Last year I started to conduct a series of interviews with some of the most interesting Marketing peeps I met so far.

I somehow wanted to take this concept one step further.My new series of interviews is called ‘Hooked’. Hooked is about leading Strategists and their hobby or a side-project. Hooked is about what people can learn for Strategy while they actually love to fly, cook, swim or whatever they do to become the interesting people that most of them are.

The first Person to be part of Hooked is Alexander Wipf – my long-time friend and all-round awesome guy. Alex is Head of Strategy at Leo Burnett, Frankfurt. And besides being one of the few truly digital Marketing Pioneers in Germany, besides being an awesome Photographer, young dad and many other things, he is in possession of a Private Pilot License. In other words: He is a passionate flier.

Irrelevant for his thinking as a Strategy Dude? I don’t think so. Get to know Mister Wipf.

You have a pilot license and you are Head of Strategy at Leo Burnett and started off as a user experience designer. I know you have an interesting theory about flying and UX. Tell me about it.

As machinery and technology get more and more complex, our susceptibility to allow technology or its interfaces to control us increases as well. As Günther Anders already noted in the 1950s (in “The Outdatedness of Human Beings 1. On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution,” 1956) at some point after WWII human technology had reached a tipping point when technologies weren’t just simple tools or extensions of ourselves, but rather complex systems that makes human capacity look outdated and miniscule. Being a thinker during the atomic age, his example for this was the invention of nuclear energy, which has a hazardous waste-product that has a half-life that will last longer than our species will be on this planet.

Trying to wrap your head around this fact is just mind-boggling. Essentially, we have created things that are simply bigger than ourselves and the consequences of which we aren’t really in control of anymore. Of course this is an extreme example, and it’s not a matter of us necessarily wanting to be controlled or hindered by the technology we create, but we implicitly accept it as necessary evil.

So, in order to cope with this, we create more technology that, in turn, controls the other technology we have. And we accept this largely because there is no way back.

As we have moved from the industrial (and atomic) age to the information age, the same forces are at play, only that the context is no longer the industrial and physical realm, but rather the informational and virtual.

Due to digital technologies, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, again, we are unable to deal with it all, so, again, after a few decades of information technologies being created to create, disseminate and store information, we are now inventing technologies to filter this information. The question is, are our interfaces designed with us in mind?

(...)
Read the rest of Hooked. Alex Wipf: A Strategy of Flight. (1,710 words)

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Post tags: Agencies, Alex Wipf, Creativity, Hooked, Ideas, Interview, Leo Burnett, People, Strategy, Truth

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In the following video, we get a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most important aspects of the Threadless website: the pics and how they get it done. In the interview in-house photographer Sean Dorgan and creative director Sean Donohue explain how they do it. It’s impossible not to love them…

(via mashable)

© Gerald for davaidavai.com, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cool, Creativity, E-Commerce, Experimental, Fashion, Funny, Presentation, Strategy, threadless, visual, We like, World

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Unfortunately I am not allowed to publish the article yet. Just wait one more month or go to the kiosk and $#%%&#*@ buy the thing.

© Gerald for davaidavai.com, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Amsterdam, Article, Page, People, World

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This is an interview of Latvian design blog Plikums with Eike who visited Riga’s Latvian Art Directors Club and talked a bit about his aspirations in work and design (via Better taste than sorry).

© Gerald for davaidavai.com, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Agencies, Berlin, Cool, Creativity, Design, eike koenig, Friends, hort, Interview, People, We like

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The best comment I have read so far on Wikileaks was published by Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald.

His thesis ‘Wikileaks reveals more than just government secrets‘. According to him no entity by now that produced as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks, for authoritarian minds. Strangely enough, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.

And the economist says:

The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.

The new Leak this button

Whatever happens to Julian Assange – the genie left the bottle. Wikileaks will clone itself and will be copied. It’s not a fight against a site that our Politicians are pretending to wage. It’s the same old crusade against free speech that business organizations have already lost – let’s call it the socialization of political processes. To simplify the inevitable I would like to introduce a new button to lower entrance barriers for future internal document releases – if anyone can please add an embed code to the design top right?

But you know what? It probably won’t matter if Julian Assange disappears or not – the concept will prevail. Starfishes have become more persistent than spiders – and WikiLeaks clearly is a starfish.

Wikileaks must be uncomfortable because that is its mission. A mission that traditional press has not taken seriously anymore for decades, living comfortably under the safe cover of common sense. A little humility is long overdue for these people. But one more thing is stunning – the shock about the inferiority of (not only) U.S. diplomacy. We simply like to believe that the ones who are running our systems know what they are doing. Bad news – they don’t. And that’s a key motive behind the smear campaign against WikiLeaks. Wartard thinks…

The leaks made clear that world diplomatic relations between countries are no different from our own shitty relations with each other in regular society, like that contractor who disappeared with the deposit I gave him for my sink repair or the dodgy mechanic who swapped out my tires when he fixed my brake pads. (…)

My favourite leak is that US and UK diplomats are shitting bricks about the current state of Pakistan and the fate of its ever growing nuclear arsenal. Oh really? I’ve been shitting about that since 2003. It’s only a shocking revelation because the media never reports it. So when we find out that diplomats have no idea who controls the nukes there, that 100,000 Pakistani personnel are involved in the nuclear program there and the Taliban captured the Swat valley with collusion from Islamacists in the Pakastani military and government, you know that smuggled chunk of highly enriched uranium is gonna go on the market in some scumbag Albanian dive bar very soon.

(...)
Read the rest of Wikileaks. The Revolution has Begun and it is Digitised. (64 words)

© Gerald for davaidavai.com, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: assange, Interview, People, Politics, TED, We like, wikileaks, World

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© Gerald for davaidavai.com, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cool, Creativity, Design, Interview, visual, World

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