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.

(Kansas City, Mo., 3-24-10) – Bozell Smartargeting™, a direct marketing company and subsidiary of Bozell, an integrated marketing communications company, received three Gold Awards and a Consistent Achiever Award at the 2010 AMBIT Awards on March 23^rd presented by the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association (KCDMA). 

These awards represent the work produced in 2009 for two of Bozell’s clients: Borsheims Fine Jewelry and Gifts and VP Builders.  “We are very proud to receive these awards this year,” said Steve Kuegler, Managing Partner, Bozell Smartargeting™. “It is an honor to be recognized by the KCDMA for our creative ability and innovative techniques in our effort to reach our clients’ targeted audiences.”

Gold Awards were received in the category of Business Integrated Marketing for the VP Builders 2009 Builder Recruitment Campaign as well as the Consumer Direct Mail and Consumer Catalogs categories for Borsheims 2009 Holiday Campaign. A Consistent Achiever Award was presented to Bozell Smartargeting™ after receiving Gold Awards for both the 2008 and 2009 VP Builders campaign.

Bozell Smartargeting™ offers state-of-the-art strategic database marketing solutions such as monitoring customer behavior, identifying emerging customer needs, developing and testing new products and targeting highest-potential prospects. Other solutions offered include scoring existing customers based on actual return on investment, matching type and frequency of communications to diverse target segments and providing precise market intelligence in the development of strategy.

More than 400 members in KCDMA are dedicated to bringing quality educational opportunities to its members in an effort to improve the field of direct marketing. This year, more than 80 entries were submitted in 24 categories. The awards were judged by the Detroit Direct Marketing Association and 15 companies were awarded gold, silver and bronze AMBITS.

About Bozell

Bozell is an integrated marketing communications company with offices in Omaha and Kansas City. Bozell combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand its clients’ marketplace and incorporates innovative advertising, digital marketing, public relations, social influence marketing to provide targeted solutions for local, regional and national clients. For more information, visit www.bozell.com.

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?

Sensible and smart use of color will help strengthen your brand. Humans naturally associate universal meanings to specific colors. For example, red is often associated with strength and power, while blue is associated with serenity and peace. Choosing the wrong colors for your logo could cause potential clients to have misconceptions about your brand. Sometimes companies feel the need to use too many colors in their logo and their brand ends up visually confusing and ultimately, unattractive. Keep things simple and with intention.

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.

Most traditional TV viewing continues to happen in the evening hours (M-SU 8-11pm) while “primetime” for online video viewing lasts from noon to 6pm, peaking at 4pm. Read More

Stay Focused on Your Values: Oftentimes companies and business owners try to create an image that communicates their ENTIRE business concept. This is asking an awful lot! Instead of focusing on the big picture, zero in on the values and ideas that your company stands for. As customers come to know your business and what it means while interacting with your brand, they’ll quickly learn to associate your logo with these principles.



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.