My thoughts, or lack thereof...

Fascinated by Cannes Lions and what it's about

Over the past two days I have become beyond-normally fascinated with the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Yesterday morning a spent two hours or so watching 5 minute long videos of their presenters, and this morning I’m spending time on Summize and created a Tinker page to follow the activity.

The conference fascinates me because it’s bringing together the most influential and creative minds in marketing and advertising from around the world, to sit and talk about what is Advertising today, and what has been successful this past year.

It seems to me however that most of the presenters, submissions and winners are mostly missing the boat. Advertising, as I see it, is totally broken. Spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns that shove their way in front of our eyes simply doesn’t work anymore. Even the cutsy ads that make you smile, do exactly that, make you smile - not more. Not buy the product. Which is the goal, right?

We need to speak directly to the consumer, not on a broad-level, not even on a targeted level, but on a singular and individual level.  With advancing technology in mobile phones and proactive engagement of social media we are incrementally sharing our life, in bits and pieces. These bits and pieces, if pulled together and constructed correctly, would paint the picture of our likes and dislikes, passions, world view, beliefs and habits. The winner in marketing will be the one who can take that information and use it to provide extremely relevant offers - offers that I actually care about. Offers on musical artists I love, restaurants that I frequent, events that I pay attention to, and vacations to places that I dream about. This can only be done with technology.

It won’t be Madison Ave, London, or a fancy firm with three last names that figures this out. It will be Silicon Valley. The former are too focused on the $$$ that come with gaining the big accounts, they’re chasing the trend-line, focusing on one-upping the other guy to win the business. Silicon Valley is about thinking 5 years down the line, barely considering what people are doing today - which is the status quo of stagnant thinking.

As a marketer these thoughts excite me, as an entrepreneur these thoughts fire me up. For what could be more exciting than revolutionizing an industry that hasn’t changed in over 100 years? To quote the closing lines of Jerry Maguire’s most famous Mission Statement:

“Let us start a revolution.  Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause. The cause is caring about each other. The secret to this job is personal relationships.”

I am so mentally exhausted it’s refreshing.

Beer, girls, and a fresh perspective

Look at that sunrise – gosh it’s gorgeous, you can literally see the “god rays” splayed across the sky lighting up Ipanema beach.  The water is cold rushing below my knees and I roll my head back laughing deep within my belly.  I open my eyes and in front of me are people with whom I have memories and history, we have inside jokes, we poke at each other’s insecurities, and we seek the most personally abrasive nicknames possible for each other.  And for some reason I decided to fly here, to the other side of the world, and spend money I probably shouldn’t, to be standing right here, right now, with them.

The vacation to Rio was amazing; yeah, sure, for all the reasons that you think: cans of beer on the street cost $0.80, the summer sun was warm and inviting, the women stunningly gorgeous, all taking place in a city where literally 6 million people stop everything but to put on silly costumes and party for four days.  But I think an equal, if not longer lasting value came hours after I had returned home to San Francisco.

Upon landing at SFO I could feel a creeping anxiety coming over me as I reached for my phone, tapped my password onto the screen and went for the Airplane Mode OFF switch, but I stopped.  I realized that my anxiety was coming from the anticipated uber-shock of rentry into the atmosphere without a heat shield.  I was about to be deluged by a week’s worth of pinging text messages, ding-donging voicemails, endlessly scrolling emails, and continuously loading twitter messages.  I made an executive decision and decided not to re-enter quite yet, and put my phone back to sleep.

I realized that I was in a rare and unusual sense of rapture, floating in the ether, away from the oxygen of ultra-connectivity that we need to breathe in our Silicon Valley lives.  I only used the computer once in Rio, for less than 5 minutes, I never once used my phone.  What an amazing gift.

I used the rest of the afternoon, from about noon onward, to sip coffee and to evaluate the priorities in my life.  I journaled for a bit and came away objectively understanding that I spend too much time on things that don’t last past a headache in the morning, and not enough time on the things that will drive me forward for a lifetime.  That said, I’ll still end up with the headaches, I’ll just try to adjust the balance between those and my other priorities a little bit better.

Then, slowly but surely, I re-entered the atmosphere, starting with email, then a tweet or two, followed up uploading my pictures.  And now look at me, I’m laying on my hotel room bed across the street from my Microsoft office building in Bellevue, Washington at 11:30 at night, poking away on my computer with a 3G broadband card flickering out the side.  I’m about to send a tweet from my phone, as my mind drifts away from this post, which is less than an arms distance away.

I’m definitely re-immersed, which is great, don’t get me wrong; I’m just so happy that I took those few precious moments between vacation and reality to realign my thoughts and my focus, because I think there’s nothing more important or valuable than having a fresh perspective.

Long time, no see

Wow. I just realized that I haven’t posted here in quite some time.  How’s that for a New Year’s resolution…?

Oh well, I have been busy, productive and been having a killer time, I can’t complain.

During the last week of January I traveled across the US with one of Microsoft’s Corporate Vice Presidents to promote BizSpark.  It was an interesting experience and I was surprised at the pace at which we were in and out of places.  Though I guess that’s what big corp execs are for, right?  The surgical strike to make a lasting impact and then onto the next place.

We hit New York, Boston, (I skipped Chicago), and Austin within a 5 day period, first meeting at 7:30am, ending with a dinner or reception in the evening - that’s one lonnnng day.  Thank god for coffee.  Mmm

To cap that week off, I met up with a bunch of old college buddies to celebrate our bright college years - part MAN.  9 of us converged upon Sin City, shacking up at the Stratosphere (thanks to Goldman Sachs who owns it, and one of their employees who got us dirt cheap rooms), and hitting the town hard.  Highlights were golf at Wildhorse, bottles at Body English and Tryst, and losing a couple hundred dollars while watching the Superbowl at the Harrah’s outdoor bar.

Now it’s back to the grind for 14 days, resting, recuperating and otherwise getting mentally prepared for the trip we are calling Operation Come Home Alive - Rio de Janeiro for Carnivale.  T-minus 8 days.

Touchpoint

Do you ever have an occurrence in your life, perhaps a chance encounter, a meeting with an old friend, or a familiar smell that shakes your life to the core? It causes instant introspection and evaluation of where you are, how you got here, and makes you think of all the things that have happened since your last touchpoint. We get so caught up in our daily lives and progressing from spot E to spot F that many times we forget how we got from spot A to spot E, and all the lessons that came in between, even though it’s because of those lessons that we are at spot E. You may think you have it all figured out, but in one fell swoop this old touchpoint can wipe you clean and refocus you on where you actually should be. Thank goodness for these moments, for these incremental epiphanies which re-give us relevant context to life and makes realize, just really how little we all know – and how much more we have to learn.