Office Archive for
Happy New Year! Our teams are back from holiday time with their families and ready for an exciting year ahead. But before we welcome 2012, we thought it might be fun to look back on some of our favorite stories of 2011. It seemed fitting to pick 11.
Here you have a list of eleven posts from across our offices, spanning topics from customer experience and branding to measurement and mobile. It’s a great overview of trends and technologies that shaped the past year of digital marketing.
We thank you for continuing to read Experience Matters and are looking forward to bringing you another year of timely and compelling points of view.
Dear Wonderful People Of Earth,
Earlier this Autumn, our beloved Santa Claus dared to dream the impossible dream.
He dreamt that this Holiday Season, instead of building toys in the Workshop, we Elves would spend our time out in the Big Wide World, spreading Festive Cheer and Holiday Magic.
To make his dream a reality, Santa teamed up with his new digital AOR, Critical Mass, to make your Holiday Wish experience a completely online one.
You see, it goes like this:
You can share your wish at criticalmass.com
Tweet your wish to @criticalmass
Or tell us your wish on Facebook
Critical Mass will take it from there.
While Santa’s sprightly Elves are off galavanting across the globe spreading Holiday Warmth, Critical Mass’s remarkable new MakerBot machines will be building, as though by magic, the Holiday Wishes of many of our dearest friends. In short, Santa’s on the digital bandwagon, making Christmas more cheerful and efficient than ever before. Read More
1. What is your role at CM? How do you spend your days?
I’m an Account Manager on the Nissan USA account based in Nashville. I spend my days equally divided as a quarterback, cheerleader, referee, defensive line and offensive tackle. I’m never on the sidelines. (Sorry for the sports analogy).
2. What is the greatest thing about CM culture?
I think the greatest thing is you’re really able to chart your own career path. If there’s something that interests you, I’ve found management is pretty open. You can go to them with an idea and they’ll say, “Ok, make it happen.”
3. What drives you? What are you inspired by?
I’m driven by passionate people. People who zig when others are zagging. I love it when people share my philosophy of “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission…”
4. What was your greatest accomplishment of the past year?
Traveling last week, I found myself immersed in the busiest travel season of the year – the pre Christmas rush. And while I moved from one line to the next, I found time to catch up on a backlog of recent articles on the incredible growth of tablets. Standing amidst a myriad of travellers had me pausing to think back a few months ago to when my wife and I packed up the kids and headed out for a late summer holiday, and the trials and tribulations of traveling with, in our case, an iPad.
My set and practiced packing of technology routine underwent a fundamental, and I suspect over the last few days oft repeated, change. DSLR Camera—check; iPhone—check; baby monitors—check; laptop… And that’s where I stumbled. For the first time in decades, I (gasp!) left my laptop at home.
Though I still remember the days where dragging my ThinkPad required the shoulders of Superman to carry through the gate-to-gate dash that so much of my travel has comprised of, I looked back and forth between my so-much-lighter MacBook Pro, and the family iPad and asked: do we really need the laptop? Read More
It’s conference season (when isn’t it?) and as the leaves turn to brown and travel budgets get squeezed we all have to carefully consider where we’re going and what we hope to get out of the experience. It’s not all trays of banana bread and drink tickets, so what makes for a good conference experience? For me it’s a focus on emerging trends and creative problem solving shared with your peers.
I was lucky enough to sit on a panel titled Managing, Measuring and Evaluating Distributed Content: Video, Webinars, White Papers and More, where we discussed the challenges and opportunities that distributed content models offer. Joining me was my partner on the client side, Kelly Turner, who is the content strategy lead at AT&T and provided perspective on what a large organization faces when it comes to distributed content and maintaining a strategic vision.
Kelly and I recently discussed what we brought home from the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver.
Derek Phillips: So, what did you think of the IMC? Was it what you expected?
Kelly Turner: Let’s see, I expected a big conference room, people with name tags, aroma of coffee and cologne, weird haircuts, hipster glasses…and on that front I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Other than that I had absolutely no idea what to expect. But I will say that overall it was definitely one of the cooler things I’ve gotten to do in my professional career. And remember, in my life as a journalist I saw open heart surgeries and interviewed criminals, many of whom were not elected officials, so I know what I’m talking about.
Derek: Were there any “ah-ha!” moments? Did you learn anything?
My wife posed a question last week that admittedly caught me off guard: “At what age do you think it’s appropriate to get our daughter a smartphone?”
Now the question is legit, and the local media has been furiously raising issues of texting and social media in the classroom, so it wasn’t completely from left field. But two elements beyond the question itself had me pause for thought.
First, my daughter is three.
Second, it wasn’t a cell phone anymore, but a smartphone.
To be clear, my wife was not suggesting we run out and buy an iPhone for a daughter barely out of diapers, but was curious as to my thoughts on when it was appropriate to buy any child a smartphone. A great question for further thought, but one we agreed was not in our personal future – at least not until our kids at least hit school age.
But the context behind the question was revealing. The question of a mobile device is no longer a question of if, but when. And, the smartphone was moving from the category of high-tech device, one that would normally fall into – as the self-confessed techno-gadget geek and purchaser in our household – my domain to initially consider.
And I shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, I should know better.
Though some might picture the stereotypical mom as slightly Luddite in her leanings, a series of reports this year reveal just how wrong that stereotype is. Modern moms are not just using smartphone, but leading their adoption. Moreover, it’s not just young, tech confident new moms purchasing the technology, but mothers in their 30’s and 40’s partaking in this rapidly expanding group of smartphone purchasers (Pew Internet).
