Essential books for strategic planners and accounts
I started to put together a list of books that should be a rough guideline for people that are interested in advertising or just started to work in an agency. My focus is on literature for strategic planners and accounts and not necessarily for creative departments, sorry. The collection should cover both classics about advertising but also the latest books especially from other related disciplines. I collected the following books over the last months, my source was mainly blogs of other planners or people working in the industry. If you have the feeling that I forgot an important book, please leave a comment.
Essential books for planners and account (10-03-08) work in progress
Decentralized communication XING group
Yesterday the DCNTRL’s invited my to join their Xing group about decentralized communication networks as a moderator. Let’s see how this communication platform develops and how many other people are interested in collaborations in the field of marketing and communication. If you want to chat with us about empowered individuals drop by.
Free products and services?
I just found Twitxr, it allows you to twitter and integrate pictures into your posts.
1. Take a picture
2. Type a short text
3. Post it
If you would add a comment feature to Twitxr you could call it blog.
But the interesting thing about all this new applications and tools is that with the launch of the service there is most of the time also a iPhone version, public API and some widgets for existing services available. Looks like that developers don’t think about the product anymore but also care about users. Or in other words not only products are getting free but also services.
Brainfood
More stuff for your brain. I just had a look at the February and March edition of Fast Company. In February you should read Clive Thompsons article “Is the tipping point toast” - is the power of influentials overestimated? Malcom Gladwell vs. Duncan Watts.
In the march issue you should read the article about “15 reasons why Google is number one” and the small snippets about “the world’s 50 most innovative companies”. As I remember it’s the first time that with Anomaly and ad agency is in the ranking. For more information about their business model you should check the current issue of Brand eins too.
Free Economy
Chris Anderson published a first preview of his new book Free in the latest Wired magazine and on the Wired website. A great article with some very interesting thoughts that will make you think about your business from another perspective. Can you offer something for free to grow?
The medium is the message
The new SinnerSchrader website is online quite for a while, and I was thinking about their website approach. Why shouldn’t you use all the nice applications like Google Documents, Twitter, XING or Flickr for your own corporate site? Most of the content that you would upload is already out there. You don’t need to write the same story a second time, and I get the feeling that by linking to other websites the reader gets even more the impression that the company and their content is real and not just shiny-corporate-press-release-information. Ok, on the other hand you can get problems with the usability and probably not all information can be presented in your corporate design but I think the way you are using the medium and the feeling you can create with it is more important.
BarCamp Senza Confini 2008
Finally I will participate tomorrow at the Barcamp Senza Confini in Klagenfurt. I’m curious about this conference format and the topics of technology, web 2.0 and social media. Let’s see what’s up in Austria, because I got the feeling that up till now there wasn’t a lot going on. The list of participants is loaded and I’m motivated so let’s see what happens tomorrow.
See you in Klagenfurt
Ad ideas for the Optimus Maximus Keyboard
The Optimus Maximus Keyboard of the Russian Art. Lebedev Studio looks very interesting. The OLED technology open up totally new ways of interacting with hardware.
I’m curious if it is possible to access the keyboard via net, so that you can run banner ads on the space bar? Another cool things would be if you connect it with the online commercial you are looking at your display, so that you just need to push one button (with a tempting looking picture on it) for direct order, more information, gift voucher…
Adscene #1: The George Parker Interview
If you are bored these days or just feed up of writing papers like I am. Go the Werbeblogger and check out the Kaisers hilarious interview with George Parker (AdScam) about swearing, agencies, advertising, WPP and ad schools.
I hope there will be soon a second part.
Happy New Year, this is the last post for 2007. I’m off to Portugal with tons of books to read.
YouTube Playlist Feature
Thanks to Igor Schwartinski for showing me the playlist feature of YouTube.
This is the thing I was always waiting for. With the playlist feature you can let YouTube play the videos of your playlist in a row. This may not sound so interesting because it’s a basic feature of every iPod, iPhone or you name the device. But in case of YouTube it brings the platform to a new level. It’s not just uploading and sharing your videos anymore, now you can use it as a web radio or as internet music collection and this for free. Have you already experienced that you find a lot of songs and even videos of your favorite artists at YouTube? Even the latest tracks and some live mixes are online and only in a few cases I couldn’t find the song I was looking for. For me this makes YouTube to a very interesting alternative to the hype machine.
With the send-a-friend option and sharing of your playlists you have the same concept like iMix in iTunes. If everyone is tagging the songs right YouTube should be able to suggest you new music that you will like, based on the playlists of the other users - goodbye last.fm. So if you have unlimited internet access with your iPhone you don’t need to buy any music from Apple you can get everything for free from YouTube.
Do only I get the feeling that Google is doing a lot of things right?
