Something Borrowed, Something New

After a lot of soul-searching I recently decided to leave Spike DDB and return to my planning roots. I've joined Sapient Interactive as their Director of Marketing Strategy and Analysis. I will head planning for clients based in the NY office and look forward to developing idea-driven, results-oriented, all around kick-ass interactive advertising.

It wasn't easy to leave behind Spike DDB, but the journey of a planner is iterative and always changing. Good planners should be prepared to recognize change and embrace it. In fact, all planners are really "change agents". However, planners also need to take the lessons they've learned on the journey and apply them to the present changes in their careers. Right now, the world is experiencing no less than the dawn of a new age. Call it what you will, but planners should be on the front-lines of this revolution--and no its not an evolution--its too fast, too powerful, too unpredictable. There is a generation growing-up that has only known always-on communications. And they don't care which screen it comes at them from, as long as its interactive. So, in the next several weeks ahead I will humbly be administering a self-taught crash-course in web 2.0.

The good thing is that what I take with me--from all my experiences--is an idea-driven mentality. I mean, have you seen the sheer amount of bad ads online? Like any channel its full of clutter and waste that will never inspire a consumer to act, engage or exchange. Being idea-driven is like being media-agnostic--its the best idea for the right medium at the right time. That's what I will attempt to bring to my new clients and colleagues.

In a strange turn-of-events, joining Sapient Interactive takes me full circle. I started my career in Chicago at one of the pioneers of user-experience design research, E Lab. Taking tools and skills I learned in graduate school for Performance Studies and applying them to real-world design was a watershed moment for me. Finally I was applying all that knowledge, finally my ethnographic skills could affect real stuff. As I was moving on from E-Lab, Sapient acquired the agency and integrated the discipline into the core practice. Since then, Sapient has started an interactive division. So, while I left design and moved into advertising, I am now returning to the world's largest independent interactive advertising agency deeply informed by a practice I began my career in. I'm looking forward to strategizing again for brands based on a truer set of insights into what people think, see and do. Wish me luck.

Micro-Interactions are the new Sticky

Sometimes some people just say it better. I count Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, Robin Chase, Henry Jenkins and now David Armano, VP User Experience Design at agency Critical Mass, in that category. His powerpoint slide is an elegant engagement with the potential of the digital age and the evolving consumer. Micro-interactions lays out a positive, almost zen-like expression of the path consumers now have available to them to engage with brand experiences. I tell you, this is it.

Now, with Armano's lay-out we can visualize the landscape and our place in it. But there's a long way to go to understanding how consumers can co-create value with brands through new behaviors enabled by technology. We have to go deeper and spend more time with consumers than ever before if we hope to anticipate and participate with them. That will come from robust analytics tools like Bridgetrack (presciently created by Sapient back in 2000) and qualitative understanding of interactions online through virtual ethnography.

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