3 countries in 2 months, an update

I have travelled accross the world in the past months, from San Francisco to Taipei, to Madrid, in the search of the very elussive dreamed-planning position. I have finally settled down in Madrid, Spain. I will be staying here for a little while as I have been invited to join Sra Rushmore in the role of Strategic Planner. Quite exciting. So far so good, so much culture hopping has not yet translated into culture shocking.

As I get settled and slowly crawl my way back into this blog, don´t be surprised at mentions of weird brands or if I start mumbling strange words in another language. It´s all part of the fun.

Planning-ness Vol. II

I have been meaning to write at least a quick recap note about the very cool and memorable experiences that I got to enjoy on day two of Planning-ness. They deserve it just as much as the experiences of day one.

Here are the highlights:

Planning deities, Jason Oke and Gareth Kay, shared their simple yet visionary point of view on Connections Planning. According to them the problem with this discipline is that, currently, it is not focused on brands or people, but on solving an AGENCY problem: the disconnect with media departments and agencies. Looking forward the key for the prosperity of Connections Planning (and this could apply to modern Advertising at large) is "to apply the New Media lens (interactive, interaction) on Advertising, and not the other way around, the Advertising lens (interruption, pushing message) onto New Media". Their presentation is here.

Flamingo, a very cool international research company, conducted a hands-on workshop on Commercial Semiotics. Through immersive, insightful and plain fun exercises we analyzed commercial advertising messages. We also uncovered Apple as the Mother ship of the Future.

Garry Tan (Posterous) shared his grasp on design and revealed how UI is a conversation and how people treat computers like people. As a consequence, in addition to design aspects, tech companies must pay attention to the human factor and human connections. He pointed out WUFOO—an Internet application that helps build online forms—who replies all customers' inquiries within minutes.

And last but not least Adrian Ho and Rob White from Zeus Jones brought the whole group together to brainstorm on how to take the leap from traditional to modern branding. We all picked our brains and came up with new and more effective marketing/planning tools to build better brands. The brilliant collective outcome can be found here. "Failure Awards," "ARG," "Act Now Think Later," and "Role Playing" are a few examples that demonstrate an interest on dynamic processes.

All of this exhaustingly stretched the limits of my perceptions and gave me a lot to think and to apply from now on.

who needs an ad agency?

... when passion comes from within. And in this particular case from a group of extremely talented, creative and well organized individuals. Great examples of user generated video "ads", below are the winner and two runner ups from the "HANDMADE MOMENTS ARE EVERYWHERE" Etsy contest. I really can't give this organization and community enough praise!