Jump

Gotta give it to the Japanese for being more than a few steps ahead of us in developing a multitude of uses for the mobile phone that go well beyond simply… talk.

They were one of the first to widely adopt short messaging (“SMS” or “texting” here in the U.S.) and more recently they’ve introduced us to the wonderful world of QR codes — created by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994, and designed to allow the contents to be decoded at high speed — for bringing greater efficiencies to manufacturing processes.

And, now the marketers have gotten hold of them.

Afterall, what could be simpler than pointing your reader-enabled phone at a code (get your reader here), snapping a photo of it in all it’s 2-D glory, and then seeing where it leads?

Retail: How about a wine store where one can learn all about the provenance of a wine on the shelf that’s been tagged with a code?

Brand Advertising: Maybe try a “billboard video” that Calvin Klein would like us to enjoy in the privacy of our phones

or my personal favorite —

Financial Services: If you are lucky enough to live in Denver (or travel through DEN, as I recently did) where else but a local bank’s website

would you visit to download a copy of Moby Dick or Treasure Island? Brilliant.

Google likes QR Codes and I must concur. My bet is that they’re going big.

Drop me a line

or give me a call

and let me know if you agree.

I don’t know about you, but my attention span seems to be decreasing with each passing year.

I have been trying for about a month to finish the latest Jonathan Franzen novel, “Freedom” (The New York Times Book Review calls it a “masterpiece” — I heartily agree), but as much as I love the book, I find myself very easily distracted and unable to focus for periods long enough to experience the “zone” —  total immersion in the material — which has been for me one of the great joys of reading.

I am far from being the first to make this self-observation.

Earlier this year,  Nicholas Carr published his newest book, The Shallows, in which he argues, quite persuasively, that the Internet, specifically — and technology, in general –is re-wiring our brains, inducing only superficial understanding.

Does that mean we’re getting stupid?

When Carr first published his provocative idea in a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2008: “Is Google Making us Stupid?“ he was challenged by the likes of futurist James Cascio, and others, like Stephen Johnson, who think about the impacts of technology on humans.

They argue that “the increasing complexity and range of media we engage with have, over the past century, made us smarter, rather than dumber, by providing a form of cognitive calisthenics.”

I love the way that sounds, “cognitive calisthenics,” almost as though surfing the Internet and checking one’s BlackBerry and downloading magazines onto a Kindle were strength- and endurance-training exercises for the mind.

But, I have to say, spending a little bit of time with The New York Times earlier this summer didn’t provide me with much support for the we’re-getting-smarter crowd’s view.

From general distractedness to impatience and forgetfulness, it seems there are evils awaiting us with each new gadget we add to our connected lives.

And here’s where the rubber meets the road — self assessment.

I took this online test to measure my ability to focus and my ability to switch quickly between tasks. As an inveterate multi-tasker, I was certain of my mastery of both. And then I got the results:

They show that I am, indeed, a high multi-tasker — and this is really not such a good thing: I am more easily distracted — and I am slower at switching between tasks — than those who multi-task less.

Does that mean I’m getting stupid? I can’t say.

But it does make me want to put away my keyboard, turn off my BlackBerry and get back to finishing that book.

As I write, I am on my way home from my way second favorite city in the U.S., San Francisco, (and tracking my flight on the go-to site for road warriors, flightstats.com)

where some of the Wilson team and I spent a few days at the DMA2010 Conference & Exhibition.

En route to San Francisco, I spent a couple days in desert-spa-and-resort favorite, Tucson. While there, I went for an invigorating run, one afternoon, in the Catalina foothills, and then mapped my route at mapmyride, the site for those of us who seek quantitative affirmation of our physical fitness accomplishments.

The thing I like most about mapmyride is the point-and-click method of route mapping — with a few clicks of your mouse, the software makes the point-to-point connections and fills in the route and the distance  — with a result that is both visual and numerical. Brilliant.

While running, I started thinking about those mapmyride connectors and their analogous equivalents in the human realm — friends, colleagues and acquaintances who put people and ideas together — and how invaluable they are to the flow of ideas and the transaction of commerce.

Steven Johnson, a Brooklynite, and best-selling author of a number of books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience, released a video a couple weeks ago promoting his latest title Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (available in retail outlets and via download today).

The premise of his book — and the accompanying video — is that great ideas don’t come from a single person having a Eureka! moment, but instead are the product a multiple minds working together in almost accidental ways due to chance encounters made via networked connections. He cites as examples the English coffee houses of the Enlightenment and the Parisian salons of Modernism, and talks about how the Internet is functioning in the same way today.

I was so taken by this video — not just the content, but also the illustrated form, that I had to share it. For my money, it’s well worth the 4-minute investment.

As I came back to reality last week, after an incredible week of biking in Puglia, 

I came across an intriguing article in the Wall Street Journal about people’s decision-making habits or, perhaps more accurately, the tendency of some to delay decision-making due to ambivalence.

As I read it, ambivalence about decisions is a sign of maturity. And as I interpret it, that means I must be quite mature, given my inability to make some personal decisions lately.

You see, it all started with the iPad.  When it was first launched, it looked to me like a glorified iPod touch.  But, as I’ve watched the sales numbers rack up (see the latest eye-popping projections here) and I’ve peered over the shoulders of friends and colleagues entranced with its seemingly magical properties, I began to do research on all the fabulous ways it’s being used for everything from basic PowerPoint presentations to the development of super-slick digitally published content. As I learned more about this marvel of a device, I found the argument for succumbing to iPad-mania growing ever stronger.

Then last Monday, when my weekly must-read, the New Yorker, announced that they will begin publishing on the iPad,

I thought, “That’s it, I’m in.”
And, so I was.

At least until I saw the Research in Motion announcement that very same day about the launch of Playbook, the new tablet for the BlackBerry crowd.

It looks like it’ll have some sweet features such as a camera and the ability to play Flash. Better yet, it’ll connect to and share resources with — what is for me — the ultimate indispensable gadget and a constant companion — my BlackBerry Tour.

So, as I look at it, there are today two very viable contenders for my tablet dollar — the user-friendly iPad with its sleek design and aura of cool v. the much more practical PlayBook with a set of functions that fits hand-in-glove with things I’m already doing all day, every day.

Although it is a truism of direct marketing that choice depresses response, I think my own hesitation is just that, certainly not a decision to do nothing at all. For as soon as I thought to write about this topic, the tablet product announcements began in earnest — including recent announcements from Dell and Microsoft — as they try to grab their share of the spotlight among all the new entrants in the coming tablet wars lining up for battle.

As we witness a proliferation of gadgets which may, ultimately, replace the PC and the smartphone, there are definite benefits to NOT being an early adopter. For as the tech titans battle it out for market share and pile on the features, we all win as consumers.

That much is clearly decided.

I like to think of myself as someone who makes informed decisions. Whether it’s researching flights on my favorite travel site or picking the perfect restaurant for a festive night out, I am completely hooked on the instantaneous access we get to endless streams of information online.

As a consumer, I love the ease and convenience of using the Web to help me with most, if not all, of my daily tasks. But, as a marketer, when I begin to think about all the data sitting in all those warehouses and all those clouds, it gets me a bit overwhelmed.

After all, in the direct marketing world, we’ve been working a very long time to achieve the holy grail –right offer/right person/right time. And, how do we do that? Data.
With so much of it out there — little bits left behind as we course through both the real and virtual worlds — it’s piling up fast. Just ask Google.

So, how do we manage it and make sense of it all?

Apparently, quite nicely, thank you.

I’ve been admiring a company called [x+1] for some time now. They’re doing a lot of number crunching to create some sophisticated algorithms that get marketers awfully close to the holy grail. Even the Wall Street Journal has picked up on it:“Websites are gaining the ability to decide whether or not you’d be a good customer, before you tell them a single thing about yourself.”

Companies like x+1 may seem a bit out there in the realm of direct marketing, but when we consider the meta-trends, we can see “digital” is already happening in many, many places today.

A recently released Winterberry Group whitepaper forecasts that by 2012, U.S. marketers will dedicate $7.8B on marketing data and associated services, with “digital” comprising 10.8% of the mix — over $840MM. The other 89.2% of that spending, of course, will be for offline or “non-digital” data and services.

So, here’s the thing —  in 2008 the number was $10.3B total spending — of which just 3% ($300MM) was digital. Data — and digital data in particular — is proliferating. But, as spending on offline data/services decreases each year, spending on the digital equivalent isn’t picking up the slack. It’s just that much more efficient to handle, manage, manipulate and store electronic information. Period.

It certainly isn’t lights out, yet, for offline data  — nearly $7.0B in spending in 2012 is definitely no small potatoes. But if I’m going to make an informed decision for the focus at Wilson — my money’s on digital.

I was in Columbus yesterday, the home of my alma mater, The Ohio State University.  As I drove around town there was quite a bit of chatter on the radio about proposed changes to the Big 10 football schedule when Nebraska joins the conference. The ardent discussion centered on the prospect of the Ohio State-Michigan game being moved from its current place at the end of the conference season (where it has been more or less since 1935) to somewhere in the middle, as part of a change that will split the conference into two divisions to accommodate all 12 teams that will comprise the Big 10.

Still with me?

Those who follow college football know that the Ohio State-Michigan game is one of the most long-standing, intense rivalries in the game. In 2000, ESPN called it the greatest sports rivalry at the end of the century. Some of my more vivid childhood memories are of the game and the antics of the legendary Coach Woody Hayes and his turncoat, former assistant, Bo Schembechler — and of the zealotry of the fans on both sides of the state line.

This is a game, mind you, that has been played 106 times – and has decided the conference champion between the two schools 22 of those times — so changing the date of The Game means seriously messing with tradition.

Ah, tradition.

I unquestionably appreciate the benefits of tradition – the sense of consistency and the feeling of belonging to something larger and more permanent than oneself that can come with ritual and custom. But, as I listened to the fans, I wondered if it isn’t time that the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry had a little shake-up — just like the rest of us.

Like many in the OSU class of ‘85, I consider myself relatively tech savvy – I am as addicted to texting, email on my BlackBerry and the morning paper on my Kindle as anyone else I see in my travels – but, man, the pace of disruptive change in the world of technology and media makes you afraid to blink.

Which is why, in a bow to “tradition,” I have been somewhat late to the social media party– and its myriad opportunities for connecting and sharing.  (Just look at the latest Pew Research study to see how big the party already is.)  After all, I rationalized, aren’t relationships best nurtured and maintained via phone calls and face-to-face get-togethers? Isn’t that why, as the leader of the agency, I’ve been racking up hundreds of thousands of miles all these years?

Until now.

Earlier this year I asked a few of the more digitally-oriented members of our team to plot a social media strategy for the agency as a way to promote our business.  Now, like any other 21^st century marketing firm, we’re on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and you’re reading my second post on our new blog.

And, thanks to the influence and helpful advice of such dedicated social media practitioners as Michael Gass, we (and I) have embraced the not-so-new as a way to give ourselves a voice and create opportunities for marketers to get to know us.

It is, however, a very long way from setting up a new Twitter account to making the words work in a way that says, “this is who we are” and “this is what makes us unique”.  The seeming ease of executing in social media belies the hard work it takes to do it well.
Being the perfectionist that I am, I know that we’ll do things that will make me cringe, but we’ll get it. We have to.

So, as much as I still believe strongly in the power of an in-person meeting (I’m definitely not giving up those miles!), I am genuinely enthusiastic about the power of digital media to broaden our reach and to get us to consider opportunities in places we’ve never been before.

It’s time we messed with tradition.

Seriously.

I jumped out of a plane Saturday.

Actually, it was more of a push — a push from my tandem partner at the sky diving center — that got me airborne.

But, the rush of free falling from 9000 ft up was more intense than anything I’ve ever experienced and, amazingly, unlike anything I’d ever anticipated. To borrow a very over-used phrase:  I have never been more in the moment.

It was the same for the friends I was with — shout-outs to our fearless leader, Marion, and fellow flyers Darryl and Terry — and for everyone else we watched drop from the sky.

As each tandem’s chute opened and they became visible in the east, besides the faint whoops and hollers we could hear on the ground, what became most obvious was the mile-wide smile plastered on the face of every first-timer.

And then, it was over.  Days of build-up to the big event, filled with nervous excitement and anticipation, ended with the flutter of a parachute as we glided quietly to touch down.

In the 48ish hours since my smooth landing, I’ve been thinking about what motivated me to get in that very small plane, fly out over the East End of Long Island — and literally put my life in the hands of a complete  stranger.

As a business owner and self-identified adrenaline-junkie, my willingness to take risks has been rewarded time and again. Whether I’m committing untold agency resources to blow out a new business presentation — then watch us go on to win the pitch — or I’m leaving much too little time for traffic on the way to the airport — but I make it to my seat just as they close the plane door — my penchant for calculated risk-taking grows with each successful outcome. So, for me, skydiving was something that I just had to do.

But, now comes the real test.  As we embark on our 10th year in business, I find myself wanting that next interesting challenge — the client with the intractable business problem, or the new new thing we can add to our capabilities that will truly set us apart as a business partner. But, I also see myself struggling daily to let go and hand over the day-to-day operations to my very competent team — so that I can do more of what I love and more of what helps drive the business.

On Saturday, I trusted a guy I’d first met only 15 minutes before to guide me safely down to earth, but like lots of business owners, I’m still working on how best to operate the helm at Wilson RMS.

Jump will be my way to put it out there — thoughts, feelings, questions, and maybe even a few answers — as I learn to trust in a completely new way. Let me know how it sounds to you.

— Dave