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Wow, some pretty harsh words from the CEO of Dyson:

The agency business just isn’t working for me. I don’t want to talk to account planners, and account managers and these other assorted suits. I need to talk to the “creatives” directly, and explain to them what I am trying to achieve. But they won’t come to meetings because they are “creative.”

And the fact is that they are not creative at all. They are doing the very worst thing you can do, which is to sit staring at a drawing board trying to come up with an idea out of nowhere. You need dialogue to create. Of all the creative jobs I have encountered it is advertising people who make the most song and dance about creativity. And, you know, they are not creative at all. When I think of the real creation that my designers are involved in, and compare it with these “creatives” who are earning so much more to just sit around the Groucho Club and be generally useless, it makes me vomit. I can’t go on supporting an industry like that, I’m afraid.

From AdRants with discussion forum.

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We’re doing a survey of Austin businesses. We’d like to know how you found out about the web design firm that built your business web site. We appreciate any participants–all of your information will remain confidential!

Take the Survey Here

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Our hosting provider, Modwest.com, has a really useful ecommerce planning tool that is online.

Check it out here: http://www.modwest.com/start/quiz.phtml

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Was just perusing the MarketingShift blog and saw an ad for this book: What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Your Success. The blog that supports the book contains a great deal of interesting posts on advertising research.

Check it out if you want to make the most of your advertising campaigns online….

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The National Federation of the Blind is suing Target because their web site is inaccessible to the blind.

Like many other web developers here in Austin, we’ve participated in numerous Knowbility training classes and rallies, and let me just say a few things about the experience:

1. They’ve opened my eyes (no pun intended) to the plight of folks with visual, auditory, motor/reflex, and cognitive problems.
2. Doing things the accesible way really does make your pages leaner, meaner, and easier to code up and maintain.
3. That accessibility requirements put yet another barrier in front of traditional design agencies who view the web as some kind of extension of print design. Sorry, the Web is software!

In any case, if you’re doing business with the federal government, with state agencies, or with very large corporations, you’d best pay attention to this trend–it’s only going to grow.

Get Story

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For those of you in the know, SOA is Service Oriented Architecture, and it’s one of those terribly geeky things that rely defy definition or classification.

What is SOA? Well, it’s best if I go to a source that at least tries to define it. Here goes from Google:

A service-oriented architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other service. They work within a distributed systems architecture.

Okay, so its a bit abstract, and I have to admit that even in my integration-aware consciousness, I feel like that guy who, after asking a million questions, finds out that what people are saying is exactly what he was thinking, but it was couched in unfamiliar terms.

All right, then, here’s an example from XML.com:

Let’s look at an example of SOA which is likely to be found in your living room. Take a CD for instance. If you want to play it, you put your CD into a CD player and the player plays it for you. The CD player offers a CD playing service. Which is nice because you can replace one CD player with another. You can play the same CD on a portable player or on your expensive stereo. They both offer the same CD playing service, but the quality of service is different.

That’s a bit better–at least we can get a handle on SOA now. And that’s the point. How can you market something as intagible (but yet ultimately, useful to business) as SOA? You can create blogs and forums that allow users to talk about it, you can publish case studies and white papers, and you can print up really slick four-color brochures.

But how about making a movie? About a hapless protagonist who returns to his former company as CEO and then puts in play SOA initiatives to solve problems? All done in a kind of thriller noir approach that mashes together quality control initiatives with kidnappings and corporate espionage?

Bravo IBM for coming up with this. The trailer certainly is exciting!
See the movie here.

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This article is amazing. I read it last night on the print version of Fast Company and was majorly impressed by how they went about describing cutting edge viral marketing techniques. The thing that got me the most was the use of narrative and building a mystery–almost a seduction–around the process.

Get it here!

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As always, Jeffrey Zeldman provides a great deal of insight into the whole Web 2.0 movement. I won’t even bother putting it into context, just read it and know that this is pretty much how a lot of us feel.

Read it here….

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Microsites–highly focused sites within larger web sites–are cool again. It seems that marketers are waking up to the power, beauty, simplicity and ROI of these little sites. Whether you’re doing a branding campaign, direct response effort, or just pulling together a bunch of information to educate or inform you target market, they’re a smart way to go.

Of course, these little guys aren’t that new–they’ve been used since virtually the beginning of the Web to help focus attention on different topics, issues, or product offerings.

It’s funny how these old tools (like AJAX, for instance) keep coming back around. First it’s old and busted, and then it’s the new hotness.

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Dr. Bernado Huberman over at HP’s Information Dynamics Laboratory has co-authored a pretty neat study on the dynamics of viral marketing.

Basically, here’s the summary of what they did:

A team composed of members from HP Labs, University of Michigan Ann Arbor and Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg analyzed the data from a person-to-person recommendation network, consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a million products. The team observed the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, as well as established how the recommendation network grows over time.

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