October 30th 2009
In a season where teen vampires are all the rage, can a drama following a real-life band of teen burglars looting celebrities be far behind? (For Halloween, I’ll be dressed as them!) The Net was their accomplice. The teens tracked the movements of stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and broke into their […]
October 23rd 2009
How can you determine the size of a blog or website’s traffic? Finding reliable website competitive intelligence benchmarks is hugely important, and a real challenge on the web. Too often people buy-in to bogus measures. There is perhaps a false hope to find that big “standings board” similar to major league baseball. After all, standings […]
October 20th 2009
The InformationWeek cover story had two elements. First was the illustration, which featured a compass with Windows 7 at true North, the headline “Winevitable,” and the question of how you will get there. That’s the kind of positioning money just can’t buy. Imagine producing software whose inevitability is proclaimed on the editorial cover of magazines. […]
October 17th 2009
I’ve written about “Brand Obama” previously; now, here’s a huge installment. RISD grad Aaron Perry-Zucker hoisted a website called Design for Obama, where artists up- and downloaded Obama poster designs during and after the election. The hundreds of submissions (including “Did The Right Thing,” sent by Don Button days after the election) caught the attention […]
October 15th 2009
“Give me your superhumans, your technological geniuses, your mutated masses yearning to fight crime.” What geek can resist a blog dedicated to considering how US laws would be applied to superheros? After all, Superman is an non-documented immigrant. But wouldn’t his marriage to Lois Lane naturalize him? What part of tort law would bad guys […]
October 13th 2009
Okay, though he used a little more nuance, that’s the essence of what Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, said loud and clear in recent comments at Goldman Sachs. The issue there is perhaps it is like the dog chasing the bus a little bit. So what I need to do is get ourselves focused around the […]
October 11th 2009
When the government tells someone to shut up, we call it censorship and the First Amendment requires the government to defend its regulation. But what if the government just says, “Shhhh… could you please turn that down?” Rep. Anna Eshoo’s Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (HR 1084) would do just that: require the FCC to issue […]
October 8th 2009
Online Marketers Who Collect Visitor Data Are Potential Targets of Regulation in 2010. Law and health care practices are required to protect personally identifiable information (PII). However, in many cases they are encouraged to circulate so-called anonymous data. It turns out the distinction between the anonymous and the personally identifiable isn’t all that real. Latanya […]
October 2nd 2009
Otis Maxwell is a copywriter who likes to mouth off on marketing, technology, and food. He’s also a great creative. Last week he asked me what was on my short list of projects, and to my surprise I immediately said “Creative briefs.” After all, they really are what keeps chaos at bay, and more importantly, they […]
The future of digital experiences will be built by strategists who grasp the full array of emerging business, social, and technical models. Specialties in user experience, branding, application design, and data science are laying the foundation for richer user experiences and business models breakthrough products and revenue based marketing.
UsefulArts is a soapbox to discuss the front line of digital experience, and the agencies and platforms that enable it. Digital business needs a cadre of leaders who can connect c-level enterprise thinking with the ways these new interaction models can help organizations to matter more to their most important stakeholders.