i [love] marketing.

Suspension Culture

I just came across this quote which, although it is meant to originally apply to NFL, is in fact a lovely description of the way we experience events these days. Just think time spent on Twitter or Instagram or YouTube yesterday in anticipation of the hurricane Irene. More fun and interesting that the rain outside was the wonderful suspension that conversations, photos, and updates exposed us to.  

I found this quote here.

Voting!

Keep it Complex, Stupid.

The mantra of our increasingly complex world has, oddly enough, become "think simple." As interconnections multiply and problems become messier, we are encouraged to reduce them to a single answer, a single solution, or a single killer insight to address an unpredictable web of moving parts. This panel is going to convince you that simplicity is a false god, especially when it comes to creating things in digital. Making digital stuff starts with interactions between data, people, and things. It mixes technology and storytelling. It produces a mesh of small, iterative experiments that work together to create new behaviors. We promise to explore why and how a new model of creativity must champion agility, adaptability, experimentation, noise, and most of all, relationship building.

Questions answered:

1. What's the difference between a simple and a complex problem?

2. Why does that difference matter when making digital things?

3. What does a creative process look like that respects complexity?

4. How do you build, launch, manage, and learn from many small experiments rather than one big product/campaign/message?

5. How should complex relationships shape creative strategy and execution?

Level: Advanced.

Supporting Material: Ana & Bud's past talks on complexity: http://vimeo.com/19634070 (Ana) and http://vimeo.com/20537703 (Bud)

Category: Design/Development

Tags: Complexity, Creativity, Design

Link for voting: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10045?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fpresenter%3AAna+Andjelic

Post-Resume World

This is the presentation I was carrying around on iPad to my job interviews in June, instead of my resume. I realized that, more than a list of places, clients, and projects that I have done in the past, nothing inspires a conversation like talking about the way I think about things, what I find interesting/important, and what I am passionate about.

Having a social object at the meeting makes the assessment of the work fit easier because two parties are involved in an equal-footing exchange (instead of one-sided conversation style that's a staple of interviews). It also allows a person to tell a story in a personal way that puts work & extracurricular accomplishments in the real-life, relevant context of someone's life (always more interesting than just listing stuff that someone has done). It shows, too, a person's presentation skills and ability to build an argument (which is potentially super-useful for client presentations & meetings). Finally, it's a tangible display of someone's simple know-how of how to put a beautiful-looking deck together. 

And it worked out for me, in the best possible way. 

p.s. For the obvious reasons, I took out the  four case studies that are part of the original deck; they served as examples of my past work & my thinking approach to specific client tasks + deliverables. But everything else is there!

p.p.s. The part of "data mining" is taken from Julian Cole and the part of it is mine.