• Users Not Customers
    My wife loves seltzer water. I can't stand it, but she will hardly drink water if bubbles aren't in it. So I thought it'd be great to buy her a soda maker. One afternoon, I passed by a Williams-Sonoma store and decided to stop in. Lo and behold, they had one sitting on the shelf: a SodaStream Genesis drinks maker for $150. But it seemed expensive. I could buy her a pantry full of 150 bottles of premade seltzer for that price. So I decided to shop around.
  • Keeping up with the @Joneses
    Online marketing is experiencing a time of unprecedented technological and consumer transformation. This is both exciting and daunting, regardless of the role you play in the consumer engagement continuum. Whether you are a cmo, an agency exec, a technology entrepreneur or a vc, the industry is proceeding at such a fervent pace that it can be difficult for companies to stop, immerse themselves in internal reflection and ensure they're laying brick for the road to longevity.
  • Seeing the Forest Through the Trees
    Ever heard of confirmation bias? It's a psychological principle that's fairly important to the conversation at hand and our industry as a whole (especially considering it is one of the primary forces behind why advertising works).
  • Google Comes to Town
    Now that Kansas City, Ks., and Kansas City, Mo., (informally, kay-see-kay and kay-see-moe) have dashed the hopes of 1,000 other cities and elated their own residents by winning the installation of Google Fiber, a sober question arises: what now? What does this mean for the brands, ad agencies and techies who make their home in Kansas City?
  • Treading the Web
    Speedo is known for innovations ranging from the creation of the first-ever non-wool Racerback swimsuit in the 1920s yes, there was a time when wool was the fabric of choice for swimwear to the high-tech Speedo lzr Racer swimsuit in 2008, worn by nearly all of the medalists who swam in the Beijing Summer Olympics that year, including American phenom Michael Phelps.
  • Ed:Blog
    Hyperconnectivity. It's not in the dictionary. Yet. But it's all over the Internet. Plug the word into Google and it returns 46,400 results, the first from Wikipedia with a warning that the topic itself "may not meet the general notability guideline." Google's 46,400 results beg to differ.
  • Dropping out of Hyperspace?
    Social media seems to be everywhere you look nowadays - no longer just connecting individuals but actually making the news. In recent months, social media has helped to bring down the government of Egypt, spread the word about the killing of Osama bin Laden, voice frustrations over the debt-ceiling crisis, register public outrage over the U.K. phone-hacking scandal and catalyze a massive outburst of civil disorder in the same country not long after. Meanwhile, Google, by far the largest company on the Internet in revenue terms, is desperately trying to crack the social media market with Google+. But for all …
  • Bewitching Buyers
    In 1998 I joined four friends in Orlando, Fl., to produce what started out as a traditional independent film project and ended up as The Blair Witch Project. Bringing to life the legend of the Blair Witch across various media - film, Web site, TV special, book, comic-book series and PC games - was the most unusual and incredible storytelling experience of my life.
  • The Browser: AKQA
    Agencies have long claimed the best way to get to know them is through their work, an expressway to their souls. AKQA's Web site is all about the work - literally.
  • California Dreaming
    San Francisco is known for cultural experimentation, natural beauty and proximity to Silicon Valley, and those factors have all helped define the city as an ad town, too. On the advertising map, the City by the Bay has come to be known as both a digital and a creative epicenter.
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