I just got back in the office from a nice long weekend. My wife and I went up to Minneapolis to see a great concert, visit some friends, check out some art, and just kind of get away for a break in the old routine. It’s really hard to think about taking a break from the crazy, hectic schedules and deadlines that we’re all trying to meet on a day-to-day basis. After having done so, it is all the more apparent why it is so important to make time for NOT working as well.

Any time things become so hectic or routine that you’re not thinking about what you’re doing or not able to do it as well as you can, it’s time to take a break. Time to step back and get in touch with the things that really do matter in life. This applies to work, play, relationships, and just about anything else you really care about. Take a minute. Breathe deeply. Relax a bit and check in with where you’re at.

After having a 6 hour drive to kind of decompress, we arrived in downtown Minneapolis. We got a great deal on a room at the Graves 601 Hotel, which is smack-dab in the heart of the action. Target Center is right across the street, First Avenue is next door, and if you really lack something to do, Hooters and a Hard Rock Cafe are flanking the hotel as well.

Those attractions were not the enriching part of the trip, however. The real pleasure came in slowing down and doing things differently. Since we were so centrally located to the things we wanted to do, we were able to park the car and walk everywhere. Yeah – walk. I love walking places. It takes longer. You get to see things. You get to smell and hear things. I don’t think there’s a better way to get to know a place than to walk through it.

So from our home base we plotted out our course on Google Maps using our phones. The walking directions were right on and we determined that anything in a sub-two-mile radius was  easily what we would consider walking distance. Over the next two days, we enjoyed walking from place to place. Talking, taking time to pop in and see things we wanted to see. Watch and listen to people. Investigate interesting things. Look at art. Eat dinner for three hours. All the stuff that for one reason or another, we don’t take the time to do on a regular basis.

That’s what made the trip memorable. We didn’t pack in all the things we had said we wanted to do. Forget Ikea. Forget driving across town to get to that one store, restaurant or bar that people said was essential to visit. If we couldn’t walk it, we simply skipped it. What we got in return was two and a half days of time that seemed like four. The weekend didn’t fly by because every moment was packed with things we “had to” do, even if it sure wasn’t long enough.

When is the last time you removed things from your list or schedule in order to get LESS done, but to really focus on what it is you’re doing? Culturally, the United States doesn’t embrace that concept. But it’s something to seriously think about. Are you rushing to get one job done just so you can start the next? Do you have three jobs going on right now that all suck because you can’t do any of them as well as you’d like? How thin have you spread yourself and your commitments that you’ve set yourself up to always feel less than effective?

How willing are you to say no to things in order to be better at what you say yes to?

Try taking a break and slowing things down a bit. You may be amazed at how it can help you be better at what you’re doing and enjoy all of it a bit more.

The Womb Chair. Designed in 1948 by Eero Saarinen. The most perfect chair in the world. Comfort, sculptural lines, modern but yet timeless. I have been tracking and loving this chair for many many years…as long as I can remember (Because that is the kind of design nerd I am).

Saarinen lounging in his Womb Chair

Saarinen's Womb Chair

I just recently read an article in TIME magazine about the resurgence of recent interest in Saarinen.

Hockey rink at Yale, fondly called "the whale."

Currently, Yale is restoring quite a number of the buildings he designed for their campuses in the 1950’s: the hockey rink and residential complexes. A traveling show of Saarinen’s work has also been traveling around the country since 2006 and will end on January 31, 2011 at the Museum of the City in NYC. It is the first full career retrospective devoted entirely to his work. (I plan on making this show sometime in the fall, and if so, expect another geeked out blog about how awesome and future thinking this designer/architect/artist truly was. And how he has made such an impression on the world of design to this day.)

What is very cool about Saarinen, is that he designed his chairs, buildings, and structures aesthetically for the future…so in a sense, he made his future is present. “The wow factor in his buildings was a matter of structure, not sparkle. Saarinen was enchanted by the drama of powerful forms.” (TIME, February 1, 2010 issue)

Where did this “drama” come from? Well, his mother was a sculptor and his father was a Finnish architect. In fact, Saarinen had studied sculpture before switching to architecture. So there you go. He had the sweet spot: intellect and taste/artistry combined.

TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport

From the curve of the Gateway Arch to the womb chair, to the wide wingspan of the expanding rooftop of the TWA terminal at JFK International, these are all evidence of his sculptural aesthetic. I have to compare the experience of walking through the tunnel at TWA to what I would imagine the birthing journey to be like moving through the fallopian tunnel…and if I am lucky, ending my journey in the Womb Chair!

Sometimes when interest or trends point to an artist from the past, people still consider their work “retro” or classic. Even though Eero Saarinen passed away in 1961, I could never really consider his work retro…but rather modern, relevant, and always pointing towards the future horizons. His designs are still opening doors in the creative mind as well as inspiring architecture and design of the days to come.

I love zombie movies. There is something that has always excited me about the danger of an oncoming zombie apocalypse. How would I react and is it possible to be prepared? How can you stop the single minded, autopilot zombie when it approaches you?

During my train of zombie thought I realized that in a way I have become a zombie myself. Not the brain eating, shuffling kind, but the brain-numb digital kind. I whole-heartedly admit that I surf the web almost continuously. Whether I am at work, on my laptop at home or my iPhone, I am hardly ever disconnected for more than 30 minutes at a time. As a person with an insatiable thirst for knowledge I am always reading. The problem is that I often find myself just looking at drivel.

I frequent numerous, news, industry and entertainment sites looking for content. However, when there is not a specific topic I am looking for I tend to digitally graze. This can bring about some interesting topics and tidbits of knowledge but more often than not I waste an hour or more of my life and truly get nothing out of it. Imagine reading a book while thinking about numerous tasks you need to accomplish at home and at work. You simply won’t retain any of the information you consume. While you may have a general emotional sensation regarding the contents of the book the actual meat will be left on the pages.

With the continued proliferation of new online content providers and aggregators and the new devices being sold to enhance our consumption of them, at what point do we just become brain-numb digital zombies? If we really aren’t paying attention while we surf, no ad or marketing message will get through to us. Have we already hit the apocalypse and just not noticed it?

I thought that would get your attention and yes this is real.

Making its way to a vagina near you is the Mooncup.  “The Healthy Alternative to Tampons”.

This British product called Mooncup (currently being marketed) is a silicone menses receptacle designed to replace tampons and sanitary pads. Sort of a diaphragm meets chamber pot, it’s a flexible reservoir for menstrual fluids that you scrunch up to insert and slide out to empty.  http://loveyourvagina.com

Every woman will use an average of 12,000 sanitary products in her life, which can be replaced by one reusable Mooncup.  Well I can’t speak for all women but I must say that I would definitely have to pass on this product. 

Buying tampons every month doesn’t seem so bad now after seeing this Mooncup.  I am all for helping the environment but not at this cost.  I remember my Grandmother telling me stories about products like this back in the 30’s.  This product seems like we are going back in time not forward.  

Even though they may be able to capitalize on the environmentally-friendly woman, I still think this would be a very difficult product to market in this day and age.  It is a complete shift in mindset to go from a tampon user to a Mooncup user unless you have been brought up using something similar to this product from early womanhood. 

The Brits can keep this one.

Google announced today that they will be adding an option to their popular Google Analytics service that will allow people to opt out of having their web surfing behavior tracked by the application. This move is likely motivated by Google taking heat from data privacy groups, and sounds great on the surface. For marketers and website owners, it has definite implications.

The thing we really like about Google Analytics is that it’s free, it works extremely well, and it’s always improving. The amount of information you can get out of a simple-to-deploy tool like Google Analytics is amazing. It dramatically aids the analysis that helps us understand user behavior, marketing effectiveness and a tremendous number of other metrics. It’s also completely anonymous on an individual-person level. I simply can’t find out that Bob Smith from Toledo, OH visited my site on Thursday and has three kids. That is, unless Bob Smith actually gave me that information.

Google Analytics tracks things like behavior and resources accessed on a web site. We use both Google Analytics and another enterprise-level traffic reporting package for our hosted sites’ analytics. The package we use runs within our hosting environment and parses the actual server log files. It generates very similar information about visitors, search engines, popular times of day, navigation funnels, and all the other goodies we like to review. It is also anonymous.

The value of the information collected is in watching and learning about user behavior patterns. These patterns rely less on what Bob Smith did than on what 1,000 Bob Smiths did. Opting out of Google Analytics presents a challenge then. Bob Smith feels like he’s either “protected” more than before or he’s feeling good about sticking it to The Man by not letting Google or anyone else get his behavior info. But we’re no longer able to learn anything about Bob Smith’s behavior style and therefore can’t improve our sites and systems based on the collective insights we get from the now-anonymous Bob Smiths of the world. At least, we can’t do it through Google Analytics.

The thing is, we’re still getting that visitor’s behavior information. Via our other analytics software. Just like everyone else will be. If people are running any one of the multitude of log file parsing packages or other hosted analytics services, all of Bob Smith’s behavior patterns are still there. We know what links were clicked, the first and last page visited, and can estimate how long he was on each page. Nice things to know. It helps us make better user experiences and more effective websites. But we’re still not getting any more information about Bob Smith, on a personal level, than he gives us.

Will opting out of Google Analytics protect the average Internet user any more than before? No. It won’t.

So do you have a right to anonymity? If you’re visiting my website, on my server, accessing my files and using my resources, I would argue that I can collect information about your behavior. Most websites have a Terms of Use page and a Privacy Policy page. These pages typically explain what data gets collected and how it might be used. They are all basically the same, and they are all pretty much ignored by everyone except the legal department.

Now back to Google. Will this spell the end of Google Analytics’ reign as the go-to service for visitor behavior insights? I sure hope not. All we can do is see, and also watch to see if Google has anything up their sleeve that will tell us how many people visited the site with tracking disabled.

As a big fan of Google Analytics, I’m immediately thinking of what this might do to general usage statistics. Will we need to re-do all of the reporting and analysis for our clients where we integrate data from Google Analytics? Will we need to identify another tool to complement our own reporting software? I hope not – I’ve grown to like our setup. But we can definitely adapt if necessary.

We’ll be keeping tabs on developments here. I will wait and see what happens with the opt-out option. If it does become a browser plug-in it may see a lower adoption rate than if it were implemented in another fashion. Regardless, we will be watching to see if it impacts our own data analysis.

We take privacy and security VERY seriously. Our clients are extremely important to us. Their sites are very important to us. We do our best to protect them and their visitors. We use the data about behavior to create more effective marketing solutions and help engineer better experiences for site visitors.

The best way for you to protect yourself is to be up to date on what all this stuff means. To learn more about what information can be found about you online and online privacy in general, you can:

• Do a Google Search for Your Name
• Check your IP address
• Learn what an IP address is
• Review popular Internet reporting tools
• Brush up on everything in general

He was NOT a real man of genius...that campaign is brilliant, Mr way-too-much Paco Rabanne was not.

I had a weird experience today. A guy showed up in our lobby to give me a packet. I did not have an appointment with him. He told the woman who greeted him that someone from his office had said she was sending information over to me. True enough. I’d spoken to her about two weeks prior and told her to go ahead and send me her contact info. I did not tell her to reach back into the 70’s and send a Barney Miller look alike (replete with London Fog raincoat) who smelled as though he’d been assaulted by a giant bottle of Paco Rabanne to deliver that info. And yet she did.

I agreed to go out and retrieve said packet, although I was waiting for an important phone call. I should have gone with my usual plan of having the greeter explain that “no one gets in without an appointment.”

When I got to the lobby Barney decided to engage me in an unwanted conversation about how our business was going. My answers were not prolific.  Barney remained undeterred and proceeded to give me a report on the glowing health of his business – which I didn’t want. I rushed him out the door as soon as human decency would allow and returned to my office to await my call.

As I returned to my desk I began to notice an odd and overwhelming scent. That’s when I realized that the Paco was all over my hands. Eeeewww!

These people will not be getting any business from me.

How is that possible? Didn’t they send this really personable guy to engage me and form a connection?  Isn’t that the best way to engage prospects – in the flesh?  Shouldn’t I be eagerly awaiting the first opportunity to work with Mr. Chemistry?

So where did they go wrong? Disrespect. Sending someone without my permission was a clear sign that they disrespect my time. They would rather trick me into an “in-person” meeting than approach me with honesty and take their chances. In addition, instead of just thanking me for interrupting my day to take the packet at his convenience he tried to parlay his intrusion into an impromptu meeting when I was clearly sending signals – both through the greeter as well as my body language and commentary – that this was not the day or time to “chat”. And on top of all of that his nauseating cologne intruded on my person by virtue of a simple handshake. Bad form Mister.

So now what do I think of their brand. I think they don’t get how to conduct business in a professional and appropriate way. And I think they’re not someone I would ever call when I have a need. Message sent, message received.

To the likely relief of ESPN and CBS, which will both carry the Masters, Tiger Woods has announced that he will return to competitive golf for the tournament.

ESPN will be carrying the first and second round of the Masters April 8 and 9, while CBS has broadcast rights to the weekend rounds April 10 and 11, writes Mediaweek.

Woods’ sponsors are also likely relieved to hear of his imminent April return, though they will be watching his performance carefully. If he plays well, sponsors like Nike and Electronic Arts may be led to decide that his strong performance mitigates the bad press surrounding his marital infidelities. If he plays poorly, however, they may say Woods is not only “risky” from a marketing perspective, but that he’s no longer achieving the same level of success that drew them to him in the first place, says David Carter, executive director of the Sports Institute at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business (via Reuters).

ESPN is banking on a large audience. “Tiger’s return to competitive golf at this year’s Masters Tournament will surely be one of the biggest stories the sporting world has seen,” John Wildhack, evp of programming and acquisitions for ESPN, says. “We will cover the Masters Tournament and Tiger’s return across a variety of ESPN platforms, both domestically and internationally.”

The highest-rated golf telecast in over three decades was the final round of the Masters in 1997 when Woods won for the first time. The telecast generated a 14.1% household rating. The second highest-rated golf event was in 2001, when Woods again won, generating a 13% rating.

Last year, the Masters without Woods declined by almost 50%, and the golfer’s absence from the PGA Tour this year caused an 11% decline, according to Nielsen numbers. While the audience for the Masters may increase significantly, the audience may not be of much interest to golf advertisers like Titleist and Callaway, as viewers may not be too interested in the actual sport of golf.

Eli Lilly & Co. was the top spender in PGA events last year, with $28.1 million invested between January and October. Other major sponsors include FedEx, with $24.1 million in spending, AT&T ($18.7 million), Pfizer ($17.1 million) and Toyota ($17.1 million). Sponsors for April’s Masters include Coca-Cola, IBM, Mercedes and AT&T.

Advertisers spent an average $104,500 for a :30-spot in 2009 PGA Tour events in which Woods appeared. During his hiatus, that number declined 30%, to $80,200 per :30-spot.

Mediaweek points out that those estimates exclude the four Majors, which typically have a cost of $200,000 per :30-spot.

Source: MediaPlannerBuyer.com 3/16/10

Something I just learned from a four day photoshoot…Everything has a story. Behind every door, every face, every object, every project. As a creative, if you aren’t coming up with anything for that ad campaign, poster, website, branding, or brochure – keep digging and pushing yourself. You have not gone far enough – that story is there, even though it may be shrouded by noise or a case of the blands.

And secondly, if you are sitting at the computer feeling stumped, peel yourself away and open your eyes to a new

experience. Fresh air, a new place, walk – get out of the familiar. Can you imagine life like groundhog day?? Brilliant breakthroughs rarely come out of repetition…unless you are a robot.

Today, I thank the offsite photoshoot, the beautiful people and their wonderful stories, and the wisdom of the creative team for this surge of inspiration.

Looks like the gloves are off in the smartphone battle. Apple is currently the undisputed leader. They reinvented the phone and we all know it. They set the bar very high, and everyone else is trying to catch up. Think of what your standard cell phone looked like before the iPhone and what all the latest ones look like now. An amazing evolution in a very short period of time, spurred in large because of Apple’s innovation. It’s going to be very interesting over the next several months, because Google appears to be a great contender for knocking the iPhone off its throne.

TechCrunch announced today that Tim Bray, the well-known software architect and blogger has joined the Google team to help work on Android. It’s also said that he’s doing it because he hates the iPhone.

This is a significant thing to consider. Apple forges ahead and tells consumers what they will like, and then, of course, we like it. What’s not to like when the package is beautiful, the interface is great, and it handily beats every other alternative? Google’s taking a different approach. They appear to be lining up to offer the more open of the smartphone platforms. They’re also recruiting well-known talent now, too.

In very-related news, John Battelle, author, thinker, co-founder of Wired Magazine and The Industry Standard just wrote an article about the iPad that drums up a lot of the same arguments that the iPhone/Android battle shares. Will Apple’s innovative and elegant interface and closed system architecture win out against a more open platform? Battelle’s article specifically mentions how the now well-known “demo” that Wired showed for the iPad was built and run on another platform. (A Dell using Adobe software.) So to show how great the iPad is, you have to use another computer. That seems a little off.

There are plenty of pundits who will shout at you and tell you that the iPhone and iPad aren’t supposed to be everything for everyone and that the closed system helps maintain stability and performance. Yeah – I’ll buy that, to a degree. And it’s a perfectly good reason/argument. But we’re talking about the competitive marketplace here. Which product or platform will be the front runner a year from now?

I’m going to bet that Google pulls ahead. Why? Because ultimately, I think that the general consumer will win with Google at the helm. Their products and services will be geared toward a more diverse audience, and their system will allow more adaptability to the way that audience wants to use the devices running their operating system. Android already sells two-thirds the number of smartphones as Apple does iPhones, and they’re just getting started.

Google also has their hooks in so many web-connected things, that there’s going to be a natural connection between ALL of the systems that can tap into Google devices, mobile networks, and the Internet. And Google will likely make it easy for people to tap into all of these resources via that operating system and API.

You can already upload any document to Google Docs, which basically makes it a lightweight off-site storage system. You can sync your bookmarks across computers with Chrome’s bookmark sync, your calendar and maps and email can all run through Google’s free services. Add the blogs, video, photos, reader and all the other Google services already in place and we’ve got a pretty significant thing to consider.

It’s all about the interface. And not the iPhone’s, iPad’s or Android’s – it’s about the interface to the Internet. I think Google understands that a little better than Apple. Apple’s making tons of money by controlling how people get and develop apps on their platform and interface. Google’s going to ensure people use their own interface by making it easy to use for the greatest number of people.

This is going to be fun to watch.

Often times, when a company launches a sweepstakes, the grand prize and even some of the tactical elements don’t align closely with the brand.  I recently read an article in Marketing Daily, by Karlene Lukovitz, about the new Ghirardelli Chocolate sweepstakes, “Million Moments of Timeless Pleasure”, and I was impressed by the engagement, relevancy and integration that they are bringing to the initiative as they target a large audience and correlate the elements back to the brand.  It’s all about promoting Ghirardelli Chocolate Squares.  And, not too surprising, according to VendingMarketWatch.com, 81% of Americans eat chocolate.  

Ghirardelli is employing social media tactics, among other elements,  and encouraging chocolate fans to go to a micro-site (www.ghirardellimoments.com) and share comments/memories about when/where they enjoy eating the squares.  The comments are broadcast in New York’s Times Square and streamed live on the website.  I would imagine that the comments will be fodder for some future marketing efforts.  Fans can enter the sweepstakes and be eligible to win a number of prizes including a fabulous trip to one of four famous squares in the world, i.e. Times Square, Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, etc.  A tour of major cities utilizing street teams is also a part of the campaign. 

 In the current economic environment people are looking for simple, affordable indulgences – chocolate is one of those.  In addition, leisure travel has taken a hit (leisure travel is still projected to be down throughout 2010 according to a variety of sources) so the opportunity to win a trip is extremely attractive and timely.  These factors that key in on the current consumer mindset,  joined with a dose of fun and creativity,  makes it an interesting campaign to follow.

 It is thematic, engaging, fun, sophisticated, relevant and an integrated initiative that fits the brand.  And when it’s all said and done, chocolate simply makes us smile, doesn’t it?