It’s worth sharing my thoughts from the PSFK Conference last week. Overall, Piers and “the purple shirts” did a great job lining up a great bunch of speakers. Thanks!

I really liked Grant McCracken‘s thoughts on Pattern Recognition. Often I find it is easy to notice the brilliant digital strategy, it’s describing it (concisely) to clients that is difficult. What is the tag that you can attach to it that makes it obvious?

During the Tomorrow’s TV panel, I took plenty of notes for my strategy partner, Ivan. They mentioned the scale of participation when it comes to interactive TV. Does 35,000 viewers equal 500 active participants? We all need to be clear about goals from the outset, because engagement does not just mean eyeballs. Ivan often talks about timeshifing and placeshifting of TV. To take it a step further, the panelists noted that content often depends on the screen you watch it on. You want to watch a show like The Wire on your flatscreen TV, you want to watch a video blog on your portable device and you want to play with interactive TV online. Makes sense once you actually think about it.

My favorite presentation of the day was by Ricky Van Veen of College Humor. It probably didn’t hurt that he had lots of great video to entertain us, but he also had some smart points to think about when putting videos online. College Humor employs the “hit” strategy over the “programming” strategy. They have to make 9s or 10s because a 6 is pretty much worthless. With all advertising, be transparent. People are likely to forgive you if you don’t try to trick them or pretend like it didn’t happen.

There’s more, I’m sure. But for now, I’m still waiting for all the information to settle.