Marci Ikeler

This music video for Arcade Fire’s new song, made with Google Chrome Labs in HTML 5, is utterly amazing - interactive art with a personalized touch.

This is what the future looks like - reality hyper-augmented by digital information and overlays. A new video from the always excellent Keiichi Matsuda. 

Believe it or not, the biggest challenge I have in my job is dealing not with traditional advertising, but with what I’ll term “traditional digital”. This are those folks who have been making microsites and banner ads for so long that they don’t know how to do anything else - and, unlike the traditional advertising people, are unwilling to admit that there’s something about digital that they don’t know.

This article from UX Magazine has some great tips on keeping from being a Digital Dinosaur. 

• Integrated experiences
• Designing for the “space between”
• Customer experience (vs. solely user experience)

Add social business to this list, and you’ll be evolving in no time.

One of the main points I make when trying to explain why digital is different from other advertising media is the incredible fragmentation that one must account for - both in terms of hardware and software. This graphic sums up that point pretty nicely.

Icons of the Web - Social Media Graphics

Me at SXSW last year, rocking a segway.

I’ve attended SXSW two years now, and both times I’ve found it to be the most inspirational, educational, and fun event related to interactive technology and communications. Last year, I decided that, no matter what, I would be submitting a panel for 2011, and now I’ve got two in the mix. They are:

1. Haters Gonna Hate: Lessons For Advertisers From 4chan - 4chan is “the internet hate machine” that crosses boundaries with the real world. 4chan’s two unusual features - it’s anonymity and its lack of archiving - have made it into a hotbed of creativity that is almost single-handedly responsible for every major internet meme in the past 7 years. In this presentation, I will use 4chan as a lens to illustrate how modern advertising can better communicate with hyper-connected, hyper-social communities. By following the lead of the 4chan community (albeit with less pornography), advertisers can learn how to hack the attention economy and succeed in the face of changing consumer behaviors.
2. The Luxury/Digital Paradox: Taking Luxury Brands Digital - A colleague of mine and I put are presenting this talk, on how to bring luxury marketing to digital communications. Luxury, by definition, is built on exclusivity. The web is inherently democratic. In the past, this contradiction caused luxury brands to be hesitant about moving online – but in the face of the internet’s ever-increasing ubiquity and print advertising’s decreased returns, more and more luxury brands are making the transition to on-line advertising and e-commerce. This presentation will show how luxury brands can participate in the digital-sphere through case studies of luxury brands that have effectively communicated their ‘brand story’.

Over two thousand panel ideas were submitted this year, and part of what determines who makes it is votes from the public. I’m sorry if this feels spammy, but I would greatly appreciate it if you could vote for my panels!

To do this, you will need to either create a SXSW Panel Picker account or, if you voted last year, sign in. Once you’re logged in, click the thumbs-up button at the top of the page for each panel. Also, please feel free to contribute to the dialogue in the comments!

Thanks so much! I’m really excited about both these topics, and am looking forward to bringing them to life at SXSW.

Media access is becoming increasingly seamless. Marketers must understand that consumers expect to access data wherever they are, without restriction.

Interesting thinking from Dan Brown on eight principles of successful IA (and, I would argue, UX in general). They are:

1. The principle of objects – Treat content as a living, breathing thing, with a lifecycle, behaviors and attributes. 
2. The principle of choices – Create pages that offer meaningful choices to users, keeping the range of choices available focused on a particular task. 
3. The principle of disclosure – Show only enough information to help people understand what kinds of information they’ll find as they dig deeper. 
4. The principle of exemplars – Describe the contents of categories by showing examples of the contents. 
5. The principle of front doors – Assume at least half of the website’s visitors will come through some page other than the home page. 
6. The principle of multiple classification – Offer users several different classification schemes to browse the site’s content. 
7. The principle of focused navigation – Don’t mix apples and oranges in your navigation scheme. 
8. The principle of growth – Assume the content you have today is a small fraction of the content you will have tomorrow. 

Cyborgs are our future, and I’m psyched about it. Check out this amazing robot arm, via Gizmodo.

A case study on using game design to create persuasion.

Interesting case study of how a band launches a new album in the age of social media.

How The INTERNET Works

Great primer, all the critical info in one place. I could have used this last week when I was explaining to someone why they needed to pay for a hosting service to get a web page.

Really enjoyed this article that outlines the four basic phases of design thinking. Great designers do all four; mediocre designers specialize in only a few areas. This could be a great way to measure the success of a project as well. 

1. Question - Asking basic “why” questions and challenging assumptions.
2. Care - Empathizing with human needs.
3. Connect - Synthesizing information in new ways.
4. Commit - Giving form to an idea.

Fantastic TED Talk on how the motivation offered by games can be used to save the world. 

TED Talk: Can Gaming Save the World?

Great presentation from frog design on the current digital trends that are impacting media.

View more presentations from frog design.

Lots of good reference data in this Mashable report on How Women Use the Web.

So one of my favorite things about internet culture is how quickly it adapts to new events. Memes have become a shared language that people use to share information and humor. As an example of this, I’d like to point out this fine (and hilarious) gallery of memes based on the movie Inception. I

This illustrates a few larger trends I’ve been noticing over the past year or so:

1. Ambient interactivity - automatic data recording/analysis that requires limited or no direct input.
2. Lifetracking - as everything moves towards digital, we have the impulse to document and track all aspects of our lives.
3. Gaming - leveraging lessons about engagement and interactivity from game design to keep people engaged in info tracking/gathering.

Facebook’s 500 Million Members [INFOGRAPHIC]

I’ve been talking about the death of physical media for a while now, here’s an article that points out that digital delivery has overtaken physical in both books (Amazon’s Kindle marketplace) and video games.

MemeFactory - a hilarious presentation on internet memes and how they spread.

Great presentation on why social media continues to be critical for brands.

View more presentations from Leslie Bradshaw.

This is my first post.

Over the past few months, if you’ve hung out with me (especially if I’ve had a few glasses of wine), you may have heard me begin to wax idiotic about something called 4chan. Rather than continuing to bore my drinking companions, I thought I’d record what it is I’ve been raving about in a more coherent manner.

For those of you who are unaware, 4chan (very, very NSFW) is an online image board with two unusual features: first, it is almost entirely anonymous, and second, posts are not archived, meaning that there is no permanent record of the behavior on the site. Its extremely fast-paced, foul, and transient nature have made it a hotbed of creativity - if you don’t mind scrolling through pages of racist, homophobic, sexist, idiotic humor. In fact, 4chan is single-handedly responsible for almost every major internet meme that has become popular in the past 7 years. If you’ve ever laughed a lolcat, you have 4chan to thank.

A few weeks ago the ever-excellent danah boyd wrote a fantastic article on the next-generation hacker culture that is 4chan, stating that:

4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy… these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously.

In many ways, the accelerated, anything goes atmosphere of 4chan is an amplified version of modern online media. Advertisers often complain that it is getting more and more difficult to attract attention in a world in which consumers are constantly inundated with information, and even when something does manage to break through the clutter, its effects are temporary at best.

Users of 4chan - otherwise known as /b/tards - deal with the challenge of limited attention and unlimited information in a few ways:

• Repetition - check out 4chan a handful of times, and you’ll begin to see the same jokes, stories, and pictures repeated ad nauseum. This repetition establishes the shared culture that is 4chan by ensuring that as many people as possible experience the same messages.
• Insider jokes - A side effect of all the repetition is the creation of insider humor, in which users impress one another by referencing older or obscure messages in creative ways. Again, this is part of establishing a shared culture and common language.
• Extremes - This is where the offensive stuff comes in. Pornography, gore, racism, etc. are used so extensively to gain attention on 4chan that they’ve almost ceased to have an effect on regular visitors.
• Humor - A good joke always gains attention. Repeating the joke doesn’t diminish it, until the 100th repetition or so.

Interestingly enough, these tactics are very similar to those commonly employed by marketers. To me, 4chan is all about watching a disorganized community struggle to gain a voice in the face of unlimited chatter. Advertisers will have to continue to keep up with these skills if they want to have an impact in today’s media environment.

Based on my Twitter feed, it looks like most of the tech industry isn’t doing much this morning besides hitting “refresh” on the Apple store, trying frantically to pre-order the iPhone 4. While we wait (and remember it’s only 8am in Cupertino folks), here are some thoughts about what’s important about the iPhone 4.

Given the fact that the iPhone 4 was famously deconstructed by Gizmodo a month ago, what was surprising about Steve Job’s WWDC keynote last week was how many surprises there were. Here are the three announcements that have the most potential impact on how we interact with technology and communications:

• Gyroscope - Previous versions of the iPhone have included an accelerometer, which is what allows the phone to recognize tilting and shaking the device as an interaction (used to great effect in many games). Now, Apple is replacing the accelerometer with a gyroscope, which will allow the phone to identify movement in three directions instead of two. I suspect that is one of those additions that is hard to fully appreciate without trying it hands on, but I think it shows how strongly Apple is gunning towards the games market. With rapidly improving processor speeds, screen quality (more on that below), and interactive capabilities, the iPhone is strong competition for the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP.


• Retina display - One of the sexiest surprises is the Retina Display, which essentially quadruples the number of pixels on a screen of the same size, making the resolution equal to print quality. This enhacement supports the play Apple is making with its iBooks app. The Kindle’s screen has been one of the only advantages it has vs. the iPad/iPhone, and this hurts that. I’m fairly certain that all the hardware enhancements we’re seeing on the iPhone 4 will be rolled out onto the iPad in the next year or so.


• iOS - In what seemed like a minor development, Jobs announced that the iPhone OS (operating system) is being renamed to iOS. This makes sense - it was a little confusing that the iPad was running iPhone OS. However, I think that the name change signifies a lot more - it opens Apple to create a series of mobile-esque devices all running the same OS. I think that Apple TV will be reborn with iOS in the next few years.

Apple continues to be one of the smartest tech companies in terms of futuristic hardware and software, with keen insights into what the barriers are to product adoption among common users. iPhone 4 is another great step for them. In short - I’m frantically refreshing the Apple store with the rest of you.

And a side note: the fact that Gizmodo couldn’t predict the Gyroscope and Retina display based on their deconstructed iPhone 4 prototype doesn’t speak highly for their detective skills, does it? Steve Jobs must have been secretly pleased that the coolest stuff didn’t leak.

While on vacation a few weeks ago, my husband and I drove about 300 miles - over 5 hours - from Phoenix to Las Vegas. We are both fans of audiobooks, and so while we drove through the feverish desert landscape we listened to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I am ashamed to admit that, although I am a huge science fiction fan, I have never read Snow Crash before. I haven’t yet finished it, but so far I am struck by one of the primary assumptions made by the book.

Snow Crash - like Neuromancer and many other seminal sci-fi works - assumes that the future of technology and information consumption is through the creation of virtual worlds. This conceit was paricularly powerful through the late 80s to the early 90s, when the advent of video games with increasinly advanced graphic technologies made the creation of a 3D, interactive, info space seem inevitable.

From a technological perspective, creating such a virtual world is no longer problematic. Such systems already exist in a variety of formats. In The Sims, players can “play God” with a series of characters (something like dolls in a doll house). The military uses virtual reality stations for everything from flight training to preventing post traumatic stress disorder. And, famously, Second Life allows players to navigate a virtual world and socialize using avatars.

However, despite the availability of the technology, the predictions of science fiction writers - that massive exodus to a virtual reality is imminent - never really came to fruition. Instead, interfaces that are primarily text and image based still prevail. This is because, outside of entertainment and training systems, there is no real benefit to navigating information through a physical metaphor. In fact, physical bodies are detrimental to navigating information - it’s much easier to click a series of links on Google than it would be to walk across a 3D library.

So, instead of replicating a physical reality, we are beginning to see technologies that use our information spaces to augment it. Augmented reality has gotten a lot of press over the past year, but I’d argue that we have yet to see the most transformative examples come to life. General Motors is testing an augmented reality dashboard that would show information about the driver’s environment and route in real-time (think Terminator vision). Contact lenses that show digital data on the eye are being tested on animals. Nokia’s future vision concept video shows how eye movements and glasses could be used to display contextual digital information in the real world.

Beyond augmented reality, we’re seeing technologies that make physical devices easier to manipulate. There are prototypes for a gesture-activated faucet, and hotels are beginning to replace key cards with cell phone applications. Project Natal, the Wii, and the iPhone have gone a long way towards making gestural interfaces not only intuitive but expected (after showing a two-year-old my iPad, he tried to zoom in to a newspaper by pinching his fingers on it).

I doubt this is an original observation, but I believe that the mega trend here is integrated reality - machine-enhanced information and interactions that are seamlessly integrated into real life contexts.

I, for one, cannot wait.

Over the past few weeks my RSS feed has been clogged with articles bemoaning Facebook’s changing privacy policy.

To summarize the situation for those who may not have been following it: since its launch in 2004 as a closed college network, Facebook’s settings have increasingly favored making knowledge public rather than private. The definition of “public” has also changed (information that used to be available only to one’s social network can now be accessed by anyone). Facebook has also made a series of questionable design decisions that make it more difficult to change one’s settings. For a good summary of the privacy changes, check out this visualization.

There’s absolutely no doubt that information on Facebook is increasingly public. But what I find interesting is the almost universal uproar that these changes have caused. The word “privacy” has become a sacred cow - it is equated with “good”, and the word “public” has become equated with “bad”. I think this is a simplistic view.

Everyone deserves to be in control of their personal information, and Facebook has done a particularly poor job of empowering people to take this control (danah boyd outlines several aspects of the problems with Facebook’s privacy settings in this article). However, I’m not sure that universal privacy is the answer here.

Sharing information - both about our surroundings and about each other - is one of the most critical and useful parts of being human. We routinely applaud the social media revolution for requiring companies and celebrities to be more honest, transparent, and responsive. Why wouldn’t the same apply to individuals?

Facebook certainly deserves to be chastised for their lack of transparency in making the changes to their platform. But I am routinely inspired by the ways in which society, commerce, and communication are enhanced by open communications. To me and my social circle, Facebook is an important part of that inspiration.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

On Tuesday this week I attended a session of The Intelligence Group’s Trend School here in New York. If you haven’t heard of them, the Intelligence Group is a company that conducts detailed research on younger generations (at the moment that’s Gen Y, although they also look at X and Z) and identifies trends that affect marketing. The entire content of the day was really great, but there were two phrases that really resonated with me that I thought I’d share:

• Accelerated Nostalgia - Exactly what it sounds like. We (and younger people in particular) romanticize a past that is more and more recent. Nostalgia used to be reserved for something 10-20 years in the past; now people talk about the good ol’ days of 2005. I believe that this is a side effect of an accelerated culture, where the amounts of information we consume and the speed at which we consume it increases every day.


• Entertainment Debt - I really identify with this one. Because of all the information we consume, most people have a reserve of content (movies, music, books, etc.) that they want to consume but haven’t yet gotten to, and that’s a source of guilt. For me this extends to web sites - “Have you checked out x.com?” “No, but it’s on my list!”. It’s becoming harder and harder to keep up with what’s relevant in culture because there’s simply so much of it. 10 years ago I had seen almost every Oscar nominated movie each year. That’s not true anymore, and yet the number of movies I see annually hasn’t decreased. There are simply more choices available and it’s impossible to get to everything.

Interesting stuff. The Intelligence Group also offers an excellent daily post/email highlighting a current trend, subscribe if you’re interested.

Like 300,000 others, I bought an iPad this weekend. For me it was something of an impulse buy - I have already pre-ordered a 64GB 3G version, which is shipping in late April (I’m hoping to sell this WiFi version then, at a discount of course). However, since I make my living by thinking about emerging technologies and the behavioral changes they engender, I’m justified in the silliness of buying not one, but two, iPads. So, the big question: what is it like to own an iPad?

Quite comfortable, actually. Everything from the in-store experience (you are greeted by a personal sales assistant and a line of clapping employees, cheering your valiant efforts standing in line - only 5 minutes long, incidentally) to the experience of typing this blog post has been surprisingly easy and smooth. That’s not to say that it’s without flaws, of which there are many (and to which any typos in this post will attest).

The Positive

As mentioned above, almost everything about the iPad experience is smooth. It shows that Apple has put a great deal of thought into both the device itself as well as all the experiences that surround it - the App Store, the packaging, in-store. The physical device is technologically impressive; the screen is crystal clear and the processor response is snappy. In fact, an unfortunate downside of the iPad is to instantly make one’s previously treasured iPhone feel clunky and old.

Another successful aspect of the device is, of course, the interface and usability. The OS works much like the iPhones, which is to say that it’s highly tactile, elegant, and easy to understand. It is entirely possible to hand the device around the table and see every single person use it and play with it without confusion or hesitation. I compare this experience to when I got my Kindle and took it out at dinner with friends; no one was able to find the book store or navigate from my open book to the home screen (in fact, most people intently pinched and rubbed the screen, expecting an iPhone-like touch interface).

There are a few excellent apps out for the iPad. My favorites so far: Instapaper, Twitterific (TweetDeck is gorgeous but its data connection has been inconsistent for me), Keynote, Brushes, Touchpad, Wordpress (on which I’m writing this), Epicurious, Weather HD, and Netflix. However, one area that I am really impressed and surprised by is the quality of the games. I probably should have expected this, but WOW - gaming on the iPad is amazing. As a gaming device alone the iPad more than justifies its price point.

The Negative

Okay, enough of the Kool Aid. Not everything works perfectly; some of the apps seem downright buggy, and I’ve received a few “out of memory” warnings (fixed for me by deselecting the “fill my remaining space with music” option in the sync settings). The lack of multitasking is a real pain in the ass, and I’ve had some issues copying/pasting across applications (which, again, might be the fault of the app developers and not Apple). While I’d argue that the iPad is already a superb entertainment device, the lack of multitasking really hinders any serious attempts at productivity. Also, I’ve experienced some of the WiFi spottiness that others have reported - this is the only part of the above that feels like it could be a serious bug.

Beyond functionality, lots of folks have raised some serious concerns about what the iPad means for technology. Cory Doctorow wrote an impassioned argument against the iPad due to Apple’s fondness for tightly controlled, closed systems, and he makes some very valid points. In the long run I think that open systems will win out over closed. In my mind Apple is something of a sherpa; they create and lead with new technologies, ecosystems, and devices, opening the possibilities for open systems to follow and flourish in their wake. An advantage to the closed system is the high level of quality control it allows, which is what makes the iPhone and iPad app stores so much more pleasurable than, say, the Android’s. So I guess I’m less moralistic about the topic than Doctorow, although I do understand and ultimately agree with his point.

The second big concern I’ve heard about the iPad is that it reverts our interactions back to passive consumption, rather than active creation. I think that this is mostly, if not entirely, true. First of all, it is fairly convenient to create content on the iPad; I’m quite happy writing this post on it, and last night I made the first of what I hope to be a series of “paintings” with the Brushes program. It is much easier to create content on the iPad than it ever was on the iPhone, and I’ve never heard the active/passive criticism about that device. Secondly, we are still in early days - I fully expect content creation to improve as more apps are created. But with those caveats, I do think that the iPad’s primary usage is for content consumption. What the iPad excels at is not work but entertainment - and what’s so wrong with that?

The Potential

As I wrote in my post reacting to the iPad’s announcement, the most interesting parts of what the iPad means are not going to be apparent for some time. The first potentiality is for a massive media ecosystem that includes television, books, and movies. Right now, all three offerings are rather anemic, but this can only improve. When it does, it will be another strong death blow for the publishing and advertising industries in their current incarnations.

The second potentiality, which I find the most interesting, is how continuous, portable, and usable access to data will change the ways in which people interact with communications and technology. In my group of friends, it is already very common for someone to pull up Wikipedia on their phone to settle an argument. Data access is no longer a luxury; it’s an accepted part of our social routines. As these capabilities become more common place we will have to reevaluate what this new behavior means for communication and socialization.

So, the iPad is coming out on Saturday (the Wifi only version, at least; those of us who are holding out for the 3G-enabled version have to wait until late April), and naturally tons of new information about the device is surfacing.

First and foremost, Apple itself released a series of videos showcasing various applications. For the most part they work just the way you’d expect, although everything looks pretty seamless and the interactions are slick. The Keynote and Pages demos are great places to start, as they show how the iPad could go a long way towards replacing laptops for day-to-day tasks.

The iBooks demo highlights the eBook reader, which is going to be pretty huge competition for the Kindle. They also give us a glimpse of the Books store, which, as predicted, works much like iTunes music. As I’ve mentioned before, the real potential of the iPad is not its technology, but its potential for creating a new ecosystem for media consumption - books are where we’ll first see this play out. Fastcompany is already predicting that the model will revolutionize publishing for smaller companies and unknown authors.

Aside from Apple’s offerings, we’re starting to see screenshots of independent developer apps for the iPad, and they look amazing.

The other big news so far this week is Apple’s rumoured announcement of iAd, a mobile advertising platform that would directly compete with Google’s offering. Rumor has it that the platform would be highly location-aware, which at the moment is a technology that seems to be largely untapped by mobile marketers. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

As an addendum to my SXSW recap yesterday, I’d like to share the slidedecks/video from some of the most interesting presentations. Enjoy!

danah boyd’s keynote on privacy and digital culture

Web Video Thunderdome, by Mike Arauz and Bud Caddell

Program or Be Programmed, by Doug Rushkoff

The inimitable Gary Vaynerchuck, talking about companies and love

Clay Shirky’s presentation would definitely be here too, if I could find a video of it online.

Enjoy!

I returned from SXSW last Wednesday, and I’ve just now reached the point where I can sort through all the panels, BBQ, tex-mex, and alcohol I consumed and come to some semi-salient conclusions. Read on!

So much has been written about the incredible atmosphere of SXSW that it’s almost pointless for me to recap here, but I’ll try anyway. The simplest way to put this into context is just to imagine that all your Twitter friends - people you engage with but never met offline, old friends from real life, people you admire and would love to meet - are congregating within a 6 block radius. This provides immense opportunities for interaction. As one might expect, the audience at SXSW is generally young-ish (late 20s, early 30s), tech-savvy, hipster-esque, with iPhone and Macbook constantly in tow (I can’t wait for next year when I can give my back a break by toting around my iPad instead of my Macbook). This environment feels simultaneously electrified and jaded, but it’s something I wouldn’t miss for the world. It’s the single most important technology event of the year, and the only one I know I will be attending annually.

The panels, however, are a different story. It’s shocking and disappointing to me that so many of the presenters - chosen by a social media voting process earlier in the year - seem completely unprepared. Panels with more than 2 people tended to be completely disorganized, and one session I attended was nothing more than the capabilities deck for the company the presenter works for. It seemed like most folks were afraid to commit to anything other than what everyone already believes in, but at the same time, did their best to avoid touching on a topic that even one person in the audience was already familiar with. This, to me, was sad, and shows a negative effect of the Twitter echo chamber and cliquey-ness that we see in social media.

(Note: based on my experiences this year and last I am committed to submitting a panel for next year; I may not be the brightest digital rock star out there, but I know how to prepare a non-trainwreck presentation. Get in touch if you’d like to collaborate.)

Aside from some of the duds, SXSW offers the opportunity to see some of the best digital thinkers - Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Moot of 4chan - in action. I’ve read much of their work online, but it’s a pleasure to see them bring their stories to life. But even more valuable is the opportunity to interact with peers and leaders who work all over the country in a variety of capacities.

This week marked the launch of the very first online-based reality TV show. ‘If I Can Dream’ is a new series from American Idol creator Simon Fuller that takes five Hollywood hopefuls (all quite attractive, obviously) and places them in a beautiful house where they are taped 24-7 as they try to live their dreams. Think ‘American Idol’ meets ‘Big Brother’. This article from Fast Company describes the vibe pretty well:

“The evocative pipes of Elvis, lingering shots of five impossibly pulchritudinous young ‘uns in underwear wafting around an impossibly beautiful house. A cross between Idol and Big Brother, the show—the first to be streamed via the Internet on Hulu— follows a wannabe model, three actors and a musician as they try to make it big in the town of Tinsel. The social media presence is overwhelming. You can tweet, FB, MySpace, blog and sms the quintet and, if one of them should make it big, vote to choose their replacement.”

What’s interesting about this show is that, at the moment, it is entirely digital. In addition to episodes airing on Hulu, it has a highly interactive web site that allows you to watch the house live, 24-7, from the point of view of over 50 cameras. You can track the individual cast members and dynamically follow them as they move throughout the house, focus on a single room, or just watch the producer’s selection of the most interesting things happening at the moment.

So what does it mean?

The world’s becoming digital

Five years ago, or even one year ago, there’s no question that this show would have been launched in partnership with a major television network. But as all forms of entertainment become increasingly digital, it makes more sense to publish the show online. Producer Michael Herwick breaks it down:

“[Young people] digest the internet, they’re socially interactive, and they’re shooting their own videos on YouTube and getting discovered. We’re just saying that’s where it’s at right now, and we’re creating a project around that.”

This approach seems to resonate with the target demographic. A few commenters on a Perez Hilton post discussing the show say:

“I always watch American Idol on line.. These days people don’t watch TV.. Unless there’s no internet..” -evancalo
“I fucking LOVE HULU! Down with paying for cable!” -holyfuck

Celebrity requires interaction

“Someone tweet me and tell me what I should do” - Giglianne, the aspiring model.

I am not a fan of reality shows, but because of my husband’s involvement, I’ve been tuning into the site periodically. And the moment that hooked me was when, on the day the cast moved in, they all sat around a television that was showing live Twitter comments and questions directed at them. The cast immediately began to interact with the fans - making shout-outs, answering questions, and just chatting. This level of interactivity allows for fans to be more than just a passive audience, and that decision was made by design:

“I am determined to continue challenging convention and pushing the boundaries of mainstream entertainment. The next frontier is the video world of authentic real-time interaction. ‘If I Can Dream’ experiments with technology to provide for the first time a complete open-door opportunity that allows the viewer to experience reality in a way never before attempted.” - Simon Fuller

Modern day celebrities are increasingly interacting with their fans - just look at all the celebs on Twitter. It’s interesting to think that, in years to come, this type of interaction and a sense of responsibility towards fans might become standard.

Always-on entertainment

Another interesting aspect of the show is that it’s always on. The 30-minute Hulu program is really only a small piece of the overall effort. Producer Michael Herwick describes Fuller’s vision:

“I think Simon’s vision was to give people complete access into what it really takes to try to make it in Hollywood. He said that nobody’s ever shown that world in a legitimate sort of way, and he wanted to give complete access to it. I also think that he really loved the idea of video communication and that the whole world is so interconnected, everyone’s video chatting. It just felt like a natural fit for modern technology.”

In advertising, we talk a lot about how digital has shifted from initiative based efforts to always-on platforms. It’s interesting to think that this shift might be happening in entertainment as well.

What does it all mean?

When I was watching the site on Tuesday evening, I started to get a strange feeling. The voyeurism of watching the cast in the house- live, unfiltered- combined with their interactions with viewers on Twitter felt slightly uncomfortable (and very unfamiliar), but it was also extremely compelling. I couldn’t turn it off. It felt completely and utterly new. To throw some marketing speak into the mix, it felt like I was watching a paradigm shifting. And that’s not a feeling that I get often.

We know that digital technology has changed the ways in which we connect with one another. We know that it changes our behaviors. Now we’re seeing how it can change our very definition of, and expectations from, entertainment.

Full disclosure: My husband, a partner at Poke, led all the digital for this project. So I’ve been hearing about the show for over a year (and ate a lot of dinners alone while he worked late on it!). However, any opinions expressed here are, as always, my own.

I recently uploaded a report outlining the top 10 strategies used by luxury brands to engage with consumers digitally. I wrote this report with my colleague Phil Jackson at Publicis when we were working on the Cadillac new business pitch a few months ago. We didn’t win the business (unfortunately), but I think the presentation has value for anyone who works with luxury brands online. Check it out!

The folks at Miami Ad School were kind enough to record my presentation last Monday (and do some very good editing!). It’s about a half hour long in total, split into four parts. Here’s the video:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Not too bad, right? I’ve been interested in moving to teaching and speaking more, and I don’t think this was a terrible first attempt, although there is certainly room for improvement (I say “kinda” a lot).

In case you didn’t see it before, here’s a link to the presentation itself on Slideshare.

Several months ago, I was asked to be a guest teacher at Miami Ad School for their “Industry Heros” course. This is a program in which, each week, students receive a lecture and 2 classes from a different professional in the industry. I am thrilled to be a part of this for a few reasons: first of all, it’s a great program and it’s an honor to participate; secondly, the students are incredibly creative and inspiring; and finally, it’s a chance to escape the freezing weather in New York for sunny Miami.

On Monday, I gave a lecture about some trends in digital marketing and advertising that I see being important in 2010. Last night I uploaded the deck to Slideshare, and this morning I was thrilled to find that it was picked as one of the featured presentations for Slideshare today (yay!). So please take a look - I’d love to get feedback.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you heard about Steve Jobs’ announcement of the Apple iPad on Wednesday. However, the response to the device was less rapturous than anticipated, with journalists and tech junkies criticizing the device while it was still being unveiled.

So was the iPad really an iFail? The first question that has to be answered is how we define success versus failure. In my mind there are two major ways to do this:

1. Is the iPad good for the technology world as a whole?
2. Will the iPad be a success for Apple?

Those are two very different questions with different answers. Let’s break it down one at a time.

1. Is the iPad good for the technology world as a whole?

Device

In defining whether or not the iPad is good for technology, we have to look at a few factors. The first, and most obvious, is the device itself. There are some interesting technical advances in the screen technology, so that it’s easy to see the screen from multiple angles. However, as lots of folks have pointed out, the iPad as a device is really little more than a big iPod Touch.

User Interface

In terms of user interface, the iPad draws largely from the conventions established in the iPhone (they even share an OS). There are some major improvements in individual applications, and the addition of the iWork suite is interesting, but there isn’t a major breakthrough as there was when the iPhone was announced. However, this lack doesn’t mean that the iPad UI won’t be extremely easy and comfortable to use.

Ecosystem

Beyond the device and its interface, there are a few areas in which I believe the iPad is much stronger. The first is the creation of a media ecosystem. The iPod didn’t really come into its own until the iTunes music store was released; same with the iPhone and the App Store. On Wednesday, we got a hint of the iPad’s ecosystem with the iBooks application, which supports book downloads in a similar manner to the Kindle. I can only assume that that marketplace will continue to grow, and will probably replace the Kindle’s (the use of ePub technology is a good sign, although from the prices shown in the demo books on the iPad will be slightly more expensive than books on the Kindle).

However, I believe that a larger opportunity is a streaming television ecosystem. Right now the iTunes Store supports TV episodes and movies, but there isn’t anything that supports free or subscription based streaming. But what about when Hulu and Netflix develop streaming video clients for the iPad, or, better yet, partner with Apple to create a network-agnostic streaming media service? That would be truly revolutionary and might be the final nail in the coffin for traditional cable TV.

Now, this is not to say that the ecosystem is ideal. Like many others, I am concerned about the fact that the all of Apple’s “stores” are closed systems. Apple, and only Apple, has complete control over what types of content and applications we can be exposed to on their devices.

You can do on the iPad only what Apple allows. And if you are allowed to do something, you have to go through iTunes or MobileMe to do it. Apple makes a nice chunk of change on everything you do, but more importantly it gets to play gatekeeper. In OS X, Apple can’t block you from using apps it doesn’t like or competes with. But it famously blocks you from doing so on the iPhone and now presumably on the iPad, which is connected to the same App Store. How long before it blocks movies, TV shows, songs, books and even web sites? Scoff now, but don’t be so naïve as to believe that this isn’t possible. - The iPad’s Closed System: Sometimes I Hate Being Right

Now, this is not a new thing. Apple has never been very open minded about collaboration and experimentation. And, to be fair, thus far I believe that the decisions they have made have been very positive for the vast majority of their users. However, it is certainly a red flag for those of us who believe in data freedom.

New behaviors

This is where I think the iPad really has legs. Its price point and form factor has the opportunity to greatly the expand the number of people who expect to have the internet constantly at their fingertips, even when they’re on their couch. Most of the tech writers and Twitterers (myself included) are already used to this behavior, so it doesn’t seem new to them. However, I believe that it is a revolutionary idea that could vastly change how the average person understands computing and data access, which I think is a great thing.

I think of my in-laws as the typical “non-computer” user. They have desktops (obsolete, underpowered Dells), which they use for internet access, but, like most Americans, they aren’t really immersed in technology. But a device that contains all their books and plays streaming TV too? That’s something they might go for.

A lot of people are complaining that they don’t really need an iPad - they are happy with their laptop and their phone, and don’t really see the gap there. To be honest, I’m not sure the gap is there either. I think that there is a class of people for whom the iPad will actually replace the laptop. No, you can’t code on it. But how many people really want to?

Going back to my family for an example, last year my brother-in-law was looking into buying a laptop. He desperately wanted a Macbook - he loved the form factor and user experience. But, since he doesn’t use the computer for much beyond web browsing, he couldn’t justify the cost. Even if he could have justified it, it would still have been unaffordable. An iPad would have solved all his needs at a price point that works.

Summary

So, my answer for “is the iPad good for tech”, is a net “yes”. Is it as revolutionary as, say, the iPhone? Maybe not. Does it have major drawbacks? Yes, definitely. But I believe that the opportunities for the ecosystems and behaviors make it an overall step forward.

2) Will the iPad be successful for Apple?

This second question is much easier to answer. Based on the possibilities posed by the ecosystem and a new category of consumer behavior, I believe that the iPad will be big.

Apple will make serious bank on the ecosystem they create. Once someone purchases the iPhone, they will be downloading DVDs and books by the handful. This is obviously why they were able to make the price point so low.

This is not to say that everything will be rosy right out of the gate. Success might take some time. Like every Apple release, the first generation will be flawed and won’t have huge sales. But in five years, I am sure this will be huge for the company.

Addendum: A note on Flash and Multitasking

One of the consistent complaints about the device (and the iPhone before it) is the lack of Flash. The fact that people even thought that Flash would be included is absurd.

Let me break it down. Apple will NEVER support Flash. Apple makes its money through its product’s ecosystems, as I discussed above. If Flash worked in Safari, people would program games that never have to go the App Store. People would even charge for them on their own sites. Apple would lose its revenue stream. I’m not saying this decision is morally right, but it makes complete business sense.

Also, if we’re fair for a second, Flash is kinda shit. 90% of the time it’s used unnecessarily. Adobe is even more of a closed system than Apple is. I, for one, am psyched that it is dying out. Don’t worry, we’re not going to lose functionality - HTML 5 is on the way. How will Apple handle that threat to its system? No idea.

Another complaint that has been quieter but more important is about multitasking. Unlike a computer, you won’t be able to have multiple apps open at one time on the iPhone. This is a problem. When I’m reading a web site, I want my Twitter running, IM alerting me to friends’ messages, and Pandora playing. I suspect (and hope) that this might be addressed in a future release of the iPhone OS.

Having spent most of this week in bed, I feel spectacularly unqualified to write my usual “week in review” post. Instead, I’m going to answer a question I get a lot: how do I keep up with what’s going on in the digital world?

The simple answer is: I spend time in it. But to keep up with news, I’ve gotten into a routine that I follow pretty much daily, aside from when I’m sick/ in the last stages of a pitch/ out of town. It might sound like a lot, but I generally spend an hour each morning completing all the steps listed below.

Of course, this is just what works for me - lots of other folks have routines they prefer, and you can tweak this to your satisfaction. Here it goes:

1. Check Twitter

I check my Twitter feed first because, being real-time, it is generally the source for the most up-to-date news. At this point it’s worth while to spend a few minutes discussing who I follow on Twitter.

Scanning and re-tweeting

I primarily use TweetDeck to browse Twitter, and as a default I believe it opens up your friends’ 100 most recent tweets. For me this is a good amount to scan through every morning. The word “scan” is important - I definitely do not read every tweet. I flip through looking for words that jump out for me, paying particular attention to my favorite tweeters (sorry, I know how obnoxious that phrase is, but it’s descriptive). If I see something that is well-written and immediately interesting to me, I re-tweet it (I prefer the old-style of retweets: using “RT” or “via” syntax, rather than Twitter’s new built-in retweet feature, but that’s just me. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this).

Friends and followers

It’s really important to get your Twitter list to a point that is useful and relevant for you. I use WeFollow and Twitter lists to find new and interesting people (you can see what Twitter lists I’m following here). I also follow people I see my friends/ favorite tweeters talking to (or sending out Follow Friday recommendations for). Finally, I have a column set up in TweetDeck that shows new followers, and if they don’t appear to be total jackasses/ spam/ porn stars, I follow them back. Also, I’m not shy about unfollowing people if I don’t find their tweets useful.

A note about Twitter

A lot of people ask me what Twitter’s good for. The simple answer is that it’s not right for everyone. For me, it’s become similar to how I use RSS (see below), because the topics I’m interested in (digital, social media, technology) are heavily discussed on Twitter. If your interests are, say, medieval history and Danish shoe cobbling, you might have less luck (although you never know, times are changing). I also think that it’s increasingly important for people who work in digital media to have a respectable Twitter presence. I’m not talking a million followers, but you have to participate. If you don’t, it says something about how much you really know about your profession. Reading articles about Twitter is not the same as participating, because it’s constantly changing.

2. Read your “required” RSS feeds

Google Reader is my favorite place on the internet. It’s the single biggest source of information, entertainment, inspiration, and procrastination that I know.

What is Google Reader?

Feel free to skip this section and the next if you’re already a fan, or if you have an alternate RSS solution that works for you. Google Reader is an RSS aggregator. Learn about RSS here, and RSS aggregators here.

If you have a Google account, which you probably do, you have Google Reader - click this link to view yours.

Setting up your feeds

Just like Twitter is only as valuable as the people you follow, Google Reader is only as valuable as the sites you subscribe to. Personally, I subscribe to hundreds of sites. However, as with Twitter, I don’t read them all. I have set up a list of sites that I call “required” - meaning that I try my best to read all their posts every day. Together they generate about a thousand posts per day (see the next section for details on how I manage these posts).

Like Twitter, it will take time to get your list of “required” sites to a happy place. If your interests overlap with mine, you can start by subscribing to my required sites. Also, you can subscribe to my list of “Shared” items (for more about sharing, see the next section).

Scanning and processing your feeds

Even within my “required” feed, I don’t read every post - the beauty of Google Reader is its simple interface, which lets you quickly navigate from post to post by using the “J” key. I generally scan through the headlines and only read posts that strike my interest. If an article is interesting, I will do one of the following actions:

1. Share - If I think something will be interesting to share with my Twitter followers, I open the article in a new browser tab for processing in the next step (see below). I also generally mark the article as “Shared” in my Google Reader.


2. Read later - If it’s a long article and I don’t have time to read it at the moment, I use the Read it Later tool. This is a nifty application that integrates with Firefox as an extension, and adds an icon to each article in Google Reader. Adding a post to this tool causes it to be automatically downloaded to the companion iPhone app as well. I’m experimenting with Instapaper, a similar tool that also supports downloading to the Kindle.


3. Save for reference - If the post contains information that I think I will need to reference at a later time, I add the link to my Delicious bookmarks with relevant tags.

3. Share interesting links

Now we’re back to Twitter. I like to share interesting links that I find via my Google Reader on Twitter. I use a tool called HootSuite for actually publishing tweets (I use TweetDeck, mentioned above, mainly for reading tweets). In my opinion, HootSuite has two killer features.

1. It lets you schedule tweets for a later time - As I mentioned above, I complete this entire routine in an hour first thing every morning. However, I don’t want to send out 10 tweets within the span of 15 minutes for a few reasons. First of all, it’s annoying to see 10 tweets in a row from one person. Secondly, I like to space my tweets throughout the day so that different people see them at relevant times. If I sent out all my tweets in the morning, someone who checks their Twitter at lunchtime wouldn’t see any activity from me at all.
2. It tracks clicks to the links you share - Other services do this as well, but HootSuite has a nifty tracking mechanism. It shortens the URLs you share so that you can track how many people click on them. This is interesting because it helps you see how popular different content is with your followers. If someone retweets you, but keeps the HootSuite URL, you can count those numbers as well.

So, for each of my open tabs, I set up a tweet, scheduled at approximately half hour intervals throughout the day.

Summary

Shew. That’s a lot of text to describe something that doesn’t actually take a lot of time. However, be reassured - most of the work is in the setup, not the daily reading.

At this point I should probably say that, although I spend about an hour doing the bulk of my work reading and sharing, I do check Twitter and HootSuite periodically throughout the day to see how people have responded to my tweets. I’ll also reply to anyone who’s asked a question about something I shared. I also might check Google Reader if I have time over lunch.

That’s it! I hope this was helpful.

After a (largely unplanned) holiday hiatus, I’m back into the swing of things with my week in review posts. This gives me a good reason to post on a semi-regular basis (I am horrible at anything more frequent when it comes to long-format blog posts, although my microblogging on Twitter is generally pretty robust), and it allows me a chance to consider what has been really important in the past week of digital. So, without further ado, here are my picks for the week of 1/11/10 - 1/15/10.

Google vs. China

Google was slammed by the US press when they agreed to censor content based on the laws of the Chinese government (background info here). Many commentators saw this as a direct violation of Google’s “don’t be evil” motto.

Why does the Chinese government’s policy towards censorship qualify as evil? Check out the content they consider objectionable. It’s insane and also a bit funny - I understand why they blog searches for “TiananmenSquare” (evil though it is), but YTMND? Really?

This week Google abruptly reversed their policy, after Gmail was hacked. The implication (although Google has not yet said so explicitly) is that the Chinese government was behind the hacking (the US government is planning to investigate). Google has temporarily closed its operations in China and given all its employees holiday leave.

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.” - Google Blog

China’s response to Google is basically: if you don’t abide by our laws, leave. This is still playing out, and it could have interesting implications for how global technology will affect individual freedoms.

Conan vs. Leno

Another smackdown that’s happening online is the controversy between Conan O’Brien and NBC over the shifting of his time slot to accommodate Jay Leno. What’s interesting about this is how Conan (definitely the underdog in this situation) has played his hand entirely transparently and online. First, he released an intelligent, respectful letter explaining why he couldn’t agree with NBC’s decision. This letter was widely reported on online and garnered Conan a ton of support, including a popular “I’M WITH COCO” movement launched on Facebook. Next, Conan began using the situation as fodder for his show, with digital tie-ins: a joke that he had listed his show on Craigslist turned out to be real.

So far,  NBC has appeared to be entirely dumb and blind to these rumblings, which suggests either enormous incompetency or that Jeff Zucker’s campaign against Conan might be personal.

From a digital media perspective, it will be interesting to see if the groundswell online has any long-term implications for NBC.

How is the internet changing the way you think?

Great post from The Atlantic.

2010 Trends in Digital Marketing

When I last wrote, I mentioned that I was working on a deck that describes what trends I think will be critical in online advertising/ marketing for 2010. I haven’t forgotten about it, but in typical fashion, I’ve made it a bigger project than I initially anticipated. It really will be coming out soon, probably next week.

One of my favorite blogs these days is Autocomplete Me, an often hilarious site that catalogues funny and bizarre Google suggest queries.

Some of the suggestions that pop up are really baffling. For example, why are people asking “what do you feed a yeti anyway”? Why would someone search for “my nipples smell like sauerkraut”?

As Clive Thompson notes, many of these search queries are actually obscure cultural references. They might be a line from a movie or song, or an internet meme.

However, what’s interesting to me is what the stream-of-consciousness nature of these queries suggests about how we have begun to understand and use Google (and by extension, the internet). I find it fascinating that the internet is the first point of contact for so many people for any question or observation, and that we have become completely comfortable just typing things in (and anything goes) to see what sticks. It will be interesting to see how this tendency progresses as our technology gets even more sophisticated.

• As the end of December approaches, it seems like every media outlet in the world is summing up it’s top ten for the year, and – since it is 2009 – for the decade. Here’s some the best lists in the world of digital:
  • Business Insider lists 21 things (mostly tech) that became obsolete this decade.
  • eConsultancy’s innovation awards highlights the top digital achievements of 2009.
  • ReadWriteWeb has a really excellent series of lists of examples for the trends they’ve identified. The areas include:
    • Semantic Web products
    • Ecommerce
    • Internet of Things
    • Mobile
    • Consumer web apps
    • International
    • RSS and syndication
    • Real-time web
    • And, amusingly, the top 10 tech failures of 2009
  • Adweek’s best of the 2000s
  • I’m working on my list of the top digital and advertising trends for 2010 (which, I’m sure, will be heavily influenced by the lists above) – I’ll be sharing that next week!
• Super-cool multitouch gestural interface from MIT. Physical computing interfaces are definitely on my prediction list for 2010.
• The big buzz this week was around Facebook’s changes to their privacy policy. Previously you couldn’t see another person’s status updates, photos, and contact info unless you “friended” them - now the profiles are public by default. I’m not sure it’s a big deal, it seems like the whole world is moving in that direction (more data available, freely). Read more about it here and here.

• The Ford Fiesta Movement - the highly successful, social-media based, influencer-marketing program run to promote the 2011 Ford Fiesta - has wrapped up. By all accounts the campaign was a success, and is an interesting case study of a successful promotion using non-traditional marketing. Check out Scott Monty’s blog for a write-up (he’s the chief Social guy at Ford).
• Time Magazine released a concept video for the “magazine of the future”, which is similar to the concepts for the Apple Tablet which have been circulating online. It’s an interesting piece of futurism, but, as Luke Wroblewski of Yahoo! points out, there several nearer term innovations that would help magazines work in the digital world.
• Google is changing the way that it presents first-click free content. Right now, publishers that have a paywall allow Google to index their content so that they appear in search results. Users who come to the publisher from Google can view the first page free, but then have to subscribe. Some people were abusing this by figuring out how to search Google for subsequent pages, thus getting all the content for free. To solve this issue, Google is allowing publishers to limiting the number of free views a single user can get to 5 per day. There’s a lot of confusion around what this change means (which, in short, is not much).
• IKEA released their 2010 catalogue as a free, interactive iPhone app. It’s a cool way of distributing their catalogue, but unfortunately there’s no interactivity (you can’t click a product and view details on the web site, for example).

I just finished reading the new Vladimir Nabakov novel, The Original of Laura. In case you haven’t heard of the controversy surrounding the publishing of the book, here’s a quick summary: before Nabakov died in 1977, he asked his wife to burn the unfinished manuscript should he be unable to finish it. She could not bring herself to burn it, and after her death the responsibility fell to their son, Dmitri, who struggled with the decision for 30 years. Finally he decided to publish the novel, and the format is amazing: Nabakov wrote his novels on series of index cards, and Dmitri has published the book in the same format. Each page has a high resolution photograph of the original index card with a typed transcription at the bottom. Misspellings and errors are preserved. The best past is that the index card scans are perforated, so that the reader can punch them out and reorder them to create his/her own experience of the novel. Given the nature of the text - which jumps between viewpoints and timelines - this exercise could be quite rewarding. I haven’t tried it myself yet (I just read the story linearly for the first go) but can’t wait to do so.

As digital technologies and behaviors change rapidly, so do the roles and titles of the people who work in the digital space. Over the past 15 years, as digital design has matured and grown, a wide variation of titles have been proposed and used. Some are particularly confusing – What in the world is a Technopologist? What’s the difference between an interaction designer and an interactive designer? (It’s a big difference, actually). Even people working in the industry can’t keep up.

Given the constant shift, and the lack of consistency across the industry, it would be impossible to provide a definitive list of these roles. This list is an attempt to map some of the more common titles to a set of roles and tasks.

• Digital Strategist
  (aka Digital Planner, Marketing Technopologist, Interactive Strategist, Digital Analyst)
  Leads the research, analysis, and strategic recommendations for solving the business problem online. Defines the thought process and brand POV, and provides executional recommendations to the creative team.


• Social Media Specialist
  (aka Social Agent, Community Manager, Outreach, Digital PR)
  This title refers to two distinct roles; the person filling the role may provide one or both of the definitions described.
  
  In one sense, this title is an almost exact overlap with the digital strategist role, but with a focus on social media research and executions.
  
  In the other meaning, it refers to a person responsible for social media outreach after the product launch. This might involve interfacing with influencers, blogger outreach, seeding, and community management.


• Content Strategist
  (aka Editor, Senior Copywriter)
  A content strategist is responsible for planning an ongoing approach to content creative, publishing, and governance. This practice includes: editorial strategy, metadata strategy, search engine optimization (SEO), content management strategy, and the definition of content distribution channels.
  
  This is a relatively new practice and is not yet widely adopted, although that is changing rapidly.


• Creative Director (CD)
  As in traditional advertising, the CD is responsible for leading the creative team (UX designer, visual designer, copywriter) and managing all aspects of the product/brand’s tone across multiple media, based on input from the strategist. The CD’s background might be UX Design or, more frequently, Visual Design.


• User Experience (UX) Designer
  (aka Interaction Designer, Information Architect, HCI Designer, Usability Expert, Experience Planner, Experience Strategist, Business Analyst)
  The UX designer creates the architecture and interaction models for a specific execution, owning all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.
  
  At the highest level, this role can overlap extensively with the Digital Strategist. However, the focus is not the “what” but the “how” - the UX designer investigates consumer behavior in interacting with products and related processes.
  
  At lower levels, this role is responsible for creating wireframes, site maps, and functional specifications that detail all aspects of a product’s interaction and functionality with the consumer.
  
  In certain projects this role might not be necessary (for example, a branded email campaign or Facebook page doesn’t allow for much variation in interaction, in which case visual designers will typically handle the design on their own).


• Visual Designer
  (aka Art Director, Interactive Designer, Creative Director, Web Designer, Digital Designer)
  The visual designer is responsible for all visual elements of the product – logo, colors, fonts, and layout. Additionally, visual designers work with the UX designer to ensure that the interactions of the site “feel” appropriate for the brand.


• Interactive Designer
  (aka Flash Designer, Flash Developer, Creative Technologist)
  An interactive designer designs and develops interactions in rich technologies (usually Flash). This role overlaps with the development team.
  
  Projects that do not require Flash (or similar rich technologies) don’t usually have this role.

List of idea generation methods

What an awesome resource… a definitive list of brainstorming, mind mapping, and other techniques to drive creativity and generate ideas.


Via Design for Service.

Via Indexed.