Influx

As the advertising industry falls more and more in love with black boxes, terabytes of data and predictive models, it could be missing out on the one thing it needs to encourage, the random. One of the non-fiction books of the year is Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, which examines the...

Here are 15 things that I know, now that I didn’t at 9am yesterday, thanks to Jonah, Scott and Teressa's Ad Age/Creativity Idea conference. 1.    No one has every liked a single one of Russell Simmons' ideas.2.    David Jones is putting digital at the center of...

 Posted by Ed Cotton

The first day at the AAAAs Account Planning conference in San Diego started with a bang, straight out of the gate, Sir Ken Robinson set the stage with an inspiring address about the human resource crisis and suggested building and nurturing creative cultures as the only way out. Sir Ken suggested,...

A few years ago, the creative career path was characterized by a rigorous process that defined the creative journey; years spent at art school and toiling in a low paying job that could only be gained through access to the right people. Although its become something of a clich�, but the...

Doing something genuinely different and surprising, is more important than ever in a cluttered world. Often, because it’s so hard to get, achieving a surprise creates its own problem; the tempting trap of a formula; the belief that recent success can be repeated if similar patterns are...

Educational establishments sometimes find it difficult to bring creativity to their marketing and branding efforts. Given the increasing desire for everyone to learn a little creativity, I thought it was worth taking a look at the exploits of The Crucible, an institution designed just to do that....

Business Week recently conducted a survey amongst senior executives on the topic of innovation. One of the questions struck Influx as being especially interesting; the obstacles to return on investment for innovation. The barriers aren’t exactly what you expect them to be, for...

Mojiti is a new site that provides all kinds of possibilities for consumers to play with existing content and maybe even for brands to annotate and add to their communication materials.It's user-created pop-up video and shows the oppoortunities that exist to add layers and depth by adding...

The California Milk Processing Board’s (CMPB) Got Milk campaign is one of the most enduring and best-loved ad campaigns in history, not the Milk Moustache campaign, but the television work of Goodby, Silverstein and PartnersThe mid 1990s campaign with “Planning God”, Jon...

Target is incredibly consitent in everything it does and especially in its innovative use of media. Here's the latest example from the BART subway in San Francisco. Via SFist