Dentsu NYC Blog

How’d you like to win pretty much the sweetest internship of all time?

An internship so fun that it will make a weekend in Ibiza look like an episode of Blue’s Clues.

All you have to do is answer one question. Answer it well, and you’ll earn a swivel chair of your very own right here at one of the biggest ad agencies in the world.

Answer it poorly, and you’ll have a miserable summer sleeping till noon and relaxing on the beach with your oldest friends.

Are you ready for the question?

Here it is…”What is the Matrix?” Just kidding, that’s not the question, although if you know the answer to that one you should probably keep it to yourself, lest the Matrix come after you.

The real question is…”What is your most profound digital experience?”

You can answer however you like. Maybe you broke up with your boyfriend over G-Chat. Maybe you learned Mandarin from a YouTube video. Maybe Kanye re-tweeted you. Whatever it is, post your answer in the comment section of this blog post, and if we like what we see you can come on down for a perfunctory interview. Do not censor yourself. This is advertising, not politics.

But wait — there’s more! To complete the application, you have to email us the following materials:

1)    The best Tweet you’ve ever seen

2)    The best Tweet you’ve ever written

3)    The best Facebook post you’ve ever seen

4)    The best Facebook post you’ve ever written

5)    The best YouTube video you’ve ever seen

6)    The best YouTube video you’ve ever made

7)    The best Blog post you’ve ever seen

8)    The best Blog post you’ve ever written.

9)    The best video game you’ve ever played.

Again, send us whatever you want. If your favorite YouTube video is a bunch of bunnies screaming at the top of their lungs, please, go ahead and make our day.  Answer as many as you can. Include a one-sentence rationale for each of your choices. Also, please send us your resumes so we can skim them.* Oh, also, cover letters are strictly prohibited.

Submit answers and resumes to: socialintern@dentsuamerica.com

Why You Should Want This Job:

You will…

— learn everything there is to know about social media marketing

— work in Tribeca, where everyone looks like they’re auditioning to be the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

— create content. You will tweet. You will post. You will spend all day on Facebook, just like you did in college.

— feed us grapes and fan us with giant leaves. JK.

— get paid. Not a lot, but that’s a whole lot better than nothing.

Rules

Only one of you shall be chosen. We will stop accepting applications on April 23rd. Submit answers and resumes to: socialintern@dentsuamerica.com

* Rest assured we will hire you based on your answers, not your resume.

Finally, the word is out. I’ve been holding Google’s secret for the past 4 months.

Dentsu sent me to attend the Google presentation of the work in Project Re:Brief in November at the New Museum in NYC.

I was at first impressed with the heavy hors d’oeuvres and fancy cocktails, but by the end of the presentation, it was the simple Coca-Cola that had us all really amazed. We enjoyed hearing from an impressive cast of advertising icons and some of the creative minds that originated the classic campaigns that were getting an overhaul. It’s amazing that ads were running before I was born are still quoted as normal conversation today, e.g., when I say “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, every day, after lunch.

One of the most exciting parts was seeing the World Coke vending machine in action. They had a working model in the auditorium. The speaker had someone record and send a message live. We watched the animation take off and the machine come to life with the video message we just saw recorded and an ice cold Coca-Cola. I was instantly thirsty and wanted to try it myself, sending it to everyone I know. Literally buying the world a Coke. Not bad.

It was actually amazing. To think this works around the world is pretty impressive and really touched a soft spot seeing the genuine excitement of the machine users who got to try it (watch the video here).

The concept behind the Google Re:Brief project is fantastic and can serve as an inspiration for the possibilities of any great piece of work. It was really fun to hear how the creatives of then worked with the creatives of today to make the past relevant to the world right now, despite their feelings of doubt and general feelings of out-of-the-loopedness.

These re-imagined campaigns prove that the medium is not the idea. The idea is the idea. And if it’s great, it can live anywhere, in any decade, on any device.

See Creativity Online’s write-up here

Often the reason we avoid trying new things is fear of failure. It’s the reason we don’t speak up in meetings, avoid taking on challenging projects, and don’t put forth new innovative ideas. Basically, it’s why we “go with the flow.”

Alberto Savoia, Director of Engineering and Innovation Agitator at Google Ads, has a different way of looking at failure and innovation. His thought is that the key to coming up with a successful idea, otherwise known as the right “it,” is to reach the failure stage as soon as absolutely possible if that’s where it is going to end up. Savoia has developed a series of methods for testing ideas, which are all organized under the philosophy he calls pretotyping.

While most of his methods and philosophy are focused around entrepreneurs, that same attitude towards innovation, ideation and how we treat failure can be applied to any job we do. And by taking the fear out of failing, it allows us become the people who speak up in meetings, put forth innovative ideas and challenge others to think of alternative ways of doing things.

This month, our very own EVP of Media, Scott Daly and Managing Director at STEAK, Mark Schwartz will be speaking at SES New York. Their talk focuses on best practices for how a traditional and digital media agency can partner together. Using real client data, they’ll show how a truly holistic approach to advertising yields great benefits for agencies and the clients too. Incisive Media’s SES Conference & Expo is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing. Visit SES NEW YORK for more information and how to register.

You are a robot. You stand beside a sealed door. In your hand, you hold a gun. A gun that doesn’t shoot bullets. Instead, it shoots…portals. Doorways that allow you to teleport, instantly, between two distant locations. You have to get through the sealed door. But how? When you flip that switch on the other side of the room, the door opens — but it closes by the time you can get to it. You sit and think. What if you shot a red portal on the wall next to the door, and a blue portal on the wall next to the switch? Then you could flip the switch without getting too far from the door. You try it. It works. You just beat Level 1.

Portal 2 is probably the best video game I’ve ever played. It didn’t just blow my mind. It changed my life. In case the rambling and incoherent paragraph above this one didn’t give you a good sense of the gameplay, feel free to watch this charming commercial for it: http://bit.ly/glKiuW. If that’s not enough, try this one: http://bit.ly/glKiuW. If you didn’t click either of those links, just read this: it’s a puzzle game. You use your “portal gun” to reason your way out of one sealed room and into another.

But describing what the game is doesn’t convey how it feels, and that’s the part that changed my life. In short, it makes you feel like a genius. Like a true, empirical, scientific genius — as if someone combined the brains of Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla and smushed it right into your skull. When you look around that sealed room and suddenly, it all clicks, and you know exactly how to point that laser at that mirror and refract it through those portals – you experience something transcendent.

The experience was particularly transcendent for me. I’ve been playing video games for a long time, but I’ve never bought a “puzzle game.” That’s because the left side of my brain has always been a little scrawny. High school math gave me posttraumatic stress disorder. I once asked my Dad how many quarters there were in a soccer game (which he politely pointed out was “idiotic on a number of levels.”) Needless to say, the idea of a “puzzle game” appeals to me about as much as the idea of a Phil Collins concert followed by back-to-back screenings of Notting Hill. If I ever played a game like Zelda or Resident Evil that unexpectedly had a puzzle in it, I’d just turn the controller over to my sister. She’d solve it in a matter of seconds, and then I could go back to blasting my way through the Zombie apocalypse.

Portal 2 changed all that. It wasn’t the dark humor, the voice acting, or the graphics, all of which have received extraordinary praise. It was the sense that only you could have devised that solution. Only you could have perfectly manipulated gravity, friction, and momentum to get through that sealed door. It wasn’t like other games. It wasn’t a puzzle in a world. It was world that was a puzzle.

For the first time ever, I was relishing an opportunity to flex my weakest neurological muscles. I learned to love something I’d always hated. Because I was good at it.

Moral of the story?

The best creative doesn’t make you think differently about things. It makes you think differently about you. And only one medium can really do that. We call it “digital.”

Last week Lucas Watson, Google’s VP of Sales and Marketing for YouTube kicked off our Speaker Series and spoke in the café at 360i, our downstairs neighbor. YouTube is restructuring its content and advertising platforms and Lucas Watson gave us the deets.

To compete with cable and general content providers like Hulu, YouTube must surface from its position of being a cluttered, unorganized internet junkyard and become a destination—not simply a URL you’ve ended up at.

The new plan for YouTube is to organize everything around Channels. So instead of the 300+ channels we all have, you can have 20 (or 3 or 50) that have exactly what you want. This lets the advertising become increasingly more tailored.

Google with YouTube has the awesome goal of keeping the creative behind the content in the benefit. They have a twofold goal of being 1) the best platform for artists, creators, and innovators. 2) To make an economically efficient system that pays the artists, not the middle men. Ideally paying the content creators directly to host their content.

To keep advertisers relevant, YT is introducing The TrueView approach to advertising, which allows viewers to skip an ad. If the ad is skipped before its full play, Google doesn’t pay for it. So if someone isn’t getting paid even if an ad technically runs, then what does this mean for advertising? That the creative must get better. It will cease to be an obligatory 15 or 30 seconds before your show and become something viewers can opt out of. Not unlike fastforwarding with a DVR, but with highly tailored ads, but now it’s a more personal blow.

This is of course a call to creatives, but also a call to the clients to be willing to serve the viewer. To blatantly skip the one single spot that comes before a show? You gotta make that spot shine. Or else someone doesn’t get paid, and it’s not the content creators.

But with better tailored content, it can become a worthwhile investment. Think Google ad words gone big. (Lucas assured us that it would not be in a creepy way, but in a “yay, I love that ______” kind of way.) Of course, traditional pre-roll ad space will still be offered, but knowing you can skip might lead you to watch because you can decide if you want to skip.

Interesting concept and it will be exciting to see where it goes. Here’s to making the unskipable ad!

Selah Sue graced us with her unique style and raw talent during a private concert at the agency. With just her guitar and soulful voice, Selah introduced us to her rock-meets-funk style of music. Check out her song “Raggamuffin” and more at http://www.selahsue.com/en/home.

My pupils are dilated to the point that the only thing I’m sure of as I type is that I’m filling the white page with jagged black lines. I suppose I could increase the font size but that would rob me of an unusual way to lead into this blog post. When I was at the eye doctor (not the herbal doctor if that’s where your mind went) about a half hour ago, I spotted (pun, son!) an intersection between two massive trends that are woven into some recent thinking we’ve done for two of our clients: Big Data and Convergence. Those are the two trends, not our clients.

Big Data is the bringing together of massive amounts of disparate data to find kernels of intelligence and insight, the “aha” moments.

Convergence is the wonder that is the smartphone: a mobile telephone, personal computer, camera and jukebox (and etc., etc…) all rolled into one. Or a spork.

During my visit to the eye doctor, I endured the very, very long, monotonous, repetitive test wherein one eye is patched, Jack Sparrow style, and other exposed eye is assaulted by tiny, arrhythmically timed round blue light-dots that appear for a fraction of a second at varying, unpredictable points within a concave half-sphere in the side of a hulking, vanilla colored machine (picture the Death Star after a good power-washing) into which your face is perched. Each time the light-dot appears, you’re meant to press a button on a wired clicker sort of thing. You know the machine – the one where you always blink when they tell you not to. If you haven’t, imagine the most boring yet annoying and interminable, unwinnable video game you’ve ever played, and you have a reasonable approximation of this experience.

I had a lot of time to think (with my eyes WIDE open) during this experience.

It first occurred to me that if the data from this test were analyzed by a doctor other than an ophthalmologist – say, a psychiatrist, some inferences could be made from it. Compared to others with similar eyesight, was there a decline in accuracy over the course of test? Perhaps that’s an indication of ADHD. How about excessive clicking of the button? Hmm…anxiety.

Then I realized that the grip I had on the clicker coupled with my face being pressed against several mounts in the machine could be used to extract vital signs if the machine were pimped with a heart rate monitor and non-invasive contact thermometers. And what about the fact that I spent at least 15 minutes breathing in a fairly confined area? Surely whatever microbes I emit as well as the intervals and volume of my breathing could be monitored by devices that would fit within the giant shell of this oven-sized eye-taunter. And while my eyes were being attacked, why not subject my olfactory senses to a potpourri of allergens to see what makes my nose twitch?

I was also abandoned in this curtained-off area, which made me feel like a dental patient being x-rayed (you know how the dental hygienists always leave the room before they blast you with plutonium powered polaroids). Couldn’t I smile big for a see-through camera hanging from the ceiling above the Death Star while watching for tiny blue light-dots and have my teeth checked out as well?

I figure that in those 15 minutes (ok, maybe it was 10), with a little hardware engineering coupled with clever software, you could provide meaningful information to an eye doctor, a shrink, a general practitioner, a cardiologist, an allergist and a dentist.

I’m sure if I had more space and more time I could cram a few more expensive specialty MDs into the mix.

And I really am sure that in time, things like this will exist.

Thanks to Big Data plus Convergence.

There will always be divergent specialty devices (like high quality, dedicated cameras), but as MIT professor and author, Henry Jenkins, asserts, convergence devices help us find new uses for hold technology.

Big Data plus Convergence has the potential to save a lot of time, money and maybe even lives. The only downside to Big Data plus Convergence in the case of the all-in-one Death Star Health Monitor (irony intended) is more poking and prodding per minute for patients and shorter and less frequent office visits for doctors. Maybe then they’d spend less time buying and learning expensive devices and more time thinking about their patients.

Big Data plus Convergence has massive implications for marketing, too. That’s one of the many things we’re thinking about when we talk about the triumvirate of Media, Content and Technology. That’s actually an entirely true statement, but I mostly brought this post back to what we do here at Dentsu to assure my colleagues that this blog post wasn’t a totally flight of naval-gazing self-indulgence.

It’s a special time of year when we sit around with our loved ones, eat for hours, drink too much, and yell at the tv. Yep, it’s the Superbowl of Advertising, with a few football interruptions. If you’re in the ad world, you can probably consider these 4+ hours billable time because you need to be savvy come Monday. And your sodium hangover is no excuse for not having an opinion.

What’s your favorite superbowl pastime? Is it discussing the possible conversations that happened during brainstorms and client meetings to make that terrible ad come to life? Is it hopping online to that obscure URL to “see the rest of the saga unfold!”? Is it going on facebook and inadvertently finding out who’s playing and what the score is? If not, then I have no idea what you normal, non-ad world people do.

You probably watch the game. Let me know who wins.

My advice to people just starting out in advertising – don’t do it. Unless you love the work. In which case please do it. Do it because rewriting a banner headline sounds delightful. Do it because you never fast forward through the commercials. Do it because you really, really, really want to write a fabulous mobile strategy. Do it because you have an unusually strong opinion about Helvetica. One of the great ironies of advertising is that if changing a logo by 4% causes you gastric distress, then this is probably a good occupation for you. The most successful account man in the business has been known to cry when looking at storyboards. Because he loves the work. If you do too, then join us. Advertising is for lovers.