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We have 5 tickets left for tomorrow's event!!!

The recent blog post on "Why agencies need labs" forced me to re-think the idea of our "Meet the Makers" conference in NYC on December 3rd.

It struck me that conference is the wrong term, it smacks of the past, boredom, lack of interaction, stale sandwiches, poor lighting and a lousy venue.

"Lab for the Day" is much better term and truer to what we plan to deliver.

Inside the corporate world, the mind is somewhat constrained by the realities of the endless "to do" list- space for thinking and inspiration is sometimes hard to come by.

Our "lab" is a chance to change that.

To explain more, our lab is about "Making" and is designed to provide inspiration from the makers themselves, those who have work directly with them and is all about about the act of making. The "lab" seeks to provide some rules, tools and instruction sets on how to "make" good things.

And in true lab style, we will be conducting a number of experiments.

Here are the key themes and speaker specifics.

Making and Re-Making Brands

Ashley Alsup, has spent time making-over Burger King at CPB and has some interesting thoughts on why corporate America needs to re-make itself and how to do it.

Mark Barden of Eat Big Fish is going to do an experiment with the audience to get them to help him think and re-think about a brand he's personally involved with.

Real Makers and Creators

Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance, recently wrote the best-seller, "Making Ideas Happen", is going to tell us how we can all have best sellers.

Jim Wexler makes games for a living, he's going to be talking about the ingredients for good games and talk about how and why games are going invade and become a much bigger part of our lives.

Thomas Callahan left his job in the corporate art world to make bikes by hand  going to tell us what he does and why he does it.

Time Magazine was one of the first magazines to re-make itself for the iPad, the most intriguing new media platform for years. Time's DW Pine is going to tell us how they did it with considerable constraints and what they are learning about how to evolve the experience.

For another take on the future of magazine publishing, Sarah Rich is going to be sharing lessons from the 48 hour magazine project, Longshot, which she describes as follows..

In May 2010, we conducted a two-day media experiment. 8,000 people signed up, 1,500 submissions came in, 35 editors selected 70 pieces to fill a 60-page magazine.Storytelling

Frank Rose has spent the last two and a half years researching the past, present and future of storytelling for his new book, "The Art of Immersion". He's talked to James Cameron, the creators of Lost , the people behind Tron Legacy, and many others, about the evolving process of storytelling and what it's going to take to tell a compelling story in the C21st.

Gary Hirsch gets people "out of their shells" for a living and inspires them to develop great ideas with others. He's going to lead an experiment to get us to create a character, one of the most critical components of any story.

Creative Output and Opportunity

Finally, Piers Fawkes of PSFK is going to challenge the audience to create compelling ideas for a fascinating project for the United Nations.

We believe it will be a fascinating day and a "lab" in the true sense of the word.

If you are interested in registering for the few remaining places, you can find out more here.

We are thankful for the support of our media sponsor, PSFK


Posted by Ed Cotton influx's meet the makers conference- december 3rd- NY (37.83798775896512 , -122.54751205444336)

For the past 5 years, Influx and BSSP have organized an annual conference in San Francisco. We started off small and last year 200 people attended the event in Fort Mason.

BSSP is never comfortable with a formula, so we decided to change it up once again and hold an event in the East Coast, New York to be precise.

Over the years, we've had a number of requests for from East Coasters for an event, so we've finally decided to oblige with Influx's Meet the Makers.

We are fully aware that there are something like 15 conferences every day in NY and if you can't attend you events, there's always a TED talk online to watch, conferences are everywhere and simply put, we know time is very precious.

It's for this reason that we've chosen the specific theme of "Making", we want to be practical and instructional and not theoretical. These are interesting and challenging times and we thought it would be good to hear from people who are in the thick of it, getting their hands dirty making stuff.

We've brought together an amazing group of speakers and facilitators and compressed it all into a half-day session.

Information and tickets can be found here.

So, here's who've got speaking...

Ashley Alsup

Ashley was responsible for leading Burger King's strategy at Crispin Porter, Bogusky,before that she led the strategy on Guinness at AMV London, where she worked on one of the best TV spots of all time. She also spent time at BBH NY working on Johnnie Walker. Recently she's been thinking hard about re-making corporate America and will be sharing some of her thoughts with us.

Thomas Callahan- Horse Cycles

Thomas runs and owns Horse Cycles. He's a true maker and builds handcrafted bicycles in Brooklyn. His bikes are made of the lightest strongest steel possible. All tubing is aerospace grade and made in Italy.He will be sharing his making secrets with us.

Mark Barden- Eat Big Fish

Mark brings a lot of experience at Eat Big Fish of telling brands what to do. He's one of the fathers of Challenger Brand thinking and has helped the likes of Visa and Unilever to become more challenging. He will be asking us if it makes sense for every brand to try and be a Challenger and what kind of brand we might create if we were given the chance to do so.

Josh Quittner and DW Pine- Time Inc.

Josh and DW are the team at Time Inc who took the iconic magazine, Time onto the iPad and were one of the first publishers to do it. They have interesting tales to tell from the process and lessons to share

Jim Wexler- Brand Games

Jim is one of the pioneers in using videogames as a media platform and he will be telling us how to make a good game.

Scott Belsky- Behance

Scott used to work at Goldman Sachs, but decided his true calling was in the creative world, so he established Behance, a company that develops products and services that boost productivity in the creative professional community.
In 2010, Scott was included in the Fast Company list of 100 Most Creative People in Business. He is the author of the national bestselling book Making Ideas Happen  and he's going to tell us how we can all write bestsellers.

Frank Rose

Frank is one of the leading writers at Wired Magazine and last year, wrote the much talked about piece on James Cameron. Frank is just finished writing "The Art of Immersion", which examines the future of the narrative that will be published February 2011, by Norton. He will be sharing his thoughts on the current and future state of storytelling

Sarah Rich

Sarah is a writer, editor and experimentalist focused primarily on new media, design and food. She is co-founder and executive editor of Longshot magazine (a 48 HR magazine), and co-founder of the Foodprint Project. Formerly, she was a senior editor at Dwell, Inhabitat and Worldchanging magazines. She is a co-author of the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006) and is currently working on a book about urban farming, due out in 2012. She will be telling us how we can create our own magazine in 48 hours.

Gary Hirsch- On Your Feet

Gary Hirsch is the founder of On Your Feet, a workshop that uses improvisation with organizations and brands to help them create, relate, and communicate-all while having a ridiculously good time. Gary will be helping us all create an instant character.

More details here


Posted by Ed Cotton Mark Barden of Eat Big Fish is one of our speakers at Influx Curated on June 11th in San Francisco.

Here are Mark's responses to three questions I sent across to him recently.

1. What's inspiring you at the moment?

My kids inspire me all the time. Last night I turned the tables on my five year old and asked her to tell me a story for a change. Out popped a story about a princess with 3 magic jewels. The yellow one she hung up when it was cold and that was like the sun. The blue jewel was rain when she needed water. And the grey jewel contained a butterfly. There it was, instant creativity on demand. It can be that easy if you can channel your inner five year old. And she never seems to run out of stories. How many of us can say that. Invention like that, especially the seemingly effortless variety, is always inspiring to me. And I hang on to the notion that we all possess this ability if we can strip away and get over years of poor schooling and lack of encouragement. I just saw the Tom’s shoes story that Blackberry told in its ads. That was pretty inspiring. And Obama. I admit I’m a huge fan so far. Its great to see intelligence and open-mindedness in the White House and such a calm demeanor in spite of what must be enormous pressure. What if all our leaders rose to this level of mastery and authority. I find the on-going dialog between Obama and people he disagrees with to be truly inspiring. Look at the heat he took for asking Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration. This was actually just a part of an on-going dialogue between the two that began before inauguration and has continued since. Recently Warren was quoted as saying he never was and never will be an anti-gay marriage activist. Has his position softened? Is it related at all to being engaged in a dialog with the President? Who really knows. What I sense is the power of dialogue at work. Sounds hard, lacking in glamor, and absolutely essential for our troubled times. I find people who come to the table — authentically — with those they disagree with to be very inspiring.

2. Are brands becoming more or less important?

I don’t think brands are becoming less important, no. A brand is just a story attached to a product. Stories will never diminish in importance. Human beings need them, its how we’ve always transmitted important information. In fact stories only grow in importance; a good one is still the best way to breakthrough the cacophony. So long as the exchange of goods and service dominates human interaction as it surely must (until one of the many possible Armageddons ends it) there’s a role for brands as stories. The stories need to change to fit the times of course, and in these times there’s a resurgence of the ‘true story’. That’s a good thing. The days where ‘brands’ could be an artificial construction designed to mislead are on the wane (for now) and that’s a good thing for anyone who takes the job of marketing seriously. And brands whose stories connect to the greater good, like Tom’s, will play a more important role as the Armageddons bear down on us.

3. Are communication campaigns going to be a thing of the past?

I think I’ve answered that haven’t I in the above. The venues and channels of story-telling might be changing, but the core principles of good story: simple, memorable, something being changed, beginning, middle, end, apply wherever. Certainly the dynamics of the storytelling might be changing. There’s more co-creation, for example, the seeking out of more voices to shape the brand story (consumers) along with the original author (brand owner); more attention at times to stories needing to catch on quick (‘go viral’) rather than be ‘forced’ into consumer consciousness (media weight); and the ever-changing nature of audience needs. But as long as there are things to sell and people to buy there will be a need to communicate about them. Just because one can find out about a product with a google search doesn’t mean one will. Good stories help products gain salience. Always have, always will.

You can read more about Eat Big Fish's latest thoughts in their blog here.

For more details and registration for the Influx Curated conference look here.



Posted by Ed Cotton I am now here in the surprisingly humid San Diego for the AAAA's annual planning smoozefest with 800 planners- including 11 from Google and 29 from TBWA Chiat Day LA.

There were things to look forward to today, like the baseball game I was supposed to attend with Gareth Kay, Mark Lewis, Mark Earls and others, but I am sure they told me it was Wednesday.

Here’s what I am looking forward to over the next few days.

Sir Ken Robinson - If anyone saw him at TED or at least the film on the TED website- he is spectacular 

Mark Barden and Adam Morgan’s- Third Eye- Perhaps a preview of Adam’s new book?

Adrian Ho and Rob White’s new vision for Planning

Eric Ryan- Planning and San Francisco’s hero of lateral thinking. Eric had the good sense not to give his insights away. Instead, he kept them to himself and built a multi-million dollar business called Method

Bruce Mau- Looking forward to hearing his version of Massive Change and how his thinking has shifted in the last 18 months

I plan to post on the above and more.



Posted by Ed Cotton