Dan Balser, veteran creative and department head at the Creative Circus, has a pretty cool podcast, where he interviews people from the business and gets insight into how things look from their persective.

His most recent guest on the podcast was our very own Jonathan Cude, who gives some background behind the five words that inspire this blog (and pretty much everything we do).

Take a listen to the podcast at Dan's website or search for "Dan Balser" on iTunes.

Toward the end of the podcast, Dan asks what advice Cude would give to himself back when he was starting out. His answer hit really close to home for me:

"I would have told myself to shut up. To listen more. To not be so consumed with being right and with having the answer."

Words to live by, for sure.

But, man, it's so hard to do that when I've got this tiny little newborn idea in my arms and I'm trying to protect it from what feels to me like an army of people who don't understand its fragile wonder.

Every day, I struggle to keep my mouth shut. Because it's tempting to ignore the possibility that someone might have a valid point and instead assume that they simply haven't understood my brilliance and if I only explain it to them in another way, they will suddenly be like, "oh how did I miss your genius the first twelve times you interrupted me to say what you really meant? I was wrong and you were right and thank you for showing me the way!"

You can imagine how well that works out.

There's a passage in one of my favorite books, Paul Arden's It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be that I turn to again and again, whenever I need a reminder to close my mouth and open my ears.

In the slim possibility that I'm not the only one who struggles with this challenge, I'll share it with you:

Being right is being boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant...

Start being wrong and suddenly anything is possible.

You're no longer trying to be infallible.

You're in the unknown. There's no way of knowing what can happen, but there's more chance of it being amazing than if you try to be right.

Sometimes, on bad days, I like to cast my creative directors as giant meanies who get their evil thrills by snuffing out the tiny little spark of my brilliance.

Woe is me, right?

But then I saw the kind of feedback Bill Zeman gets from his tiny art director.

For example, look what she had to say about his monkey drawing:

Compared to her, I've got it pretty damn good.

Love you guys! (Speaking of love, I've got some stuff I can't wait to show you tomorrow...)

When we're coming up with ideas for the interactive world, we often imagine the kind of sites we'd love to partner with or the blogs we hope will post about our awesome idea. But are the people we think visit those sites anything like the people who actually do?

If you wonder, like I do, what a site's audience looks like, here's a tool you might find interesting: quantcast.com

It's targeted toward media buyers, but as smart creatives know, the medium is the message these days.

Besides, you can learn all kinds of fascinating facts.

For example, 65% of the visitors to eharmony.com are women. (Sorry to all you single ladies.)

And who would have guessed that 48% of visitors to perezhilton.com earn over $100K a year compared to only 33% for money.cnn.com? So maybe I should stop paying attention to the stock market and start worrying about what Jessica Simpson is up to.

As an avid ukulele fan, I was so excited to get the chance to feature a ukulele track in our latest Travelocity commercial:

But I was even more excited when a fellow ukulele fan sat down and figured out how to play the song! He was also kind enough to provide the chords for people like me who aren't skilled enough to figure it out.

If I keep practicing, who knows? I might actually be able to provide the ukulele talent for the next commercial.

Or not.

I know that gasoline is dirty. That oil comes from the ground only after being sucked forcibly by gigantic insect looking drills that pump all night and day and create a blight on the landscape. That gas stations are usually pretty ugly places where you really only go because if you didn't, you couldn't go anywhere else.

I know all of these things. But every time I look at this logo, all of that knowledge threaten to fall right out of my head.

Whenever I see this logo, oil derricks pistoning against a hazy sky are replaced by vast fields of green, lined by rows of sunflowers gently nodding their heads in the breeze.

Whenever I see this logo, I start thinking of warm summer days, of taking a blanket out to a warm meadow somewhere and lying down for a nap under the warm golden light of a friendly sun.

Of course, I immediately reprimand myself for such ridiculous thoughts and remind myself that the soft-focus images of my imagination have nothing to do with reality at all.

Any time I question whether branding really works, I think about this logo.

About the fact that, in the .00303 seconds it takes to catch myself, this image has already made hundreds of associations in my brain, all of them pleasant.

And I think about how, when given the choice of two gas stations on the same corner, I'll pick the one with this logo.

Not because I think they are any different or better than the competition.

But because it feels good to stand by my car and daydream about green fields and sunny summer days while the gas meter whirs industriously behind me.

In which I express my admiration for that most awesome of mckinney traditions.

Christmas Tree
December 2008 - December 2008

Seen at kottke.org

(Quick definition: A robots.txt file tells search engines what pages they aren't allowed to look at.)

Under the last administration, the robots.txt file ran over 2400 lines.

The new administration's robots.txt file? Two lines.

Whether this change reflects a difference in transparency between the two administrations or just better web design on the part of Obama's team is still up for discussion.

It does, however, have bearing on the work we do, especially as clients and agencies push for more engaging interactive ideas.

A robots.txt file is about control. Control over who can find your content and where.

And for brands, control is one of the biggest issues when it comes to harnessing the power of interactive. How much control do we need? What if the campaign gets out of control? What if people say things we don't like?

All fair questions.

But I believe the brands that are going to be most successful as we go forward are those that open up a true conversation, without trying to maintain the control to which we've become accustomed in traditional forms of advertising.

Obama's presidential campaign is a perfect example of how giving up that control puts power into the hands of the public and creates strong evangelists for a brand. (Which, of course, Obama is, just as much as he is a leader and a symbol of change.)

During the campaign, anyone could log onto my.barackobama.com and get access to organizing tools. Including phone numbers for undecided voters.

One chilly Sunday, I sat on my couch for a few hours and dialed almost 100 of those voters.

When I tell people about my experience, their first response is "Wow, they LET you do that?" And, in response, I say how glad I was for the opportunity, because I probably wouldn't have engaged otherwise.

Obama's presidency has a lot to do with how skillfully his campaign team harnessed technology during his campaign. But it wasn't the technology that mattered. It was how they used that technology to open up the gates of communication, dropping the whole "one to many" form of conversation and allowing people not only to engage with the campaign, but to engage with each other ABOUT the campaign.

Obama's team knew something a lot of us are still struggling to understand: There's no such thing as total control over your communications. And by really engaging with consumers and letting them have a hand in shaping your brand, you end up that much stronger in the end.