funny you should ask questions, suggestions and mind congestions

These are my links for March 2nd through March 4th:

• 20 cool & creative business cards for your inspiration - awesome and nice business cards. Top 20.
• JESS3 / The State of The Internet on Vimeo - Internet statistics by JESS3. 30 000 servers are facebook.
• The Marketing Renaissance « Reinventing - Rishad on future of advertising. New talent. Via made by many.
• Is Facebook secretly planning an internet-wide payment platform? | Royal Pingdom - Facebook and payment standard?
• South Korea Will Debut "National App Store" and Open Public Data to Developers | Popular Science - Cool as ice. National app store.

URL:s are always nicer in their unnatural habitat; offline. Online, they hardly ever look anything special. They can be interesting and fun as in urlsthatactuallysaysomething, which is a bit tricky to read, just like long hash tags. That, alone, grabs your attention for a moment. Offline they can actually be beautiful.

These are my links for February 25th through February 27th:

• Share and mark up documents online | crocodoc - via @vonsydow; "what acrobat.com should have been". Perhaps. Useful in any case. Share, collaborate and review collectively on docs, ppt and pdf.
• Facebook Statistics, Application Statistics, Page Statistics | Facebakers.com - FAcebook stats and stuff and this and that.
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for August 2009 - facebook (social) games stats.
• A marketers guide to behavioral economics - McKinsey Quarterly - Marketing - Strategy - 4 pointers by McKinsey on marketers and behavioral economics.
• Iconfinder | Search through 128,345 icons or browse 347 icon sets - find icons.
• Leaf through! The Internet Case Study Book - Case study book. Presented via an aweful "digital book" reader. Come on folks.

I have a friend and ex-colleague, in the advertising business, who’s very careful to use the title consultant. Communications consultant, yes, but even more importantly business consultant. This is a guy who’s been to business school, started a number of companies, who loves advertising, has co-written, produced and directed quite a few TV ads. Not too common. He doesn’t care much about departments. And he sure doesn’t give a crap about titles. But he does care about coming across as a consultant. A client or potential client will never leave a meeting thinking they just talked to their future advertising agency (which is a bit sad). They just met a business consultant who often use communications as a tool to drive business results. This works to his favor.

Here are three variables that’s been very top of mind with me lately. Both because of client specific work and for the fact that they’re floating around the blogosphere. I’ve also included a triangle for you who can’t visualize how the three are connected…

1 - Dan Landin on advertising spend and measuring.

2 - Us, in the future, perhaps. By Bud Caddell.

3 - McKinsey, who get away with being damn good in any imaginable area it seems.

So:

Are advertising agencies OK with, and will they be proud of, for example, analyzing a client’s online store, identifying that they can help the client go from 16 clicks to purchase, to 3, with 26% of traffic on the way to purchase presently dropping out after about 8 clicks? Are advertising agencies proud of a case like that? A case that helped a client earn (or rather keep) a couple of hundred thousand or millions of dollars a year, worth of revenue with a fairly “simple” move like that, that stand no chance winning a gold lion?* A business consultant would.

Thing is, it’s OK to be perfectly alright with “just” being about advertising tomorrow too. Advertising agencies can be advertising agencies because they’re needed. And it’s OK to be of the opinion that agencies should/will have to change. Because advertising agency can be a very troublesome name/definition. Either way; the triangle should involve business consultants. Because we’re not considered that.

* Yes we did. It was actually 16 clicks to 3 (and hopefully that’s very rare), the revenue part remains a secret.

Presentation de l'exposition Soulages
Uploaded by centrepompidou. - Independent web videos.

“It is the absence of colour at its most intense, at its most violent, and it casts an intense and violent presence on colours, even on white”
-Pierre Soulages

You have to taste salt to taste sweet…

Actual physical books made me miss this awesome piece; The Sandpit, by Sam O’Hare. You’re off the webz for just a short time and everybody’s praising something new. This little film is just soooo beautiful. I’m massively impressed and in awe with people who create stuff that leaves you sitting with mouth open…

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

When/if a company comes up with the most innovative way to stifle competitors’ innovation (innovative ideas and strategies), they are;

a) Innovators

b) Stiflers of Innovation

c) Hypocrites

Just wondering. Google are kind of in a position to have to prove one or the other. Failing to do so will prove them c…

These are my links for February 20th through February 24th:

• CheckoutCheckins - Beta - Your check-ins contextually enhanced. Told as "story".
• TED 2010: Reality Is Broken. Game Designers Must Fix It | Epicenter | Wired.com - Games fixing real world problems. Jane McGonigal says so.
• Flashlight Projector Map Concept - Cool GPS flashlight. Directions as you flash and go.
• Measure the Web Like TV and Brand Advertising Follow - Advertising Age - Digital - new way of measuring online ad effectiveness (and pricing). Web GRP, in Ad Age.
• C O D E O R G A N - wonderful little idea about websites being music. Why not?
• PubSub - Real Time Web Search - pubsub realtime.

When two worlds collide. Pretty powerful. Lovely to see a geezer with tattoos sticking up on his neck singing love lyrics. His mom must have shed a tear. From BuzzFeed via that digitally remastered old school account man also known as @mjsverige (don’t be fooled, he knows swedish now!).