The Internet is filled with secrets.  Who killed JFK, cheats & hacks, how to extend your penis size by 12 inches or discover your long lost lineage connecting you to the Royal Court of Louis XIV.  So it goes without saying when Google this week finally released it’s revenue sharing agreements with other Non-Google sites & properties a lot people attentively listened.

Google revealed that it’s partners get 68% of revenue for ads placed alongside articles/partner content.  For on-site complimentary partner search, Google offered it’s partners 51%.  These generous percentages have been in place between 2003 & 2005 respectively.  Financially impressive numbers flow along with the figures.  The numbers show hefty profits for Google to the tune of over $7 Billion dollars, which compliments the $15.7 Billion dollars it made off of it’s own sites and services.

Sharing this long held secret also showed that Google is starting to become more expressive & social in the way it deals with the outside world.  It is demystifying itself , it is moving away from a monolithic giant…slowly but surely.

I remember for a long time Agencies, especially Media Agencies saw Google as an industry killer.  I never shared that belief.  There are many reasons I did not believe this,  but for the purpose of this post I will stick to culture/outlook.  One reason I personally was not afraid of Google:  they were just to focused on building, on complete automation and it was a company that was driven & populated by Engineers immersed in an insular culture.   Google has always felt a little impersonal, this despite it’s best efforts to deliver increasingly more and more social tools, gadgets and platforms.  Additions like Youtube and the attempts to become more socially relevant through platforms like Wave have been big catalysts for change within Google (externally the jury is out on Wave).   With these changes have come new people and new ways of thinking.  These additions, are helping balance a culture born out of  automated ad systems and the cold an impersonal world of Search that was embedded deep into Google’s DNA.

As someone who deals with Google and watches Googles tact’s and movements very carefully, I think that this is a continuing sign of change @ Google.  A change that will make the company even stronger (not without growing pains).  A change that will empower a new relationship with Media Agencies and hopefully better services and functionality for consumers.

Only time will tell.

The Shift Disturbers conference, billed as a mash-up of visionaries from the worlds of advertising, art and design for a half-day of inspiration from the gods of creativity, was a success despite the absence of its headlining speaker, Stefan Sagmeister, who apparently came down with the “worst flu of his entire life.”

Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of ifwerantheworld.com and former chairman of BBH New York, assumed the headlining spot gracefully. Her talk focused on one question; what is the future of advertising?

She danced around this question with some highly subjective and thought-provoking views. Some highlights:

“One of the things that characterizes the advertising landscape of today is the extraordinary number of messages, caveats, and preambles that come with the advertising that we see around us…messages that say “If you agree to watch these ads you can download this content for free”, or “skip this ad”, or pre-roll countdowns that say “only 30 seconds more”…what all of those messages are saying is that advertising is a bad thing.
Advertising is a bad thing and people have to be cajoled, bribed, blackmailed, and begged, and in some form or another tricked into watching it, in order to get to what they really want to see…the future of advertising revolves around the absolute necessity to make advertising good…not to make good advertising, but I mean quite literally to make advertising good. We have to make advertising loved again.”

“The future of advertising is about action…the single biggest untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action. I want to change that.”

“The future of advertising is about magic. Once upon a time clients thought that what we did was magic…because they couldn’t do it themselves…today clients no longer believe that what we do is magic. Not only do they believe they can do it themselves, they believe they can do it a whole lot better themselves…we have to re-create the magic. We have to put the black box back into advertising.”

After a quick break the conference resumed with Stephane Xiberras’, president and ECD, BETC Euro RSCG Paris, raging against the creative machine.

Over a nine-month period, and with the help of his team, Stephane created the world’s first Creative Artificial Intelligence, known as Kay to her closest friends.

Stephane spent his time on stage demonstrating Kay’s monstrous power: the ability to create average, everyday advertising that we’ve all seen before.

Kay is a creation that warns us never to tread on clichéd ground. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Kay is a creature whose only reason for existence is to show us what we should never become.

The conference concluded with a talk from R/GA’s EVP & CCO, Nick Law, who focused on marrying the art of storytelling with the science of systematic design, to help build a complete creative brain.

He believes the age of “The Big Idea”, the creative one-two punch of a “funny story” wrapped up neatly with a conceptual bow called the “tagline” are coming to an end. There will always be a place for it on TV, he says, but in the digital realm, the “Big Idea” needs to extend itself further, and to do this properly, a modern agency needs to hire the right people.

Nick advocates hiring a lot of interactive designers to fill this gap. They have the same conceptual ability as traditional art director/copywriter teams, but focus their thinking towards systems instead of story.

He believes the next creative revolution will happen when we get these people working together. An agency that relies only on storytellers will risk producing digital work that is considered trite; likewise an agency that employs only system builders will produce work many will see as too complicated.

Apple has been going at it with Adobe ever since they decided they wouldn’t include Flash in their iPhone and iPad devices.  If you missed the whole thing, you can probably catch up by reading a post that Steve Jobs wrote explaining their decision.

Eat it, Adobe.

The post set off an Adobe hate-fest on Twitter, one which in turn set off a guy named Joe Hewitt, who actually has a lot of insightful thoughts on the state of the web today (TechCrunch has a nice synopsis for anyone who hates trying to figure out twitter streams).  One of his tweets linked to an incredible post, from which I stole my title.  Here’s the punchline:

“The modern web had over 10 years to reach parity with desktop applications, and it couldn’t even hit that. Now it faces extinction as innovation in native applications accelerates.”

That hits home, doesn’t it?  Most of the web apps we use aren’t REALLY being innovative, they’re just trying to emulate the desktop, and FAILING.  Now that developers have the option to write applications on a way better platform, why wouldn’t they?  Apple knows it, developers are figuring it out, and what’s more, if you take a few minutes to think about it, you know it too.

Separated at birth?  (by about 10 years)

At the moment, your internal monologue might sound something like this:  “but what about HTML5, Al?  Everyone will just use that when it comes out and then the web will be awesome again!”

If that’s what you’re thinking, you should ask yourself this: “Does HTML5 have native support for multi-touch?  Or gestures?  Or accelerometers?”  (the answer in all cases is no).  Apple’s development platform supports all of those features now.  Flash will undoubtably add support for these features rather soon.  HTML5 will add support for these features…when a committee decides that they belong (read: don’t hold your breath).

The fact of the matter is, HTML5 is just another platform (just like Flash, just like Apple’s development platform), and as a platform, it has its own pros and cons.  It’s great as a baseline, but new features are added way too slowly for us to use it as the upper bound for functionality when we’re thinking of new apps to make.

So what do we do?  How do we deal with all this platform war rubbish?!?

1. Use the right tools for the job.  If your main goal is wide adoptance, use something like HTML.  If your main goal is snazzy new features, use Apple’s dev platform.  If you’re looking for something in the middle, go ahead and use Flash.  The technology you use will depend on YOUR goals, and not the goals of Apple or Adobe.  I actually believe that more choice is a good thing; there’s a better chance that there will be a technology which matches your needs.

2. Stop trying to support everyone.  Find out who your target market is, and do your best to support them.  If you’re building some sort of highly-interactive website for socially-connected users, I think it’s safe to drop support for users who don’t use javascript. On the other hand, if your website caters to the 60+ crowd, maybe you should think about not having javascript at all.

3. Vote with your support and dollars.  At the end of the day, Apple and Adobe are both slaves to their customers.  That includes the application developers.  If you’re a developer that truly believes that Apple made a mistake in dropping Flash, then build your Flash apps and stop worrying about iPhone users.  If you’re a user who MUST have Flash, then don’t bother buying an iPhone.

Conclusion: whether you’re a developer or a user, choice is GOOD.  A platform that isn’t ubiquitous is not useless.  At the end of the day, WE decide the future, not Adobe and not Apple.

Well I know we told you we would follow up with you shortly on the PS3 error8001050F incident that happened at the end of February but a day after the Playstation Network (PSN) went down…it went back up.

Overnight we saw thousands of Tweets & #hashtags dedicated to the issue.  Facebook status updates in newsfeeds were blazing and Youtube video’s were created, uploaded and hitting a few hundred thousand views within hours.  Most of the chatter was complaint or commentary on the issue.  Then suddenly, the next day as quickly as it began, all the chatter and complaints almost stopped.  There were very few follow up’s on blogs, forum posts dropped like stock on Black Monday and the volume of vicious attacks against PS3 suddenly subsided (except from XBOX’ers).  The reason for the decline was not that everyone forgave PS…but simply “we” went back to playing. (We were also guilty).

SONY stayed pretty quite throughout the whole “down period”.  They rode out the storm for the most part.  SONY Europe did try several times and ways to communicate with customers. The rest of the Playstation world was less proactive in explaining and calming the masses down.  But maybe that was a good thing.  Playstation North America had only minor communications…Twitter being one of the main outlets for information (also two blog posts thrown in as well…see here http://bit.ly/dsKFx5) .  For most users the info was recap’s of what users were getting from other sources.  Many consumers felt that SONY was not being very informative and promised to make them pay for it.

Well pay they did…but it was consumers shelling out gobs of money on new releases and DLC (downloadable content) like CODWW2 map packs.  In fact the PSN network has already sold 1 million map pack extensions, which at $14.99 each is about $15 million dollars worth of punishment.  The release for PS3 of these map-packs is less then a month old.

The moral of the story for Playstation and other video game companies…stay quite, limit the information flow, fix fast, and get people back to playing and the issue will go away.  I personally think they missed a real opportunity to manage the situation a little better, but least they did respond.  A big lesson for SONY was that being present and responding/posting on Social Media platforms did help and that it is pretty important to monitor these spaces.  SONY’s presence did not stop a lot of negative commentary but it did help SONY inform, guide and better understand consumers and the problem.

Bonus Content:

Some classic YOUTUBE video’s that shot up like weeds and then disappeared as quickly as they came up (mostly for copyright issues others just were pulled down).  Interesting if PS paid these guys off to take them down with a few credits at the Sony Store or a promise to give them free CODWW2 map packs

Fat Man Rage:  Pushing 900,000 views when it disappeared.  You can still see a copy of it here: http://bit.ly/bAMaA6

The obligatory Youtube Hitler rant!  had 680,000+ views, but has since been removed for copyright violations.

Now back to gaming!

Copy of PS Tweets:

The 2010 Razorfish Outlook Report is out and, as always, it’s a very interesting read. Every year Razorfish looks back at the media trends and spends from their clients, and then looks forward to make some educated guesses as to possible influences moving forward.

“We analyzed how our clients adapted to the challenging environment, what media proved effective, what didn’t deliver as expected, and how this information can be used to direct successful strategy moving forward.”
Jeremy Lockhorn, VP of emerging media, Razorfish.

This year they’re looking back at the media mix during the worst parts of the recession and found that, despite increased pressure on budgets, many companies actually turned to more brand-focused marketing during the tough times rather than direct response.

Some other key findings from the past year:
-  Clients continued to experiment with new media. Digital out-of-home in particular experienced significant growth, along with ad exchanges, data brokers and social media.
-  Social media, which has exploded in popularity over the past few years, still only garners 4% of average client media spend. However, much of the cost of social media comes in the form of labor, not ad space – an important distinction when analyzing and planning media budgets.

Looking forward:
-  Local online advertising – As the iPad and other similar devices breathe new life into local newspapers, we expect to see an increase in both local display and local search digital advertising
-  In-game advertising – As gaming and social media continues to intertwine with location-based services, the opportunity for brands to provide relevant and meaningful interactions within a game is growing.
-  Digital out-of-home – With growing popularity across the board, retail clients especially are embracing this technology as a way to communicate and connect with consumers in stores.

Remember, these finding are focused largely on Razorfish clients, but they make an interesting barometer for the industry as a whole.

Here’s the link to the entire report, you can read it online or download a PDF.

If Lady Gaga doesn’t do it for you, and if Justin Bieber makes you want to bury your head in the sand … if you’re looking for good, real music thats being made right in your backyard rather than rolling off the American Idol assembly line, check out The Roncey Boys (from the Roncesvalles area), ’cause they’re about as anti-pop as it gets. This “ragtime-dandy-piano-rock” musical act features Christian Aldo on vocals and Colin Edgley on piano. And that’s it. That’s all. Just two guys singing and playing their hearts out. There’s nothing fake or overblown here and their songs are sure to put a smile on your face.

They’ve been appearing around town at places like the Cloak & Dagger and The Press Club, and they’re building a devoted following. Right now the recordings are pretty, well, basic – integral to the appeal yes – but who knows what can happen down the road? It should be very interesting. (Someone should sign these guys if they’re not signed already – and fast.) So visit them on MySpace and have a listen. Or listen to these. If you like what you hear let ‘em know and keep your eyes peeled for shows in Now and Eye.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Free Man

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Fun-loving Guy

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I'll Be There

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

So Long

The Roncey Boys at McCready Studios

In short, the platform for taking payments just got itself slapped in the face. Square which is out today (US only as far as I know) allows anybody to accept credit cards via a mobile device of their choice, be it iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad or Android based handset. Now everybody has the ability to take credit cards. Moms at craft shows. Artists, even small businesses. Square is not only cool looking but its built in security features and paperless receipts are pretty rad. Not to mention that businesses can start to build real rewards systems for re-occurring customers. All this from the dude that helped bring you Twitter. Slamma cow!

Watch square in action!

SO what now? If I lived in the US I would have this in a heart beat, squaring up money with friends would be super rad, as well I find myself buying stuff for friends often, like from costco since people I know don have the easy access to one like I do, would make getting money back a snap. No more I need to hit up a bank machine. All in all I’m super stoked for this, and if I get the chance to use square in the US the next time I’m there I most definitely will.

For more info check out squareup.com

It’s not often I get warm and fuzzy feelings for big brands like Coca-Cola, but there are exceptions. This video has made the rounds, but as always there are people who haven’t seen it. Posted for them, enjoy.

Kristopher Strom creates a new drawing on his iPhone every day and posts it to his blog. He uses Sketchbook Mobile or Brushes Apps – check them out.

Great way to get some attention without the usual tactics. Such a simple idea that cost next to nothing had a huge impact on people and really the rest is a sight to be seen…

watch the video here