May, 2008 Archive

Life As Elevator Speech

I was in New York recently listening to some focus groups on enterprise security. The people on the other side of the glass oversaw the safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. They were smart and articulate (and God bless them, they also liked our creative). When we came to the channel survey [...]

If it took mass media to build mass brands, what will you build with fragmented media?

This intriguing question comes via a media colleague, who found it in a Columbia Business School ad. Clearly, we will be building mass brands and niche brands in the future, but what sort, with what tools and with what kind of partners? I thought Kevin Maney’s perspective on this question was pretty interesting in his [...]

Downshifting Denied

I was reading an interview this week with the incoming president of RISD, a 41-year-old named John Maeda who has never run an institution of higher learning. When he was asked why he decided to leave MIT Media Lab, he said: “I’d been at MIT for quite a while, but I was a bit tired [...]