Hearing the tiny bird sing while you're being assaulted by dozens of screeching eagles

I thought this comment I put on Noah Brier's blog merited its own post here:

Over the summer, someone asked me how I can keep track of all the digital information - music, RSS feeds, Tweets, iChat, and whatever file I am working on - at once.

I said, "Take a second to think about everything you are experiencing right now. You're listening to me, about three other conversations going on around us, the air conditioning. You're seeing me, my desk, the carpet, the wall, the wall art, out the window, the trees. You're feeling the air around you, the clothes on your body, the floor beneath your feet. You're smelling the dust from the vents and the coffee in this cup. If you tried to explain all that to someone who was deaf and blind, they'd probably say the same thing. 'How my god, how do you process it all?' And the answer is, 'You just adapt. You learn how to decipher what's important and what's not and how to focus and refocus on things throughout the day.'"

I'm not normally that eloquent, so I assume I'd either thought of or heard that explanation before. But I can't remember when or where

I heard a great Buddhist story once. The student asks the master how he managed to hear a tiny bird singing softly at the window and the master replied, "The real question is, 'How is it that you did not?'"

The interesting thing is that my comment directly contradicts a post I wrote in 2007:

Some [social digital tools] have proven valuable. Others have increased my mania. But now it appears I may just be making myself stupid... Navigating the maze of strategies, media and applications can be awfully distracting. Especially to a creative mind that verges on the manic without any help from hyperlinks.

Welcome to my homepage. Now get going.

I can't think of a single personal or brand website that I visit on a regular basis. (Maybe The New York Times.) Instead I grab feeds that interest me (Like ColoradoPols, Noah Brier, Reach for the Wall, Selectism, Pitchfork and Sometimes Daily). I integrate interesting people into my news stream (Such as Alan Wolk, Barack Obama, Andrew Hyde, Universal Sports and Redhead Writing.) I subscribe to video channels on YouTube and look through my friend's photos on Facebook.

Like Jaffe said:

Today, consumers' digital homes are their Facebook profiles, their blogs, their custom-created communities. That's where they "live" in the digital world and that's where we need to hope they invite us to come and hang out from time to time, not the other way around.

My favorite personal websites right now are single-page designs that encourage visitors to connect on social platforms. Sites that are portals into larger stories. Sites that encourage you to leave them. (Such as Adelle Charles, Bud Caddell and Zach Klein.) My home page, Ingwalson.com, works the same way.

Brands could think of their websites as hubs, with links to content, connections and on- or off-site storefronts. Help people get where they're going. And don't bog down the pace of their lives.

Experiences are your creative equity

Is creativity anything more than taking a given and matching it with something unexpected? Watch this:



It's another example of a Z that can't easily be traced back to a known A. Of thinking that inspires joy, not just because of the content, but because of its unpredictability. I love it. And I was thinking about it when I read Noah Brier's comments on some interesting findings:

"What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?" Ramachandran asked me. "The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things."

Michael Gruen writes this:

This is also not to say humans are incapable of complex thought, quantum leaps, or extraordinary thinking - I’m only suggesting that those leaps and complexities are based on systems that we know or that we happened upon: our imaginations are limited to our experiences and the patterns we innately understand on circumstance of being human.

Which means that creativity depends - almost to the exclusion of all else - on finding a lot of cool, random, beautiful stuff to put in your brain, so that when someone hands you a problem, you have a deep well to draw from. You take their A and add a Z that no one but you could've possibly seen coming.

Advertising stuff of the year, according to me

National ad blog of 2008: I keep thinking about deleting AdPulp from my feeds. And then I notice that I bookmark it constantly.

Denver ad blog of 2008: The Egotist wins this one in a walk. They're so far ahead of everyone else that the only thing I can do is nitpick at the things I wish were different. (I wish the blog's multiple anonymous authors had different pseudonyms, so I could tell them apart. I wish the comments were threaded instead of flat. I wish there was a troll-rating system.)

National agency site of 2008: The Barbarian Group. So rich. So cool. So smart. So useful. So, so elegant.

Denver agency site of 2008: I don't know. The cool ones are hard to navigate. The elegant ones don't capture my imagination.

Local agency blog of 2008: Pure's Pure Thinking. They post frequent and interesting content. At times, they're they only agency that seems to be trying.

Blog I wish I wrote of 2008: Barbarian Group head of planning and strategy Noah Brier writes a blog much better than my own. It's sort of about advertising, sort of about the Internet, and mostly about whatever he wants.

Cool ad-like idea of 2008: See a cnn.com headline you like? One click and it's a t-shirt (not to mention a walking ad for CNN). This genius brought to you by - you guessed it - the Barbarian Group.

Cool spot of 2008: "Fate" is a statement about life's glory and inevitability. Nike, David Fincher and Wieden + Kennedy put a lump in my throat that I don't think will ever go away.

Marketing takes intelligence. Advertising takes guts.

These are words I have written before:

[Blogging] immortalizes everyday language, holding it to an impossibly lofty standard.

And I am thinking about those words now after reading a post by Noah Brier named "When Too Much Listening Is A Bad Thing."

It's precisely those emotional comments that [the Microsoft/Jerry Seinfeld ad campaign] should have been aimed for and seemed to have succeeded at. So why did they drop it? Well, my theory is that it's because a bunch of people with blogs and such started talking about how they didn't like/didn't get the ads. Lots of people were saying that Microsoft needed to respond and listen to what the consumer was saying, but I call bullshit. In a quote for PRWeek I explained, "Other than the Super Bowl, how often do people talk about ads? Microsoft should let this play out. I think there are times to listen to everyone and there are times not to listen to everyone... The people talking about this may not be the audience for this ad. They may not be talking to early adopters." And I stand by that.

In the end I guess my point is that there are times to listen and act upon what you've heard and times to listen and respectfully ignore the feedback.

Brier is right. More than once I've prepared a marketing director for the idea that an ad (this radio spot, for example) might offend someone. But these days, a client might get more than a cranky phone call. He or she might get an angry blog post that an antsy junior marketing executive sends to an unpredictable CEO who forwards it to the whole senior management team, which immediately convenes a committee to seriously consider the matter. The next day the agency phone rings, a junior account coordinator picks up the call, and an effective, wonderful ad dies.

In Hey Whipple, Squeeze This Luke Sullivan wrote that we marketers get so tied up measuring public opinion, we forget that we have the power to shape it. The Internet appears to give us the ability to measure opinion more accurately than ever before. But it gives disproportionate weight and unprecedented permanence to isolated, impulsive rantings.

For the most part, I've been blessed with courageous, focused clients. But the weight of the written word makes even stout hearts wobbly. Sometimes the best course is to just sack up and plow on.