Engaging “Audience O” on the Fly.

There are some people who just can’t sit around and wait for things to get done. They are the first ones to take matters into their own hands when challenged. I know a lot of those kind of people. It was more than two years ago that more and more people who fit into that category started talking to me about Barack Obama. I knew about the Jr. Senator from Illinois. He was certainly a rock star in the making. But they were talking bigger. Much bigger. As November grew closer, more of these people were hitting me up for cash. They actually believed a black guy could be President of the United States.

These were extremely rational people. The more I listened to them the more I noticed something totally different in the way they were speaking. I had worked for David Garth and Paul Trippe. I knew my way around campaign workers, but this was totally different. Everything was about “we.” “We can do this” and “We should do that.” These people were committed.

While everybody else was faking cool, these Obama people were getting things done. So we began infiltrating these folks through membership in their work groups and online forums. What we found was the “hive mind” at work. Highly motivated “cells” of political activists focused on four tasks: fundraising, voter registration, asking people what they would change about the way our nation is governed, and gathering follow-up information on everybody in the room.

From this initial contact with Team Obama we began to seek out our own team. We went for those who were obviously there to observe as well as participate. The event hosts made this very easy. “Oh you’re in advertising. Rebecca over there is also in advertising. let me hook you up.” Strong glue. Within a month we had our committee of 25 IAPIA volunteers. “The Committee” became our group handle for those who make up the Political Sphere of Influence Group on the NeoAdvertising Platform development team. We settled on a group posting name for our online comments, so as to be easier to track and less overwhelming to new visitors to our ultimate network of online profiles, websites, socialnets and blogs.

For more than three months now The Committee has been deeply emerged in the Obama/Biden Presidential Campaign as both workers and watchers. Monitoring chat rooms and political blogs, The Committee was able to determine the plans for a massive web portal to be launched the day after the Election results were finalized: www.change.gov.

We found that several forums were planned for public discourse on change.gov.
This led us to the development of an innovative Trojan Horse Strategy. Our concept was simple. To build/define our first NeoAdNet Audience we would leverage the traffic of change.gov to enable our proposal that the Obama/Biden Administration institute a White House Office of Creative Affairs (OCA). Our OCA proposal provided us with the perfect reason to scour the change.gov site for “America’s Ideas” and then cut and paste them into the “ideas” section of our first NeoAdNet site at http://whitehouseofficeofcreativeaffairs.wordpress.com .

This allowed me to post a selection notice as a comment on each selected idea to the author of the idea that their suggestion had been selected by IAPIA to be included as one of the Top 20 Ideas of the Day, to be included in the proposed White House Office of Creative Affairs beta test site. A link to the site was included, as well as my email address here at MadisonAveNew.com, our second NeoAdNet site.

The selection notice was done in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Policies posted by change.gov. But in effect it was a very subtle NeoAd for the OCA website and MadisonAveNew.com. We were able to use this NeoAdvertising technique to engage the change.gov audience for three months.

Next on the IAPIA agenda was to determine the efficacy of the Obama Team’s intake process. A section of the change.gov site was to be dedicated to proposals for the Obama/Biden Transition Team. An upload to the president-Elect. Great idea, if it worked. Our proposal that the Obama/Biden Administration institute a White House Office of Creative Affairs (OCA) was uploaded on December 18, 2008. As of yet there has been no response. A second proposal was uploaded on January 9, 2009 and an email was sent to White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett the top administration official on “Public Liaison.” No response as of yet. Nor was the proposal posted for public examination as were the rest of proposals submitted.

This, along with the massive traffic to our OCA NeoAdNet site made us decide to go to the second phase of our testing protocol, engaging “Audience O” in a campaign to add to the idea generation process. They would augment the cherry-picked ideas from change.gov. The IAPIA campaign that would drive the second stage test of our first NeoAdvertising Network ever was developed. The theme was “Think Hard America.”

We wanted America to post its ideas for solving the problems expressed in the Obama/Biden Agenda on http://thinkhardamerica.wordpress.com . Our idea was that members of all the creative communities that serve corporate America would contribute their genius and their expertise to improve, refine and bring these ideas down the line to fruition. The end product could be adopted by anyone with the capital to make a go of the final business model. As long as the business was located in or employed workers from an area designated as an area for Economic Development by the Obama/Biden Administration.

After we made our proposal to the White House our focus shifted back to an open source development platform that would stick with solutions developed to follow the Obama/Biden Administration agenda guidelines but without the political baggage the direct association with the White House affiliation brings to the party.

Besides, we believed the Transition Team had already adapted key elements of our proposal for their White House Office Of Public Liaison and their Citizen’s Briefing Book. We were not in competition with the incoming administration here… we were in support of their agenda.

But what we learned from members of the change.gov audience (Audience O) allowed us to understand that their main interest is in the process of change, not necessarily the politics behind it.

And so it was that we “privatized” the IAPIA proposed White House Office of Creative Affairs, even as we continued our proposals to White House Staff through other avenues.

With “ThinkHardAmerica” we were able to shift our strategy, learning curve and user research into developing http://thinkhardamerica.wordpress.com/ The initial 6o-day alpha phase is currently in progress. We invite you to participate. We will begin NeoAdvertising Sponsorship Trials on March 1, 2009.

To our way of thinking, NeoAdvertising is now a reality and not just a theory. “Audience O” is been engaged even as we speak. Now our job is to help NeoAdvertising to grow.

In Search Of Audience “O”

We know you are out there. We see evidence of that particular fact in the White House for the past week. We know you are feeling good about yourself right about now. You sought out the powers that would bring about a change in the world and your request was answered. We hope. What will be, remains to be seen. But what is, is.

There are millions of Americans who feel exactly the way you do. And millions more who feel more or less the way you do. Since you are not all relatively the same age, we can’t call you a “Generation” as in GenX.

Since your interests are more Geopolitical than old time Political, it’s hard to call you a “Movement”. And since you seem to have the capacity to organize and act rapidly, it wouldn’t be accurate to consider you a “Mob.”

However you do as a group have an amazing capacity to absorb and process masses of complex information across a vast network of resources. This would make you in essence, an “Audience.”

And since you are best known for your ability to elect a virtual “unknown” Junior Senator with a history-making ethnicity to the most powerful civil service job on the planet we tag you with “O” for your candidate of choice. Barak Obama.

Welcome “Audience O”.

At the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the great man looked out over the sea of faces and said, “I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it-and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

Dude was facing the Cold War and the threat of Cuban missiles in his front yard.   Not that the meltdown of CitiBank and BofA are not their own kind of daunting.

But Jack Kennedy was the ultimate Washington “Insider”. Barak Obama was a relative nobody from the middle of America with no family fortune and no political dynasty. The great equalizer for his campaign genius David Axelrod was a simple message well told and the powerful force of Social Networking.

Axelrod proved beyond a doubt that the power has shifted radically from financial capital to social capital. Although the Obama campaign was the best-funded political incursion in American History, the amazing fact was this war chest was collected door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood.

This means that far more people believe they are stakeholders in the Obama/Biden Administration then any other in recent memory. And that particular fact is where the opportunity lies.

“Audience O” is paying attention. Their membership is involved in following and supporting everything their President says and does. Barak Obama is their new reality show. And Team Obama has provided them with an excellent means to do exactly that. Change.gov

David Axelrod knew that whether they would win or not wasn’t the point. David Axelrod’s position was to focus on getting ready for the job, not the competition for the job.

To accomplish this strategy he had to build a functioning transition team months before the election was won. And a functioning Administration months before the Oath of Office was administered. This was just the plumbing.

The hot water was and remains “Audience O.” Axelrod, his President and all the ships at sea know this to be a rock-solid fact. They serve at the will of their Audience. “Audience O.”

Everything about this campaign is history-making. When IAPIA made the decision to leverage the Obama Campaign in the development of the NeoAdvertising Platform it was to make history as well.

NOTE: On December 8, 2008, IAPIA became the first (and only) advertiser to use change.gov as a medium to begin building brand awareness with AudienceO.

IAPIA would follow in Bill Gates footsteps. Our strategy was to get the Federal Government to help us beta-test NeoAdNet 1.0 just as the GAO beta-tested Windows 1.0 with Microsoft.

We would be, as one Obama-supporter wrote, “That pesky little dog, trying to dry-hump the leg of the great man to draw attention.” She hit it right on the head.

IAPIA followed the Obama campaign city by city, building, testing, rebuilding and retesting our theories on NeoAdNet into working data building prototypes.

And when the Candidate made his historic speech on Race In America in Philly, we were ready with a tested prototype. (Branswers.com) and an understanding of what to build, where to surface it and when to push the button.

Tune in next week for “Engaging Audience O On The Fly. “

Think Hard.

No Place To Hide.

So it’s been a few days with a Black guy in charge. Aston Krutcher did not run out and say, “Punkkkkkeeeed!!!! I did not wake up to hear, “Authorities speculate the weapon was fired from…” I can stop writing that pain in the ass President-Elect, crap and come on out with Pres. Obama and be done with it.

I just can’t believe we’re not in a bad science-fiction flick and someone is hiding the fact that we are all gonna die a horrible death in the path of the blazing meteor heading our way in the next 23 minutes. I feel both proud and creepy at the same time. It sucks to be me right now.

They took my race card.

I only deal it to myself, when I can’t find any other logical reason or excuse for the things that don’t happen in my life, not happening. When nothing else makes sense I go to the Ace of Spades.

But not now. A black dude is President of the United States of America, Jack! All bets are off. Reasonable doubt has been established on institutional racism in America. It’s all going to come down to some high priced lawyer stating, in Cyrus Merhri’s zillon dollar discrimination class action suit, “Yes, but he voted for Barak Obama.” Reasonable doubt. Nobody gets paid in the anticipated Madison Avenue Project Discrimination Witchhunt. “That was so Pre-Obama.”

At least that’s the way I see it going for me. I won’t be able to hide behind the bias of “The Men In The Grey Flannel Sheets” as Sandy Moore so richly describes Madison Avenue’s chief executives. That scape goat is now a dog that won’t hunt. What will I do, what will I do? I won’t be able to blame them ignoring my resumes as being racially motivated. “It must be my age.”

I’ll have to polish off some other obvious conclusions to come to. Or, “They just hatr people from LA,” That might work. But, for sure, “Maybe it’s because I’m Black.” is dead in the water.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what I need to get me to work harder and think deeper. If I don’t have these barriers to consider, maybe I won’t give up after the fifth email with no response. Maybe it’s the work that’s not good enough and not the worker.

Interesting thought. I hate interesting thoughts. They always make me think harder.

This is all pretty esoteric mumbling since I’m self-employed. Nobody has responded to a resume from me in 15 years. My resume is far too scary.

“Well first I worked for Berry Gordy and then I worked for Helmut Krone and Mary Wells. Well actually, both Mary Wells. And then Berry Manilow, Mike Becker and I created the longest running campaign in advertising. Lately? Let’s see? President Barack Obama turned my White House Office of Creative Affairs proposal into the White House Office of Public Liason. That was this past Tuesday. Is that late enough for you?”

No, a resume like that will get me absolutely nowhere on Madison Avenue. That’s why I’m self-employed.

I fully expect business to be better during the next four years. By business, I mean the ones I build, not the ones I work for.

Big business is still fairly clueless about how to build their own business. That’s why I started to build my own businesses. I was running out of clients who understood that everything was about to change so advertising better get itself changed as well.

I figured they couldn’t hear me because I was speaking from an African-American face. Then I realized that if they were stupid enough to regard somebody with my track record in that light, the concept of Neo Advertising was way beyond them. Way. No excuse. It’s not me. It’s them. They’re brain dead. Oh well, back to work.

Me. Only Better.

It’s not easy being me. I piss a lot of people off. I have a short fuse with people who don’t do what they say. I do entirely too many things all at the same time. I work very, very long hours and don’t get to spend much time with my family. I do not suffer fools easily. I demand the impossible from people who never even attempt to do the difficult. I am not a happy guy.

All of these character flaws tend to take their toll on the people in my daily day-to-day existence. They think I am worth the agrivation. (fingers crossed.) None of this is made any easier by my insistence on being the guy who is set on reinventing advertising.

This is the reason that once a year I take myself aside and spend the week between Christmas and New Years trying to reinvent myself for the coming year, a process you may know better as the New Year’s Resolution syndrome.

Generally speaking, I try to boil my resolutions down to a single, simple statement. Something I can remember to do. Last year it was, “Stop talking. Do Something Real.”

The result during 2008 was an indepth reengineering attempt at defining the shortfalls of advertising as a meaningful means of communication and then evolving an alternative series of principles and practices grouped under the banner of Lean Advertising (the precursor to NeoAdvertising).

In 2008 I invested a wealth of time, money and effort into not just writing about the decline and fall of Advertising, but also building computer models, web networks, affinity groups, work teams and a significant body of empirical data to prove or at least document our progress in determining then deploying what comes next.

In December I went to New York at the invitation of Nancy Hill, CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies as a part of their ongoing overview of the impact of emergent technologies on Advertising Best Practices.

Adonis Hoffman, Senior Vice-President and Counsul of the 4A’s set the agenda for us to present our work on NeoAdvertising to date. Mind you this review/presentation/meet-and-greet and luncheon took a week out of my life. Ms. Hill’s team brought me to Gotham on today’s equivilant of the “Super Chief” and “The 20th Century Limited.” I support Amtrack. Besides It’s the only first class.

During the three days rolling from LA, I was able to develop a project in exchange for their gracious hospitality and vital input to the development process of the NeoAdvertising Platform. Cultivating the interest of the 4A’s is just one example in an effort to “Do Something Real” for the NeoAdvertising Platform in 2008.

Of course when the bottom fell out of Wall St. during our lunch with Ms. Hill, it was a very real wake up call that there is a need for the Advertising industry to join us in the Reinvention Process at IAPIA.

2009 will be even harder as we go higher. We got a little jump on 2009 Resolutions with our proposal for A White House Office of Creative Affairs right on the heels of the 4A’s Meeting. Working within the strict guidelines of the Transition Team and it’s amazing change.gov.

But locked away in spare room over the holidays with family, I hammered out the 68 areas for improvement that I have to address in 2009 if we are to do business with the Feds orthe Industry giants . For Example:

Number 34:
Problem: Inability to prioritize attentions
Solution: Cut back your activities to the four projects you care about the most.
Action Required: Drop everything but MA, NeoAdNets, Fantazzzmia, IAPIA
Time Required: Spend 1 hr. a day on each of 4 projects

Which leads us to t his year’s simple statement, “Do Everything Better and Better.”

The time to focus is at hand.

Greetings Earthlink. Take Me To Your Leader.

A labor of love gone bad. That is how I think of my relationship with Earthlink over the years.

I came in early. I had known Earthlink founder,  Sky Dayton as the braniac kid that owned Mocha Café. I knew he had worked at Mednick, a hot agency during my spell as Brand Director of the L’Ermitage Hotel empire in Beverly Hills. Mocha was one of the places down the street where we would hang out, since I was also moonlighting for Buzz, a competitor for the West Hollywood coffee house fortunes. When Sky and George Soros took Earthlink shares to a slingshot 33% growth spurt, I did well. But I digress.

My decision to build my business on an Earthlink backbone was the opposite of Michael Corleone. It was personal. It was not business. They were not the low-price leader. At one time we had 18 websites hosted on Earthlink. Even though Earthlink lost its local start-up allure to the size of its investors, I still thought of it as a local-kid-does-good kinda place. Tech support at Earthlink was like going to Internet school. Not only would their people know how to fix your problem, they would explain it to you as granularly as it could be comprehended. Then suddenly, they moved to Atlanta and everything started going from bad to worse.

My first mishap came when I discovered that Earthlink had charged my credit card $1800 more than they should have over the course of two years. They told me I was only entitled to be refunded for the past two months because I hadn’t brought the over charges to their attention. I had to go to friends in the Public Utilities Commission to get Earthlink to do the right thing. I also had my payment method changed to a monthly billing situation. The ordeal told me that putting my all of my eggs in Earthlink’s basket was fool-hardy at best. So one by one I began migrating my websites from Earthlink to MediaTemple and Value Web.

Right after that point I began working with Sky Dayton’s wife Arwyn and actor Bodhi Elfman (Gena’s husband, Danny’s nephew) on the screenplay of her science fiction book “Resurrection.” It was a cool concept and my boss, Matrix Producer Dan Cracchiolo, wanted me to develop it with the two of them. So we had our meetings and I thought it wise to forego my Earthlink exodus, now that I had reestablished a direct line to the founder. And so it was that years went by without a hitch.

And then Earthlink made the decision to offshore its tech support to Bangalore and the shit began hitting the fan on a monthly basis. So the migration began anew. This time I would move a website off Earthlink, but Earthlink would not remove it off my bill. No matter how many Hindi tech support people with their Americanized names would promise to take care of the problem, the problem and the bills would continue.

Finally, I said that’s it. I am not paying for something I am not getting. And so Earthlink started mounting charges for websites they no longer hosted and pulling the plugs on sites they were hosting. Around and around and around we went. Until finally, I gave in and said I would pay the $300 they claimed I owed, but I would not give them my credit card number to abuse in the future. I would pay via bank draft. So I gave them the numbers, which they fowled up. And which put my 300 bucks in limbo, with the bank saying Earthlink was paid and Earthlink claiming it wasn’t. Two months went by before this circle jerk was resolved by the bank.

Meanwhile, Earthlink decided that enough was enough and waited until December 23rd to pull down all of my websites and shut down my email. Merry Christmas from your long-time friends at Earthlink. I went ballistic. Someone advised that I get a Visa gift card for the $300 bucks in question and pay them that way. But to do that I had to get a real person on the phone. Which is what I attempted to do all during the holidays. To no avail.

After eight days and dozens of phone calls waiting as long as 45 minutes for some idiot in Bangalore to pick up the phone, I finally got a human voice, who promptly told me I now owed Earthlink 600 bucks to restore my service. Of course my first response was to rage at said human being, which resulted in a cross-border, off shore hang-up. People were now calling me asking what was wrong and did my business hit the wall.

It was obvious I had no choice but to pay the blackmail to restore my email. So off I went for another Visa Gift Card. Ten calls later I once again had a human being on the phone. She took the information on the two credit cards and claimed that the $500 credit card was registering an invalid error. After three or four tries and confirming that they had the numbers right, I was told to contact the issuing bank. Which I did. Only to find out that Earthlink had already been paid by the bank and that the error message was due to the fact that the Earthlink staff idiot had misspelled my address.

So once again I called Earthlink. Six calls later another human being. I was informed there was a $425 balance owed and my service would again be terminated on January 7th. This time I was the picture of patience and explained my entire ordeal. They could care less. I went back to the Visa bank and reversed the charge and was told my $500 gift card would be good in seven calendar days. Back to Earthlink for a stay of execution.

I am taking the time to start your new year out with this tail of woe for two reasons and two reasons only. One. If anyone out there knows Sky Dayton personally (he’s still on ELs Board of Mis-Directors) let him know for me his company sucks the big weenie.

Two. If you hear about some big tech company laying off thousands and thousands of loyal employees, don’t feel bad. They probably deserved to be laid off. And those blathering idiots in Bangalore who are lining up to take their jobs will most certainly do an even more bootyass job then they did. And they will deserve to be fired when said high-tech company finally hits the wall. Perhaps 2009 will be the year we come to our senses about technology and see it for what it really is. A poor excuse for common sense.

Keeping The Faith.

I don’t go to church that much. But I would still consider myself a believer, as opposed to a non-believer. I wouldn’t go so far as claim true believership. But I do believe in a wide variety of esoterica that more or less makes up my belief system. For instance, numbers. I’m a numerologist. I see numbers in everything. I have specific numbers that crop up in my life all the time. Other folks believe in ghosts. Older Hispanics and Asians talk to departed loved ones all the time. Ancestor worship is coo.

Currently more and more people are believing in technology. Not just the occasional Mac whacker, but entire industries full of people are following their respective techno tyrants. Try and convince somebody at Razorfish that they don’t need the latest Adobe CS whatever. Never happen. Or somebody in the bond business they don’t need version 3.0 of the latest Bloomberg analytic whositswhatsits. Belief systems went gonzo when somebody finally stood up and said, “Enough is enough” in the last U.S. Presidential election.

Now everybody’s belief system is up for grabs. Me? I believe that we are on the verge of an economic tsunami that will blow out the value of the U.S. dollar on the global currency market and cause a meltdown of Wall Street as we know it. It will be a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetimes. My business, Advertising, as we know it will cease to exist. It will not keep up with the audience. Advertising will die an unremarkable death. Except for WPP. Sir Martin understands.

So if advertising implodes from the weight of its own ignorance, where will you people go every morning? Who will you login to? What will become of your platinum card? Your air miles? John@whoizit.com. Mary@OhOh.com. What do you believe will become of you in the coming hard times ahead? I’ll wait. It’s a big question… hmm, hmmm, hmmm… OK. I don’t know what you came up with. This was my bottom line. I will do better. I have faith that America will do better.

This is that leap of faith everybody talks about. This is that miracle of faith the religious community puts so much stock in. Faith, the business partner of hope. In the words of the immortal Holland, Dozier, Holland, “Son, believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” These are the sentiments that guided my belief systems up until this point in time. Skepticism was my rock. But I cannot be skeptical about the effort it is taking for me to reinvent advertising through the emerging practice development of NeoAdvertising. I must use social leverage rather than financial leverage to make things happen day after day.

All over the world, people are joining me in the movement to reinvent Advertising. Open source collaboration is the prime driver of the development of the NeoAdNet 1.0. platform. Every day I have to bolster my faith in the effectiveness of NeoAdvertising Practices over traditional advertising techniques, so as to be able to inform and inspire the contributions and efforts of others. I have to do better. So that America will do better.

But that’s me. What about you? What will it take for you to begin to believe you will do better through this economic turmoil then you are doing now? How can you start to have faith in your ability to make lemonade out of cold water and sugar? I can help you out with these four easy steps to self-reliance.

1. Invest $35 to register your own name as a web domain. (i.e. www.yourname.com or if taken www.yournameonline.com or www.yournameweb.com)

2. Say out loud to someone who cares about you. “I am no longer an employee. I am the owner of a web-based business.”

3. Register for a PayPal account.

4. Figure out a product or service and determine whom you can sell it to and get to work.

That’s it. These four steps give you the basis of web-based business based on your faith in your own good name and your own good brain. My gift to you and yours during this joyous holiday season.

Think Hard.

Think Hard America.

If this country ever needed it’s “Creative Class” the time is now. Now is the time for all Big Ideas to come to the aid of their country. We need all the Big Ideas we can get. No matter how I say it, we hold these truths to be self evident. We are at a critical crossroads in the journey of the Republic. Do we stop crying and hunker down to clean up our national Katrina with its maelstrom of unsecured debt and worthless paper promises. Or do we tear ourselves even further apart with our greed and self-deception.

I feel very responsible for what America has become. I’m a legend on Madison Avenue.I create demand out of pixy dust and innuendo. Until I saw the writing on the wall. The last time I saw such writing it said, “Mass Marketing Is Dead.” I wrote a book about it. I figured I did my job. I warned the industry with “Divide & Conquer: Target your customers through Market Segmentation” (John Wiley & Sons, NY, 1986) Market Segmentation caught on.

Then companies became very stupid. The smart guys at the top were dying off. Goizetta, Ross, Lansing. Goners. Meanwhile, people were getting smarter. The internet helped. A lot. Nat Ives of the New York Times credited me and a bunch of other guys with starting the trend of user generated content. The Coke “Cool American” campaign. The first true NeoAdvertising campaign, was featured and pictured in the article. Born and bred right here on these pages, by readers like you. That was when we stopped calling people customers, users, consumers. People were just the audience with a job to be done. 

That’s when I realized I had to take all this stuff i was learning about the audience and use it to start from scratch. I came to understand the only thing left for me to do was to reinvent advertising. So that’s what I am in the process of doing. NeoAdvertising is New advertising, from the ground up. But the going has not been easy.

In fact, we just stepped in it again. Given the radical shift in focus, proposed by the President Elect. And our extensive work through IAPIA on the practice of Adaptive Branding and its key component NeoAdvertising, we find ourselves in the crush of the “Transition” of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Federal Government. IAPIA in their work on NeoAdvertising and testing of the theories of Adaptive Branding, thought it would be cool to propose the use of Adaptive Branding and NeoAdvertising to the Obama White House. Just walk up and say, ” So? What’dya think?” That was last week. 

This week we are building a network of interactive blogs tasked with:

a. Pulling 20 of the best ideas on change they can find on change.gov,

b. Posting them daily at http://whitehouseofficeofcreativeaffairs.wordpress.com ,

c. Archiving them at a linked blog with a more appropriate template at http://ocaarchive.wordpress.com

d. Mixing and matching the selected ideas into working assets for achieving the stated agendas of the Obama White House,

e. Developing a means of audience-testing these assets in real-time, real-world situations. A campaign just developed to assure the audience that the letter of the law will be followed in dealing with the financial crisis. At least by government employees that are still alive. We created a novel way of showcasing the diligence of one unique IRS agent. If you can call being “Un-Dead” You can see the beginnings at http://vampirebanksters.wordpress.com.

f. A 100 post Twitter campaign getting people to follow our actions here on MadAve so we can increase our circulation.

g. More than 1200 mentions of the madisonavenew.com URL on the Obama Administration Transition Team web forums at change.gov,

h. Creation of The Future Safe Fund as a funding mechanism for the critical work being done by IAPIA,Development of the campaign strategy and theme we will deploy on any site that will have it to drive ideas to http://whitehouseofficeofcreativeaffairs.wordpress.com and change.gov. The banner is above.

All of this since you were here last. Next week who knows?

 

Think Hard.

Slipping Into Madness.

One of the hardest things a creative practitioner has to master is when to fish and when to cut bait. For more then twenty years I have been of the opinion that “More is more.” 20 to 30 projects on the log for the frog. NP. Bring it. Then I decided to simplify my life and do one more impossible task. I decided to Reinvent Advertising. Right away that simplified my to do list by a magnitude of 50%. Movies, Musicals, Realty Shows, Trade Shows, done. My plate was cleared of half its contents with one key decision. And since my Ad Business time was split evenly between SMART clients and IAPIA Initiatives, another 25% was dropped as well.

The number of projects has dropped from 20-30 to 8 in just the past month. Of course the complexity of any one of these NeoAdvertising projects far outstrips any TV campaign or branding assignment that SMART might throw at me. Everything IAPIA touches, is characterized by breaking new ground. We learn as we go. Discovery takes time. As creative types we long for compleation, benchmarks, results. Findings carry a different kind of satisfaction. Whatever. We soldier on.

Pulling On Superman’s Cape.

Do you have any idea how scary it is to pitch the President of the United States of America. You can never be caught with yesterdays underwear still on. You cut back on the use of the word “fuck” in the stuff you write. You return e-mail from people you don’t know, without the casual evisceration. You cross at the light. Everything seems to go into button-up mode when you open yourself up to Federal investigation by the folks who got famous for it. Not that we don’t normally run a tight ship around here.

The point is being compelled to take a closer look at the ship. It’s the last month of an amazing year for us and everybody else. My focus is on trying to focus each of our business units into becoming even more adaptive. When IAPIA pitches the White House, Fantazzzmia renews its web domain.

The whole thing just makes me want to puke. But a slob’s gotta do what a slob’s gotta do. Like define exactly what the connection is between Branswers.com and WhiteHouseOfficeOfCreativeAffairs.wordpress.com . No, I mean define it right down to shared databases and web architecture. As well as defining everything else around here. Well, what do you mean by Adaptive Marketing exactly? And what is the difference between Lean Advertising and NeoAdvertising? Inquiring Feds will want to know.

Then there is the issue of loose strings. Did we file all of our taxes? Do we have any outstanding creditors out standing around saying unflattering things about our accounts payable procedures. Or lack of same.

Once you work for the government you get to understand it’s more about getting them not to say “No” rather than convincing them to say “Yes.” It’s all about the check and the box. That’s just the price of admission. That’s what you get to go through just to play.

So this past week has been one of constant discovery. “Hey did we ever file a form 950 back in 2003?” How about ’04,’05 and ’06?” “So that’s what that $1473, was for. Damn.” It gives me a new appreciation about what running a business is all about. It’s all about filing, stuff. And being able to find stuff when you need it. And it’s all about the ability to execute on the ideas you dream up. And know where every penny went., four years later.

Then there is the “consistency of message”, thing. I’m always messing that up. “Well over here you say this, and then on the IAPIA blog they quote you as saying that.” Hell, one thing got written on Tuesday and the other thing got said on Wednesday. Not good enough. Rearrange history for the sake of neatness.

The White House Office of Creative Affairs (OCA) is a powerful idea. It could do a lot for the country in the right hands. But it’s gonna take a lot of work to make it work. And it’s the kind of work that needs to be done in advance. ‘Cause when those wave after wave of smart people start asking them smart questions they seem to be so fond of, we better have the answers. Like, how does the OCA work to forward the President’s agenda? What is the process for government acquiring an IP through the OCA? Who funds the activities of the OCA? Big questions. So along with finding out the required big answers, we also have to find out if we paid our interns as freelancers or independent contractors in 1999.

I keep hearing people around here saying how did we get in this “White House Dealio” anyway? Nobody seems to recall the battle cry of our Adaptive Marketing Practices work. “Change or Die.” Or the four interest areas covered by NeoAdvertising. Lifestyle. Political. Business. And Financial.

In any case, here we are. On one hand we are pitching Lifestyle NeoAdvertising to the Global 1000 that may cut their cost of marketing in half. On the other hand we’re pitching the Obama Administration a branch of government based upon the principals and practices of Political NeoAdvertising which could reduce the cost of Government outreach by 75%. And in our spare time we’re going over our latest EDD forms.

Think “New.”

Something To Be Thankful For.

This past election season certainly has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt the power of a single idea, expertly crafted and flawlessly executed. Proof that the system was tragically flawed is more than evident in our current economic crisis. Proof that the system has the ability to self-correct to reinvent itself to address these flaws is also more than evident. This is something we should not take for granted. It is the end result of more than two hundred years of searching for “a more perfect union.”.

Although many of the promises that have been made may prove impossible to deliver upon, the overall commitment to “change” seems to be driving the bus.

Even through the transition period we are seeing evidence of change in the ways and speed with which the new administration is rebuilding the mechanisms of government. There seems to be a new openness and transparency to the process of finding and recruiting the three thousand or more professionals that will be brought in by the Obama administration to oversee the buracracy that turns the wheels of the public sector. Lobbyists have been frozen out of the selection process. Selection seems to be based upon experience rather than patronage. Agendas have been set well in advance of the transition date and mechanisms to to gain popular input have been well thought out and put firmly in place, well leveraged by the use of technologies that have historically baffled previous administrations.

Above all of this, there seems to be a willingness from the new administration to be responsive to new ideas and innovative ways of conducting the business of government going forward. For this alone, we should all be thankful. But is it real, or is it rhetoric? Ever the skeptic, I decided to put it to the test. For the past two weeks, I have begun the process of bringing a new idea to the attention of the Office of the President-Elect.

The White House is more than just a fancy hotel for a four-year stay in Washington. It is the seat of the executive branch of the federal government.

Within the White House are several offices. The Office of Administration, The Office of Management and Budget, The Office of National Drug Control Policy, The Office of Science & Technology Policy, The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, The Office of the First Lady and The Office of National AIDS Policy are just a few of the offices and Councils included in the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office.

The Office of the President-Elect has already begun the establishment of a White House Office of Urban Affairs and no doubt there are several other offices currently under consideration. The idea that I have proposed to the Obama Administration is the establishment of a White House Office of Creative Affairs (OCA): a “think tank” for America.

The purpose of the OCA is to bring together the most creative minds in our nation to address our most pressing problems. From architects to zoologists, I believe that the thought leaders and innovators who are willing to serve at the will of the President need a means to become a part of the campaign for Change in America. The OCA will serve as their on-ramp to involvement by providing them with both ways and means to contribute their time and their genius to generating the millions of solutions needed to effect the Administration’s sacred promise to the American people to address the following issues:

1. Revitalizing the Economy
2. Ending the War in Iraq
3. Providing Health Care for All
4. Protecting America
5. Renewing American Global Leadership

Certainly this becomes a full plate for any creative mind to contemplate, let alone address. But as a community of creative minds, the power and the capacity to create the solutions required can be certainly be achieved.

Never one to propose an idea without some form of “Proof of Concept” I enlisted the help of some friends to build a microcosim of how such an Office might work.You can visit our demo at : http://whitehouseofficeofcreativeaffairs.wordpress.com

We invite your participation in our presentation to the White House by visiting our demo site and sharing your ideas regarding the issues posted above and on this site. Who knows? Your ideas may be adopted even though ours may not. We will forward all of the ideas submitted to John Podesta at the transition team. It is our way of helping those who have committed to change the way government works to begin the work at hand.

Thank you for helping us make it possible to insure that “Creativity” has a seat at the table. And thank you President-Elect for restoring our belief that doing something like this actually has an opportunity to help make a difference in the way things get done.