Things We Can Do

I just came from a meeting of a great group of smart, engaged, fully immersed, present and friendly ad people, called the Free Radical Syndicate, hosted by my amazing friend Laura Luckman-Kelber...unique I know, and fun! We were discussing the relative merits and de-merits of blogging. We were asking why in the face of so many interesting choices should I choose to spend my time in this way? "Isn't it just pissing in the wind?", "Does it really build community?" And if so "Isn't it a fake community without any of the tactile-ness of being in the same room with other people verbally sharing ideas?" My answer is I don't know. Ultimately I don't think one is better than the other they are just different tools used at different times for different purposes. You can opt out or into either. In the example of this here personal blog of mine, well frankly it is a bit of a shot in the dark as I am still a bit shy about my writing and therefore I do...

"If you want to engage the consumer, really get them spending time with your brand offer them a service not just an ad." - AdAge I think this maxim is absolutely true in terms of what makes a brand stick. I also think this is absolutely true of what the real Web 2.0 , some now dub 3.0 will be, and perhaps even the secret to fully monetinizing the web, UTILITY. The movement in this the next wave of the web is toward cleaning up all the junk we spewed in Web 1.0, because it simply is no longer true that if you build it they will come. There's too much built. If you're lucky they will try to come, but along they way they will stop off at Hulu or Youtube and poke around in Facebook and your brand is lost. People are busy. We know this. The consumer is harrassed, our goal, the goal of advertisers should be to acknowledge that and look for ways to make things easier, more useful and relevent. Crispin just got the Microsoft account they're biting this one right in the fa...