Hooked. Alex Wipf: A Strategy of Flight.

Februar 1st, 2012 • Allgemein, Hooked, Interview
Tags: Agencies, Alex Wipf, Creativity, Hooked, Ideas, Interview, Leo Burnett, People, Strategy, Truth

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weren’t just simple tools or extensions of ourselves, but rather complex systems that makes human capacity look outdated and miniscule.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 more »

Heaven or Hell. That’s where you go when you live in Germany.

Oktober 21st, 2009 • 1 comment Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Funny, Germany, Leo Burnett, Study

It may be a little bit off topic but I found this experimental research pretty funny. My friends from Leo Burnett Frankfurt have tried to find out in which part of Germany you are most likely to go to hell. They tried to combine research data from institutions such as the Federal Police on theft and violent crimes in Germany and combined it with the concept which we call “The 7 deadly Sins”.

Red = Going to hell!
Yellow = Purgatory (Fegefeuer) at least!
Gray = Not sinning, but also not being angelic!
Green = Angelic behavior = Going to heaven!

It may look ugly and it’s not completely representative but it’s funny as hell.