Creative directors are not the key to delivering amazing creative ideas. We hold them up in high regard for their creative brilliance and original thinking but they are not the white knight sent in to solve all our great challenges.

Winning and delivering great work comes from a culture of creative excellence. It’s a unified desire that spans your creative, strategy, account, production, and amazingly even your business development teams.

Creative types are rewarded within their agencies for their creative excellence. Account types are typically rewarded for the size of their business and the associated profit margins they keep. Business development people are typically rewarded based on the amount of revenue they generate of any kind. These differences highlight a fundamental flaw in aligning an industry (or an agency) to deliver excellence for it’s clients and elevate the overall quality of work.

If your business development people can’t communicate your passion for amazing creative work at the earliest meeting the opportunities will never arise. If your account and project management teams can’t constructively and positively challenge stumbling blocks from clients, partners, or even operational issues then your ideas will always be watered down. But most importantly if they’re not incentivized, trained, or inspired to think differently they will never want to develop the necessary skills to create a culture of creative excellence and fight to do great work.
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If you’re not aware, the term Internet of Things refers to the interconnection of everyday objects (large and small) via an array of sensors and radio tags that would allow for a vastly “smarter” world empowered through technology. The amount of information that would be generated is staggering, but innovators will find opportunities to leverage this data (in conjunction with data from your social profile) to create amazing experiences in every day life delivered through this new found insight.

Imagine how a person’s lifestyle enhanced through digital experiences might change if devices, applications, or even marketing experiences were able to pull from a massively expanded pool of data delivered by understanding the current state of things they interact with such as their car, their personal electronics and appliances, the buses their kids go to school on, all the items in their refrigerator, and even their clothing. If each of these items were tagged and at minimum reporting their “identity” and location but potentially even sharing their operating status, power consumption, fuel level, capacity, current activity, or history of use computer logic could understand and make intelligent and highly relevant recommendations based on these factors that could be used to enhance any digitally enabled experience.

Let’s re-imagine a great marketing as a service example from recent memory: Fiat’s Ecodrive. Fiats’s brilliant Ecodrive system allowed your car to monitor your driving behavior and via their website was able to make driving recommendations on improving your driving style to increase fuel efficiency. Unfortunately it wasn’t real time or wirelessly driven but it did demonstrate a clear value to consumers and marketers how rich insight into your behaviors could create valuable experiences. Now imagine if experiences like that were all around us and operating in realtime without the need for thumb drives etc.
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Ever heard of diminished reality? It’s much like the augmented reality, except instead of using computers to add visuals, it’s about taking things out in real time.

That easy enough with a still image, perhaps, but not so simple with video…  Technical University of Ilmenau’s figured it out, just draw a circle around the object you want to disappear and it practically disappears as the image synthesizer reduces the quality of the image drastically, removes your target and re-enhances in just 40 milliseconds per frame, using object tracking algorithms and guesswork to maintain the illusion as a camera moves around in 3D space. The framework’s presently running on Windows, but the team says they have plans to port it to Android soon.

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Another great one for our Viral Video Mondays: A decidedly tech-flavored parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” featuring iPads, iPhones and Twitter.

Straight from the twisted minds of the Pantless Knights — the same guys who brought you “New Dork” and “I’m on a Mac” — comes “Tweet It,” a reimagining of “Beat It” that pits iPads versus iPhones.

Just #tweetit

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I meant to post this Friday, so let’s change my Viral Video Fridays series just for once.

It’s amazing how brands love to use someone else’s big splash and ride it for their own … after the amazing success of the Old Spice campaign, many brands chose to follow the same spot archetype — which should have been somehow trademarked –. Sesame Street launched their Smell Like A Monster. With over 5 million views, this cute spot quickly went viral.

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