the hurricane inside my brain

photo: laughlin

On WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10, 7-8pm, the Ad Club held a “Twitter Party” talking about “The Best Advice You Ever Got.”  I was the moderator. Four questions were asked over the course of an hour. Over 50 people joined in. The best answers will be used for a coffee table book being put out by the Ad Club for their Women’s Forum Event.

Here are my answers to the questions asked that night:

Q1: Inspired by Women’s Leadership Forum speaker, @ellynletters, book “What I Know Now”: What do you wish you knew when you were younger that you know now?

That learning, just learning for the sheer joy of discovering something new – is awesome.

It’s ok to ignore people who say “you can’t do that.”

That knocking down the walls between professional and personal is really quite awesome.

Q2: What do you see as the greatest struggle for women today?

How to deal with growing old in society which cherishes young, beautiful women.

Helping to solve the universal problems which should be solved: poverty, war, hunger, abuse.

Q3: Who has been the most influential female figure in your life and why?

My daughter(s). Who taught me resilience and courage and joy and surprise and showed me how to love me.

Q4: What’s the best advice you ever got?

The reason men get paid more than women is because women don’t ask for as much pay. Figure out what you’re worth. Ask for it.¹

Don’t be the person out there looking for a job, be the person doing something interesting.²

There’s a difference between “networking” and “needworking.” ³

“My philosophy of deal making is this– it’s usually about figuring out how to make the other person rich *first.*”⁴

Give away the credit.⁵

Where I got the advice above:  1) Nugget discovered years ago, in some Harvard Business school article. Advice I have thought about before going into every negotiation since that day. 2) I used this line in my shortshort appearance in the movie “Lemonade”. It gets re-quoted quite a bit, so I know it works for people. However, I cannot take credit for originally saying this. I read it online somewhere. If anyone finds the original source, please let me know. 3) Just discovered this on LinkedIn. I’ll take that advice to heart, thanks. 4) Advice from Tom Matlack, former venture capitalist and Good Men Project co-founder. It’s advice that can be used not just for financial deals, but for networking, client relationships, employee/employers. It’s that word “first” that’s important and counterintuitive. 5) Always give away the credit. I was taught that at the start of my career and never looked back. Funnily enough, people recently have been telling me I don’t take enough credit. But then, 5 minutes later, there asking me “so how DO you stay so busy in this economy.” Hmmmm…

Please see The Ad Clubs website and blog for more details on the event. Thanks all who participated!

photo: orphan jones on Flickr

When I worked in advertising, my desk was always in disarray. And as aghast as I was about my own clear lack of organization, I’d be equally aghast when I went to an account persons office and saw their neat-as-a-pin desks. How could anyone work that way? Where is everything? Aren’t you *working?* I would wonder.

And then one day I read an article that told me the reason why my desk was messy.

It’s because, as a creative person, I’m constantly looking for two unrelated things to combine.

After all, most creative ideas are not 100% new, but are just ways of taking what’s already out there and combining stuff in new ways. But in order to do that “creatively”, you have to break sets. Combine things that are unexpected, because they are not ordinarily grouped together. It used to be putting a new ending on an old cliché. Then it was combining two unrelated images in Photoshop. Not too long ago, it was someone who forgot that a camera and a phone were two completely different objects.

A messy desk keeps the solution to ‘problem A’ right next to the solution to ‘problem B’. It doesn’t file things away into a drawer labeled “the way it’s always been done.”

The internet is the biggest, messiest desk there is. I like to use that to my advantage.

Do you?

I started blogging, tweeting and using other social networking/sharing/media sites not too long ago. The experience changed my life, in amazingly powerful ways, a comment that is still met with a great deal of skepticism almost everywhere I go.

But “Social Media” (a phrase that doesn’t even do what it’s really about justice, as most people equate the words “social media” with “getting on Facebook”) has given me the chance to meet brilliant, thoughtful people from all over the world, and talk to them as equals about things that are important to both of us. It’s helped me get involved in projects I never could have dreamed of on my own: producing a book and a movie, getting a cameo role in a movie; having crazy, impassioned conversations about the future of publishing, sexism, war, pornography; gave me a chance to help start not just one but three online publications; taught me how to shoot, edit and produce a hundred small videos; gotten me over my last final fears of technology. But most of all, I discovered the power in helping other people.

So why wouldn’t I want to blog about social media, if it brought about such profound and wonderful changes?

Because that would be like having a blog about email.

What I’d like to do here is to give you insights into the way technology is colliding with human interactions and communication, insights that will cause you to say “wow, I never saw the world that way.” And, at its best, will let you see the actions you can take next to create the profound changes I think we all can make.

I’m sure that sometimes I’ll slip up and talk about social media, because it still is such a passion of mine. But, on the whole, this blog is not a social media blog.

What is it instead?

It’s a “how the way we interact with each other affects the places we go together” blog.

It’s a “let’s think about creative ways to solve problems and then go out and solve them” blog.

It’s a “what if you didn’t think about technology and communication and marketing and friendship and business and art and change as separate things, but ONE thing” blog.

It’s a “where the heck is this all going to lead us 5, 10, 20, 100 years from now?” blog.

It’s a “wow, this is cool and here’s how it might translate into a business model” blog.

It’s a “Think. Do.” blog.

As always, comments are adored, opposing views are welcome, feedback is thoughtfully considered, and spammers are not tolerated.

Ad Headline: The Tsunami Killed 100 Times More People Than 9/11

Guest Post by Jim Mitchem

Last week DDB Brasil was publicly scrutinized for publishing a print ad and :30 television spot for the World Wildlife Foundation that caused quite a stir in the advertising community. There is some speculation as to whether WWF even knew about the campaign or whether DDB executives approved it. The ads were submitted in the 2009 Cannes Lions festival. Fingers will be pointed, people will lose jobs. But this post isn’t about the politics or egos. It’s about the creative development.

The print ad, which won a Cannes, shows a litany of passenger jets taking aim on Manhattan, ala September 11th. The headline talks to the number of deaths caused by an act of terrorism versus the number of deaths caused by natural disasters. The purpose of the ad is put the raw power of our planet into proper perspective. And it works. Kind of. Which is to say that you don’t tug on superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger. And you damn sure don’t use one of history’s worst spectacles of hate as the backdrop for promoting any company or organization.

My father always said, “It’s easier to run on a fly ball than to run back on one.” This is the one piece of advice from him that I utilize in my work every day. In fact, when I think through any communications problem I tend to run all around the periphery of first - to see how far logic extends in the brain. And frankly, if I were working on this project for WWF, I’d have come up with something similar to what they created. Only, I’d have written it down and shared it with my colleagues as a way to set the limits of periphery. Not as a realistic solution. Why? Because of the rules of cooth. Yes, we’re in advertising, but at some point we must draw the line. DDBs decision to publicly promote (in an advertising contest) this ad as a way to flex its conceptual muscle was proof to me that they lack cooth. The fact that this singular idea was produced beyond the napkin into a fully-flushed out print ad and television spot is shocking. Where is the cooth?

Jim Mitchem has his own provocative blog, Obsessed with Conformity. You can also find him on Twitter @smashadv