Ten years later, it’s not just a news story!

There comes a time in life when news loses its relevance of being either good or bad. News becomes a reference point to reflect back upon all that occurred in one’s life whilst the news was in making. Osama Bin Laden’s death news took 10 years in the making and today while some celebrate and others renew their vow towards Jihadi destruction; I find it all too personal.

10 years huh! Osama touched my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined. Still remember the day in Bangalore when the first news of the aircraft crashing into the twin towers percolated in our office. Rush to view news footage in my boss’s hotel room and collectively worry about the future of the world and our company over large pegs of Old Monk rum. We couldn’t even imagine the full extent of the impact in the next 1-2 years forget about the 10 years gone by. I still remember immediate pull back of new product launches and the layoffs that followed in my organisation soon after. This was hailed as a great move by the industry veterans; they all copied and did something equally silly in the short term. We never tire of being unimaginative in the short term do we? Would we have imagined in 10 years time the world would not bother about our quick move? The answer is a NO, we just couldn’t imagine beyond what America was stating – War on Terrorism! Let’s ride out the war years….

Personally at home I was doing my own share of silly things, in and out of relationships, getting married, changing jobs and such all while Osama was always in the news backdrop and world grappling with war on terrorism. But Osama never was just a news backdrop was he? He ensured I stayed without my share of Rossogolla, misti doi, Ilish maach sorshey bata (hilsa curry with mustard paste) from Kolkatta (they didn't allow my mom to carry them in flights inspite of her best assurances that they wouldn't blow up), shampoo packs while travelling and lost my sleep and mind while trying to catch an early morning flight. I had to learn to live while expecting the worst attacks - in the train I was travelling in, the mall I visited or the busy roads of Mumbai where I parked my car. Burkha and long beard made me uncomfortable, and I tried my best to avoid thinking about the hand that made my authentic kebabs so delicious. Osama ensured he distorted my life in every way possible.

This I refuse to acknowledge as just ‘news’ and debate implications as editors and TV anchors are busy doing. I will not make that mistake again. To me this is personal!While we were always aware of the possible outcomes of the manhunt for world’s most feared person, we could never have been more surprised with what changed in our lives in the mix.

Hushhhhh…..

Hush the time is not right,

Hush cause we haven’t slept all night.

There’s the wild wind blowing and passion inside killing

Hush in time, shall make it all right!

Dinner’s great, and conversations too,

But did you read the meaning of silence?

Hush our time’s not yet,

Hush in time we might be all right!

I like the silence, and all that’s unspoken.

You my dear, frankly gave a damn!

But then again you WYSIWYG,

Me self analyzing to the pits

Hush it had to be,

Hush; we might just be doing what’s right!

Ode to you...

Jakob Dylan and his melancholy got to me, or perhaps it's my state of being so lonely...feeling so one with the words of his songs .......

You're gonna say I told you so
I never should have let you go
Ain't it funny that here we are
The two of us in two different bars

In separate cages dancing slow
We ain't got nobody to call our own
You can always go back home
You just might be there alone

I'm drunk and you're insane
I can't quit and you won't change
Ain't no halfhearted romeo
Why do you treat me so?

Like our love's a joke
Hurts too much to laugh
Can't you least smile
When you call me that......

Seth Godin - Linchpin

via youtube.com

How many times have we recently thought of playing out the middle overs? It's the middle boring overs where a Rahul Dravid is needed...

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

Digital Natives, ah! a term I had long forgotten in the advertising world....

Making an Agency Digital to the Core

Why Digital Natives Are an Essential Ingredient

Posted by Phil Johnson on 03.12.10 @ 01:36 PM

Phil Johnson

I continue to be fascinated by how agencies change and how extraordinarily hard this can be to accomplish. Regardless of the difficulty, it's an essential agency survival skill. Great agencies learn how to continually reinvent themselves to the core, while merely good agencies often only change their outward structure. In some ways this pursuit of change, particularly as agencies define their relevance in the digital world, has been the great advertising drama of the last two years.

Hard to believe, but two years ago people were debating the merits between traditional and digital agencies, as if they had to choose between blue states and red states. Jump ahead to today, and most small agencies have carved out their own path. They have found a way to be true to their roots and have also made huge strides in their commitment to digital marketing. Digital vs. traditional no longer seems like a religious war.

PJA Advertising has made this journey along with the rest, and what I've learned is that change does not come from one defining choice. You need a commitment from the top. You need to redefine processes and roles. You need to bring in new resources and talent. More than anything, if you want to make changes that go beneath the surface to the core, you need to introduce a foreign agent that will chemically alter the composition of the agency. In our case, we didn't experience this degree of change until we opened our doors to the new breed of "digital natives" and gave them the freedom to introduce their digital DNA into the agency.

Specifically, digital natives are people who have spent their entire lives using the internet as an extension of themselves, and there are some good descriptions of the attributes that these people possess. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a nice post about digital natives on his blog, Web Strategy. Without the influence of these native speakers, most of us are doomed to clumsily translate conventional ideas into a digital format, rather than creating original ideas unique to the digital medium. We may master the outward forms but not the soul of the digital world.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating hiring some kid that spends 80 hours a week leveling his "World of Warcraft" character. I'm talking about a specific set of traits and insights that help transform an agency into an innovative digital marketing organization. Here's why every agency needs these people on staff.

They understand what happens under the digital hood. They see beneath the user interface to the underlying technologies. This gives them the ability to assess the true capabilities of a tool or platform and often manipulate it to their own purposes. They can define the digital experience on their own terms and not let it define them.

Digital natives have the skills to conduct their digital lives across many digital platforms with the ease with which an international traveler moves across continents. They can jump from platform to platform depending on its utility. This means that when planning marketing campaigns they can leave the beaten path to create more highly customized online experiences for consumers.

Digital natives treat their identity in the physical world and online as one entity. This makes their online personalities multidimensional and gives them better communications skills than the occasional visitor to Facebook and Twitter.

Because they conduct so much of their lives online, digital natives have a rich collection of experiences with brands in the digital world and a solid understanding about what kinds of communications are effective. With this fluency, they can expand an agency's vision for what is possible when developing strategies and campaigns.

Above all, digital natives get gaming. It's in their blood. As advertising and marketing agencies continue to adopt more of the principles and psychology of online gaming, all of us will need digital natives to help lead us through the maze of opportunities.

Agencies don't just need digital natives working in technical functions. We need them working throughout the agency in planning, media, account, and creative. They need to be allowed to experiment and explore and not be forced to work within old job titles and structures. If you're really serious about a digital transformation, these are the people who can shake up the organizational structure and push senior management to see the world in a fresh way. We're in a business that encourages clients to take big risks on change. We should be willing to do the same for ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Johnson is CEO of PJA Advertising & Marketing with offices in Cambridge and San Francisco. He's as irritated as everybody else that the iPad won't support Flash. Follow Phil on Twitter: @philjohnson

via adage.com

An art director, a flash artist or HTML person doesn't a digital make....when will agencies learn to go core! Maybe they never will with all the traditional foilks at the helm.

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

Social media's a party, but you gotta keep it low!

Social media as Google rightly puts it is a giant party; and to put it lightly it’s turning out to be a wankfest of immense proportions.

So called social media agencies and fad hunters are creating a state of near paranoia in pushing for growth by numbers. Hey hold on! Is social media about large numbers? Or is it about the likeminded coming together to communicate, share, work for a shared passion and create something in its wake?

I would tend to agree with Seth Godin’s of the world (read his take on social groups in his book Tribes), that it’s the latter. And the key to any social group is communication, so to that effect how can communication channels work when it starts emulating broadcast media formats of one ->many?

 Let’s take a look at our own social habits. It’s great to add new friends grow numbers and engage in fruitful communication with a group of likeminded people. But all this changes after we cross a threshold limit, 100’s for some 1000’s for others; somehow the communication channel begins to crumble beyond a size, the intimacy is lost and we find it difficult to keep track of the diverse set of comments, member movements, activities etc. While there are celebrities do have lists that runs into millions ( Shahrukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra etc) but you really have to ask yourself if they are really creating cohesive groups or using the social tools to broadcast? Can you imagine SRK responding to your critical analysis of his last movie and explaining his stance?

So here’s my plea to number hunters, get off those blinkers, take a step back and re-visit your strategy. Delve a little in the amazing world of obscurity in existence across the multitude of b/boards that are as old as the internet and definitely much older than the social fad. Maybe you will find your answers, I for one have always believed in my closed groups, its time you do too!

Posted via email from An idea, a day!

Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder

via blogs.forrester.com

This is an interesting trend. Now we have a new group of conversationalists. This nicely slots the twitter and FB status update population into the technographics ladder. While the data is US specific but the trend can easily be applied in Indian scenario, though cluster population will differ, but the projected hierarchy is still relevant.

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

Google Phone...This lays to rest the iPhone killer debate, cause Googlephone falls short of being the best andriod phone only!

Early reviews seem to suggest..this is the best Android device at best! 

What the web is saying:
ZDNET.com: Nexus One has some neat features — animated wallpapers, neat weather widgets and other items — but do those items qualify as “super.” Perhaps the Nexus One is just a “really smartphone.”
CNET News: Of course, the Google store-only purchase model marks a change in how cell phones are sold in this country. More devices will be added to the Google Store. The store will also expand to more countries and more carriers, including Verizon, which will join the program. What’s more, Verizon will sell a CDMA version of the Nexus One in the future.
Mobile Gazette: For some reason, the Google Nexus One seems to be a big deal with the media. The fact is that the phone itself is just an evolutionary upgrade to existing HTC phones, with another evolutionary upgrade to the software. From the point of view of the actual device itself, the Nexus One is hardly a revolution.
O’Reilly Radar: We’re moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.
The Globe and Mail: Instead of revolutionizing the market for handsets, as Google has done to other markets such as online web searches and online advertising, the introduction of the so-called “Googlephone” simply seems a way for Google to cement its role in web searches on mobile devices. Wall Street, consequently, has been relatively indifferent to both rumours and realities of the phone.

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