Think

Back in my school days, I hated writing essays or anything that had a required word or page count. The topic could have been “if you had a unicorn, where would you go?” I still would’ve silently cried at the heavens and shook my fists at the english teacher.

“Mike, stop that.”
“Sorry, Mrs. French.”

I never really understood the reason for writing a two-page essay on something I could describe in one. I had my shortcuts, ways to lengthen the work. Like starting each paragraph with a sentence that described what I will be discussing. Like using an entire quote when I only needed a third to get a point across. Or simply being redundant (“the character of Timmy in the book Annabella Average: A Mean Lady, always loved to stare and ogle at Annabella Average, the mean lady.") Since all of my brainpower went into clock-watching, I was ill-prepared for analogies and metaphors and whatnot. Actually I used whatnot a lot, and didn’t learn to mix metaphors until college, where I got tired of these shortcuts and handed in writing the color of Barney.

I once saw a man do 20 back flips in 20 seconds. Granted this was on vimeo, but still...it was damn exhausting to watch. What if he tried to do 19 more equally amazing tricks? In a row? That’s just ridiculous.

I had my first Pecha Kucha experience on Monday night. The term loosely translates to “chit-chat,” though when I walked into the venue (Le Poisson Rouge), chit-chat took the form of shouting over live music. Good thing I brought my glow sticks to navigate through the crowd.

There are skills and habits you acquire when you live in New York. Like standing by the subway doors instead of the middle of the train (or its variant, getting out of the station and standing lost right at the top of the stairs). And then there is the all-important walking through the crowd.

14 Street Union Square is perhaps the busiest station I use - it has multiple lines railing through it. I’ve been using it since junior high, and while it has gone through some cosmetic changes, the swarm of people shuffling through has always been chaotic. One of the skills you need is a technique from aerodynamics called drafting. In science speak, it’s a way of "reducing the overall effect of drag or air resistance due to exploiting the lead object’s slipstream." In language I can get behind, drafting is when an object uses another object in front of it to go faster. Race cars use this maneuver though it’s not confined to vehicles.

On Friday I had the pleasure of attending a CreativeMornings session – a monthly meet-up organized by Tina Roth Eisenberg (swissmiss) and Carl Collins. This one, conveniently located in 45 Main by HUGE, (thanks for the tasty breakfast, neighbors!) featured Armin Vit, a man well-versed in design and its relationship to branding.

If I were to condense his thoughts into one point, it would be this: Reality gets in the way of branding. It muddles the way you experience and think about the companies, products, even logos that marketers work so hard to crystallize in your precious mind.

I had dinner at Souen last night with a couple of fellow strategists, including my vegetable-hating colleague Ivan Askwith. In the mood for fish, I surveyed my options: salmon, sea bass and – the fish of the day – fluke.



I’d had fluke before but couldn’t recall the taste or feel...whether it’s meaty or delicate, etc. Not wanting to reach for my iPhone (like several of my neighboring patrons), I asked our waitress what fluke was like. I went with the sea bass.

Had I seen this Cool Hunting post on an SMS-based app called FishPhone, I might've chosen differently. Developed by the Blue Ocean Institute, it provides info on safety and environmental concerns relating to seafood. You text 30644 with the word “FISH” and then the type of fish in question. Here’s what I got back from my “FISH fluke” text:

The drive for gamers who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s was most likely to reach the last level, face off against the final boss, and be the one to declare “hell yeah I beat it.”

Endgame - particularly needing to see what the last stage and boss looked like - was the dominant mentality back then, partly because of the hellish difficulty in games, partly because of a game’s unalterable nature, which isn’t points off its score. That’s how games were, and that’s what gamers - and everyone else - expected from the industry.

Nowadays games have turned multiplayer; even single-player experiences have elements that allow themselves to be part of the community. Connectivity has changed the industry, has allowed games to reach a much broader audience.

In a Gamasutra article, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell says, “…you can’t be a game company anymore, you have to be an entertainment...

Shown: a bridge. Also shown: a boat.

A good chunk of my morning commute consists of a half hour express bus ride - think Greyhound, where all the seats face forward. More often than not, someone within a two-seat radius is usually blabbering on their phone, loudly of course because, well, we’re not on a hovercraft with an engine running on quiets. What they talk about I couldn’t say. I’m too aggravated to make any sense of their sentences.

If I wasn’t 5-feet and change, if I was a hulk of a man or if the scar below my lower lip was instead a fissure across my face, I would play a game with these walkie talkies. It would go something like this: if someone not more than five feet from me starts blithering into their phone, I flip mine open and start a phantom conversation, paraphrasing whatever the person is saying, loudly of course, because of the whole hovercraft thing. The mission objective is to get the person to turn around or step up and say, “what’s your problem?”

Browsing all the news about the Tropicana redesign and subsequent reestablishment of the old design, I wondered what did the online RFP look like? Did anyone even think of digital until Arnell's designs were set in stone? What would their goals be? Luckily, New Media Strategies (NMS) gave me a peek into a social media strategy for Tropicana.