Dude makes great points! He gets that the right next thing to do is more important than doing the same thing right.

Lines are indeed blurred! See my post on and/and below...

The Churchill Club's annual look at what it takes to build a successful startup. This panel of five Silicon Valley entrepreneurs discussed the challenges and critical success factors necessary to reach the promised land. Moderator: Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures. Speakers: Lauren Elliott, Founder, Third Rock Mining; Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn; Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot; Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah; Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket.

Banner ads? WTF? Lots of hype but no real revenue model in my opinion. If there was a model I didn't hear about it here.Traffic only equalls profitability if you believe that eyeballs equal relevance in the current advertising paradigm. Everyone claims to have a "better" version of it but do they? But I'm not just a complainer without thinking out the solutions either :)

Tom is my Global Brand Network buddy who mirrors a lot of my own thinking on brands and vice versa. I've learned greatly from his insights and I hope you will too.

The nature of information is biological.

In the connection economy, a new piece of information that might create some sort of meaning to us is a game of odds. Sure, we choose what creates meaning for us, but why do people still SPAM? Why does crime exist, why do AdWords still make sense in the age of click fraud and DOS attacks?

Simple: They all pay!

Back to the subject of SPAM, SPLOGs and sincere pleas from Nigerian royals. Could it be that they are actually effective? Even though everything I believe in detests such practices, we can’t deny the logic of a small percentage getting through. Guys like Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian even raises money for a great cause by spamming a real message.

So is it SPAM that’s bad or the messages we’ve come to associate with it?

Are criminals smarter at recognizing what works in our interconnected paradigm of the world before the rest of us discover it for good? Is it too late for us by that time? Do legitimate marketers employ SPAM tactics while their public brand denounce it? If you understand human nature and the nature of information you might already have the answers.

For all of my rants on the sad state of marketers' desperation, I just ran across some good branding. BMW sponsors TED, the Technology Entertainment and Design conference and they couldn’t be more on code. While “The Ultimate Driving Machine” was a force fit German engineering POV into more "identity" conscious car buyer cultures like the US, this transition into turning their passion for design into sponsoring an innovation centric event and organization is right on the money. I hope more brands see this as a way to bring in positive change to marketplace that needs solutions, NOT more messages. Well done!

On another note, I love this UI prototype. Ted talks rocks! Check out the rest of their site when you get the chance.

Can you spot the HP logo placement in this video? Does anyone get the 1,768th chance at making that 1st impression? What seems logical to most human beings seems to elude marketers these days. From HP paying $200,000 to place a translucent logo on the recent Jessica Simpson video that most will never register, to a promo my wife just saw on Lifetime Television where the sponsor, Vagisil plastered their logo bigger than the title of the show, it seems advertisers are still chasing the idea that impressions equal dollars.

Can impressions still be meaningful when we are bombarded with them? One can argue that its a chicken and egg scenario for relevance, in that the more you know about something the more you’re likely to recall it when you’re seeking it, but I disagree. Cockroaches are omnipresent, but only relevant to entomologists or those sharing their apartment with them. The same goes for advertising impressions. There is a better way to think about it. Sharing meaning in a common context for one. You know, when you and your friend both love Thai food equally and he hooks you up with the best one in town?

Is it the "message" or the "method" where the creativity needs to be? Do more clever ways of getting "attention" really worth the investment if there is little MEANING to me?

While the US debates about what stem cell research really means, Singapore is collecting the world’s best minds to move their research forward. The same with cloning progress in China, the fusion of bank-less transactions and online gambling in Europe, eNums and VOIP and more in less regulated areas of the world.

I’m generally observational about patterns and not politics, but I can’t help but see that policy is standing in the way of progress.

This is NOT about my political viewpoint, but rather an observation. It seems that this country’s culture confuses managerial and operational expertise with leadership while visionaries within organizations get labeled “futurists” or some other “harmless” title, and real progress gets sidetracked by the immediate and myopic agenda.

Maybe that used to be OK before in a less connected world... But with INNOVATION repeatedly proving to be our true advantage in the global marketplace, can we still tolerate this kind of condescending thinking at any level? Haven’t we been fooled long enough as “consumers”, “patriots”, “members”, “employees” and other cogs in someone else’s machine? Isn’t it time we stopped taking it and championed real change by putting visionaries in charge and contributing to their causes with our collective creativity?

Dig it, this is long overdue!!! But instead of just observing it as a phenomena and trippin' on the symptomatic end of it; I've actually got a solution:

Why don't we make customer and advertising intelligence access flat? Wanna know what I mean? Drop me a line :)