Curiosity Matters

Planning: We Bring The Divergent Thinking In From The Outside by Heidi Hackemer

Just stumbled upon this presentation given by former BBH Strategy Director, now freelancer and dare I say, life-liver, Heidi Hackemer. Like many planners who’ve reached a senior level, she had a crisis of faith in the traditional planning model realizing that the linear career path, reliance on focus groups and online reports and value placed on “busyness” were not conducive to inspiring the best work. The presentation offers invaluable advice for planners.

planning, creativity & planning for creative campaigns

View more presentations from Heidi Hackemer

Tags: account strategy, Advertising, inspiration, planning, strategy

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Categories Advertising, Advice, Inspiration

Some Very Practical Advice For a Monday Afternoon

16 Apr

One of my favorite blogs and newsletters is LearnVest, a great example of a successful and groundbreaking startup by women. The website and newsletter tackles something that unfortunately, most women’s magazines do not – personal finance. Instead of encouraging us women to buy the latest Marc Jacobs bag to look professional, the site teaches us how to budget, negotiate a raise and generally improve our financial future. Here’s a great talk by Learnvest’s founder Alexa von Tobel who reminds of how important it is to always consider our long term goals and happiness.

Tags: advice, money, personal finance, women

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Categories Advice

The Politics Of Taxes

11 Apr

As the deadline for our taxes quickly approaches, countless articles have recently been written about our archaic tax code and the politics that shape our economy. The latest issue of Business Week somehow managed to make taxes an engaging subject. Joel Stein, in an attempt to figure out the best tax preparation method, points out the ridiculousness in having to prepare our taxes ourselves.

“I don’t resent taxes for the usual reason—that government wastes my hard-earned money. No, I resent paying taxes because if the government wants my money, it should have to do the work of figuring out how much it wants. I don’t click on a book on Amazon.com and then fill out 20 pages of forms to figure out how much it will cost me, and then keep every receipt and form in case Amazon wants to make sure I got the number right five years from now. If I had to do all of that for Amazon, I’d have an even lower chance of reading Finnegans Wake.”

In fact, the tax system is so complicated that when the IRS studied 46,000 audits of taxpayers in 2006, they found that 67% of the problems were unintentional errors. Even the IRS computers have trouble navigating the system; 27% of those errors were computational errors by the IRS or tax preparer. To deal with all these errors, Congress created a Taxpayer Advocate Service, overseen nationally by Nina Olson who has tirelessly fought to help foster a more trusting relationship between taxpayers and the IRS. She points out that the wait time for half of the people who have written to the IRS is more than six weeks. Not surprisingly, the 1% get special treatment even by the IRS – they’re some of the only people who actually get face-to face time with the IRS if audited. Nina is looking into the psychology behind those who do not pay taxes, using data to learn what regions, jobs, income levels, etc. are more likely to pay or not pay taxes. She strongly believes the government needs to focus on innovation within the IRS.

“The IRS budget, currently $11.8 billion, has been cut each year for the past two years, resulting in a hiring freeze. “No one is willing to fund the IRS to do imaginative thinking,” she says. “The military gets funding to develop the next new weapons system. But the IRS does not get funding to sit down and say, how could we harness the iPad? How could we harness video technology to talk to the taxpayer in their home? I mean, we don’t even e-mail or text the taxpayers. We’re so far behind.”

Finally, in today’s New York Times article, A Tax Code of Politics, Not Reason, Eduardo Porter points out how the complications of our tax system can attributed to compromises between the Democratic and Republican parties. Parts of the tax code that seem to charge a lot to taxpayers are actually littered with loopholes for certain groups.

“Among the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Mexico and Chile collect less in taxes. The average across the O.E.C.D. is 9 percentage points higher.”

Eduardo suggests simplifying the tax code and implementing higher consumption taxes, a suggestion supported by the vast majority of economists and a strategy that has worked in prosperous countries like Denmark and Sweden.

As usual, after reading a few articles about our archaic tax system and our economic policy shaped by people with special interests, I feel informed but helpless and also furious. Why is so much of our economic policy shaped by politicians when bi-partisan economists have quantifiable data to support their policy recommendations? Would I want an insurance company standing in for my doctor to determine my care? Both parties have managed to stand together to defeat the enemies of our country because we believe we will be stronger as a nation. Why should our economic policy be any different? What good is it to protect us from outside enemies if within our own country, we’re nurturing a select few through partisan economic policies?

Tags: economy, government, New York Times, politics, taxes, united states

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Categories Ponderings

Magnum Pleasure Hunt

4 Apr

Have you played the Magnum Pleasure Hunt?! This is why the internet was invented! This is the kind of execution that comes with true collaboration – I’m guessing from creatives with a digital background, gaming, maybe film and traditional TV. And the idea was potentially seeded by an account planner who said, you know what – girls like intuitive, computer games as well as men, as long as they don’t involve guns and gore. And you know what.. they’ll like it even more if they get to travel virtually to romantic, beautiful locations and are surprised and delighted along the way. I remember playing the first version of this game and being completely astounded, then looking up who made the chocolate and where I could get it. The only downside is the association with Magnum condoms and pleasure. But then again, most women can easily compare sex with chocolate.

Go Play!

Tags: Advertising, digital, gaming

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Categories Advertising

New York Tech Meetup “March” Re-Cap

1 Mar

The New York Tech Meetup “March” event tops my list of best NYTM’s. The technology and new products were both groundbreaking and more importantly, incredibly useful.

First on the stage was Watch It. It was the first in a long list of “why didn’t I think of that?” Watch It aggregates available movies across multiple platforms so you can easily find a movie you want to watch either online, DVD, in the theaters, etc. You can make a queue, share it with your friends, and get alerts when a movie becomes available. Simple yet brilliant.

Yapp took the stage next. I think Yapp marks an important milestone in our digital behaviors and needs. Yapp allows users to easily make a mobile app. Currently in beta, they demonstrated how to make an app for an event – which I’m sure all us nerdy tech folks will want to use to impress our other nerdy tech friends. So does that mean we will go from everyone having their own website to everyone having their own app? Special shout out to the preggers demoer who cracked us up with her Vegas wedding app suggestion. It’s always nice to see female presenters onstage especially when they’re developing startups outside of fashion.

For those of you trying to juggle your various social media presences (isn’t that all of us?!), there’s Engagio, a platform that allows you to see all your social media comments and interactions in one place.

Float schedule looks like a useful tool for agencies, studios, digital project managers – or anyone else who has to manage the schedules of various client projects. The act of producing projects is often under appreciated. I consider myself a dreamer or incrementalist according to Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen so any tools to help me be more of a “doer” is very much appreciated.

And another special shout-out – this time to my former hometown classmate Andy Tider who presented his Hack of the Month with Ben Fisher called Pool Party. I’m not 100% sure what it does because I was distracted by him throwing beach balls at the audience. Oh – and the hysterically awesome “please be patient” commentary while the program pulls data. Pool Party connects with LinkedIn’s APi to help you make better use of a particular group’s members – so when you sign in, it connects to LinkedIn, then one of the groups you belong to. From there, you can easily pull out UX Designers, Interaction, Product, Rails, etc. to better connect with. And as if I can’t give enough props – another special shout out for getting the URL: JumpInThePool.com.

It would seem as if a shower of beach balls would be a tough act to follow but UnRoll.me did it with ease. UnRoll.me could be the most useful thing since … email. UnRoll.me is a very simple email add-on that allows you to easily unsubscribe to unwanted emails, receive the subscriptions you like in one convenient email and here’s where this service can become the next Groupon: get recommendations on newsletters you may actually want to read. It’s in beta so sign up and be sure to tell your friends, or work on making your newsletter more interesting and engaging so it doesn’t end up “unrolled.”

When Kapitall took the stage, it became apparent that the hits would keep coming. French accents, online gaming and stocks! OH MY! Kapitall aims to make investing in stocks understandable and engaging to the masses by creating a game around researching and trading stocks. I’d tell you more but I just signed up and want to go play! Sign up now because trades are only $5 up until March 31st. The potential for educating people about stock trading is groundbreaking. I’ll let you ponder that while I introduce the final presenter.

Last but certainly not least, the seasoned Anthony Caselena from Squarespace took the stage with an introduction to their revised portfolio and website publishing platform. There were collective oohs and ahs as we watched Anthony create a photographer’s portfolio under a minute. And cringes as we silently cursed ourselves for renewing our WordPress hosting sites. And curses from web designers who realized they have some serious competition.

So the common theme with all of these, and why I think they’re going to be successful, is that they were all incredibly useful. More importantly their use can easily be explained.

Be sure to sign up for the next NYTM on March 27th. If you haven’t attended yet, you’re missing out. A trick to getting the ticket before they sell out is to make sure your payment is correctly linked before they go on sale. Also, they sell like hotcakes so set your alarm and be on your computer when they sell. If you can’t get a ticket, people often resell theirs closer to the date when they realize they have a conflict and can’t make it so don’t “unroll” your NYTM message board.

Tags: New York, New York Tech Meetup, NYTM, startups, Technology