widgetwonder

I love this ad because it so perfectly captures the crazy endearing chaos that is India…

Sometime this month, April 2006, will be 20 years for me in advertising. I’m happy to say I still enjoy this business, the people, the ideas, and yes I even still enjoy moderating focus groups & training moderators.

When people ask, Where Do You Want to Be in Five Years?, I’ve never had any idea or answer. Mostly, I’ve been confused enough with where I was. My 2006 answer: “Somewhere I can’t possibly imagine today”.

My first 6 years in the business I was a sponge at DMB&B NY as a P&G media planner & then Chiat/Day NY as a young account planner. The pay was crap, and the work was fascinating. I liked the strategy of media, and literacy in MRI books proved an asset at C/D. The people I worked for at both shops are still rock stars in their world. There’s no way I could have planned this kind of education & opportunity.

When I moved to FCB San Francisco, then started my own business a year later in ‘92, I wasn’t sure what would happen next. Pitching IBM with Ogilvy in 1994 was a good break, and started a 12+ year relationship. And clients in SF, NY, Seattle, and elsewhere have kept me busy & learning & paying my mortgage. Thank you.

One day, I sat down & asked myself about widgetwonder‘s value proposition: How do I best serve my clients? Why should someone hire me?

Perhaps contrary to my British-infused education, I was tired of the planner’s role as “most clever person in the room”. So I said Yes to Collaboration — work to bring the group together, into alignment around language and ideas. The power of brands are expressed as shared values, not proprietary. Help the team move forward, and experience themselves in new ways. My job is to help create an environment where the group can do its best work. Building & holding a group is a skill, and I’ve been focusing here for the past 10 years.

Mostly, I just follow what I’m most curious about. And I like to solve problems, tell stories, and make a connection. That’s my idea of a plan. Oh, and its ok to freak out all along the way because you don’t know where you’re going. Doesn’t everyone do that anyway?

The best thing about entrepreneurship is that I’ve had the opportunity to invest in my business & myself. With each 5 year period of the past 20 years, my growth & learning have accelerated & have become more interesting.

This diversity of experience drives innovation for my business, and adds value to my clients. Personally, I couldn’t ask for anything better. Check back for an update again in 2026…

My almost-daughter Cara started working this past school year at the Oberlin College Bicycle Co-op, and has discovered she loves getting greasy & fixing bikes. This summer, she was talking to her friend Gabe, who recently started a bike co-op in San Francisco called Box Dog Bikes. As Gabe was telling of some frustrations of being 5 recent college grads opening a business, Cara mentioned that my work is in helping teams & organizations collaborate better. Gabe was interested. So I visited the shop, we talked, and agreed that I’d join their board as their first outside director.

Earlier the next day, before my first Box Dog board meeting, I was teaching a Brands & Branding class at the Miami Ad School (SF campus) and my class needed a new client for the last 4 weeks’ assignment. So I gave them the co-op. The brief? Box Dog Bikes believes cycling can change the world.

The co-operative entrepreneurs at BDB combine bikes & sustainable business practices "to have a net-positive impact on the world" They promote cycling because bikes are better than cars for the air, for traffic congestion, for building local community, because oil = war. BDB’s radical political agenda is to convince students & office folk to commute by cycle. They are happy to be experimenting with an alternative to capitalism.

Its exciting that my class had a real client to present to, and great for BDB to have 6 creative teams working for them. We’re all kind of blown away by how its come together.

Personally, I share BDB’s politics, and I love bikes more than any other way my body can be in motion. So we made a deal about compensation…

Over the past 5 or 6 years, we’ve been pitching clients on using storytelling and improvisation to innovate, to improve internal communication, and to build more effective teams. But it hasn’t often been easy. Say "improvisation" to most business people, and they think you are some kind of flake, that you don’t understand the needs of their business.

Now, two of the season’s hottest business books — Seth Godin’s "All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in Low Trust World" and Malcolm Gladwell’s "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" — are focused directly on the benefits of story and improv.

Gladwell’s "Blink" discusses the value of the rational thinking that happens in the moment — he calls it rapid cognition — and makes a point not to use the word "intuition", which he feels is written off as emotional and antithetical to business. Instead, he points out that the complexity of business and life today — the sheer amount of data — frequently confuses deliberate, careful decision-making processes. In our information-saturated world, what wins is responsiveness to the market, flexibility, and speed. Improvisation is a best-practices lab for employing rapid cognition across departments, functions, and geographies. Perhaps "Blink" will help encourage the development of our practice.

Godin’s "All Marketers Are Liars" is about the value of Story — the difference between a marketing message that is full of facts and salesmanship, and marketing that engages. What’s cool about this book is that it emphasizes the Quality of Connection, as more valuable than a commoditized marketing "impression". Given the overwhelming complexity and choice of data and products (competition), Godin argues that consumers are demanding more authentic stories from marketers. Along the way, Godin chides companies that write mission or brand statements that have nothing to do with the way real people speak and live. Stories are how humans make meaning of events. For organizational development, for group creative process, for any kind of community.

This may sound prosaic, but my blog is motivating me to write more. I ‘m enjoying it. And I’m not the only one. Some claim as many as 50 million blogs worldwide (a guess plus a few assumptions), a number that’s been doubling in size every 5 months. A more reliable estimate is for 10 million in the US. We’ll see about the growth rate. But as a share of 285 million Americans, that’s just 2.8%. Of Adults 18-49, the age cohort judged most likely to post, just 6%. Is this a revolution?

Now, its fair to assume that not all blogs are individual endeavors. The Applied Improvisation Network blog has a a dozen active writers. On the other hand, by some estimates, as few as 1 in 5 blogspaces are updated in a given 30 day cycle. And amidst it all, its impossible to know how much of this growth is business blogs.

Interesting to me is the activity of creation that steals share directly from passive consumption of any medium. Active media means making something, possibly with others, and the trend is growing — driven by education, access to tools, and a desire to connect.

What does "consumer" or "target" mean in this creative state of mind? The activity of creation creates/requires a radically different psychological space than the psychology of passive television consumption. Perhaps "marketing" needs some new ideas about how audiences/users "learn about a brand" while active and creating?

Passive media will always exist. But active media seem to growing. Do we count online/multi-player games as active, but single-player videogames only "interactive"? Where’s the line here? There isn’t one, and maybe won’t be. But there are opportunitites out there for media companies, content providers, and marketers to provide more user-directed or user-created media.

In a media world where "relevance" is the currency, targeting is good, permissions (including interactive) are better, and active will be a home run. 

For advertising folks, the ad movie is a special genre - hopefully biting, sarcastic, insulting, and funny as hell. Well, here’s one perhaps you haven’t seen - Putney Swope.

The film, from 1969, was directed by Robert Downey Sr (Yes, the father of Jr.), and begins with a corrupt and slovenly ad agency board kveching about their business. When the chairman & head of the agency enters, he starts berating the group , stuttering, and as the others begin a game of charades to figure out what he’s trying to say, he has a heart attack and dies, face down on the board table. After rifling through his pockets for his wallet and watch, the board holds an election for the new chair (with the chairman still laying face down, dead, across the table). The majority vote for Putney Swope - the music director and only black guy on the board. The rest of the movie follows the outrageous consequences of changing the name of the agency to Truth and Soul Inc. and replacing all the execs with brothers and sisters from the ‘hood. The film is in B&W but the ads are in COLOR. Outrageous - Black Power account execs, a pot-smoking German midget as President of the US, and they pitch a car account - the Boreman Six. One AE walks around repeating: "Putney says the Boreman Six girl is got to have soul!"

One special aspect of the film is the actor Antonio Fargas, later famous as Starsky & Hutch’s Huggy Bear. Something else that I personally love is that in the movie Cotton Comes to Harlem (itself a classic early blaxploitation story, written by the under-known and under-appreciated noir-writer Chester Himes), as characters Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed (two Harlem police detectives) run across 125th Street, the movie theatre marquis in the back ground is advertising Putney Swope.

But what really blows me away is this: My father came to the US from India in the mid 1950’s, when he was 16. In 1969, his parents and sister came to live in Philadelphia - a big trip for them to bring the whole family and leave India. Having not much money, they lived in a crappy section of South Philadelphia (where my mother grew up) - the part that was going downhill fast from old Rocky-movie Italian, sliding into the crumbling poverty and ruin that most people associate with Philadelphia today. Over the years, we’ve made fun of my aunt and uncle for never wanting to go out - they won’t go to restaurants, or parties, or the movies, or to Atlantic City casinos. They had jobs for years, but would only go to and from work, and then to church and the neighborhood shopping. What is wrong with these people, I wondered?

Recently, though, I was telling my mother about Putney Swope, and she remembered — when my aunt and uncle first came to Philadelphia, my parents took them to see this movie. What? THIS was the first movie they saw in the US? Militant afro advertising agency? Loud soul guitar and psychedelic colors? Pot smoking Nazi US president? Jesus, no wonder they refused to go out for the next 30 years…