Lefty December 16th, 2008
So the big news here is that, after a joyous six months of working on personal projects and freelancing (at Euro RSCG and MCD Partners), I’ll be starting a new job on January 5th. I’ll be joining Organic, one of the original Silicon Alley interactive agencies (and current Omnicom company), as Director of Strategy. It’s a pure account planning role, where my key responsibility will be to provide consumer insights to our creatives in order to deliver effective client work. The day-to-day will consist of a whole lot of talking to consumers, as well as research, writing, and presentations on digital media.
I’m honestly very excited to start. Organic is a great company (with a great blog), and I think this role will be a really challenging opportunity for me. I’ll probably be working mostly on Bank of America to start, with some new business work thrown in as well.
Lefty December 16th, 2008
This past Sunday’s NY Times ran an interesting article on the challenges of using social networks for marketing. This is particularly relevant for me, as one of my freelance projects right now involves creating a Facebook page for a major financial services company. I think the key quote is here:
Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.
I’m reminded of a brand strategy class I took at Stern last summer in which brand benefits were broken into functional, emotional, and self-expressive. Functional benefits speak to actual features and utility (i.e. a car gets me from point A to point B and has automatic transmission), while emotional benefits speak to how a brand makes me feel about myself. Self-expressive benefits matter most in a social context however. When a brand allows consumers to communicate something about themselves, it becomes highly relevant to sites like Facebook. For that reason, I can see brands with strong self-expressive benefits like Apple (“I think different”) or Harley-Davidson (“I’m an all-American tough guy) having effective social networking presences. For brands that lack a self-expressive component, it’s going to be an uphill battle.
Lefty May 29th, 2008
Go check out the World Science Festival, in NYC this week (5/28-6/1).
http://www.worldsciencefestival.com
Lefty April 16th, 2008
I finally launched the site for Figure Four Media, a new side project focusing on web video distribution, strategy, and production. We’re still working through a few things (getting the blog working, for example), but you should be able to get the idea.
Our goal is to do high quality branded content, with a full set of web tools like RSS, comments, sharing/emailing/embedding, as well as integration with the big video sites like YouTube, etc.
Lefty February 21st, 2008
At work, we finally finished the two sites I’ve been working on for the last year:
redken.com
redkensalon.com
As a reward, Emily and I spent five days up in Phoenicia for the Valentine’s Day/President’s Day weekend. There was lots of snow up there, so we gave cross-country skiing a try. It was good fun.
Stay tuned for news on what’s next, work-wise.
Lefty October 13th, 2007
A friend at work showed me Delicious Library, a new (at least to me) application that uses the built in camera in your mac to scan the barcode of books, DVDs, CDs, etc. It then automatically adds the item to your online and allows you to keep track of who you’ve lent things to by integrating with iCal and Address Book. It’s pretty slick.
I’ve also been playing around with goodreads.com, a social networking site for readers, that allows you to share your reading lists and recommendations with other book enthusiasts. My profile is here.
Both are nice usages of technology in the service of those who like to read.