diamonds speed on its roads. this is not a city but an exposition of the rare, the expensive and the priceless. With more Tiffany stores than coffee shops, this city is for the stimulated and not the depressed.  Where shorter structures create longer shadows that fall in a poetic straight line.When factories produce wealth and exhale toxic fumes through the world's tallest chimneys. This is a linear city designed for mobility and speed. A city whose highway is its soul...where the cent

inspiration vs. propitiating

Inspiration in theology - is a divine influence directly and immediately exerted upon the mind or soul Recently we went to The Marketing Forum. Being a creative, she expected to be bored by lots of case histories, graphs, charts, numbers. But one client told an amazingly creative story about the birth of a brand. It started when he was working in Belgium. Every day he had to try to sell margarine (butter-flavoured spread) to people who didn’t want it. It was dispiriting work. To cheer himself up, every day he went to the same pastry shop and ate a delicious chocolate pastry. Eventually it became clear to him. “I don’t like margarine. I do like chocolate. I’m in the wrong game.” Doing what you love is always the best idea. So he quit his job and began working on perfecting a delicious, rich, chocolate pudding. He worked on it until he had it exactly right. Now he needed marketing. He needed a positioning, a name, packaging, a brand in fact. So he went to see

finding meaningful exits rather than glorious ones

Of the several quests, we the people, undertake, as heroes, as successful individuals and mere mortals is to identify that one point of departure. WE refer to these points as hanging up of boots (retirement), we call it exit clause (investment) and as common folk we call it the end. As most human ideologies exist, the point of contradiction is built into this burning desire to discontinue and pursue an alternate set of activities that could deliver other forms of rewards.  While this is a topic of pulling out, we invest considerable thought in timing this exit to a perfection, the utopian point, of course is to pull out at your peak, so that the world remembers you as some sort of a legend. A player announcing his retirement whilst people have gathered to celebrate his recent accolades, booking profits and exiting while your investments have just peaked after a long hiatus ... the focus is towards getting to that point where the audience is busy visualizing a future and the hero feels

Truth In Opposites

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Well I know my theory of opposites is tuning into a personal obsession.  But the theory of human choices and existence does reside in between the YES & NO options we exercise. Somewhere the notion of opposites also CRUNCHES the theory of choice. Derek Sivers talks about open mindedness and tolerance using some unexpected examples of how easily we jump to conclusions and how always the exact opposite can also be true. Derek tells actually four stories: about a Japanese man asking for his way on a street somewhere in the U.S., an American (or any Westerner) asking for his way somewhere in Japan, about Chinese doctors being paid slightly differently, and the special rhythm of West-African music. All stories are real-life examples of things that we take for granted: addresses and street plans, doctor bills, music and rhythm. The genuine surprise and wonder they evoke prove how deeply entangled we all are in our own cultural conditioning and how that limits our view of the wo