September 2007 Archives

Yves Béhar asks this question of companies in an article in this month’s Fast Company

Béhar himself estimates that only about 1% of American companies really dig in on design, and that the rest “will be left in the dust by companies that do. Over time, they will fail to connect to consumers in a relevant way and become obsolete.”

His challenge is great, and is a challenge for all of us, marketers & advertisers included.

A great sidebar is his Seven Axioms of Design

So one of the evolutions in programming has been the development of what is known as Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses “objects” and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. It is based on several techniques, including inheritance, modularity, polymorphism, and encapsulation. It was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the early 1990s. Many modern programming languages now support OOP. Wikipedia

In general, the efficiencies and flexibility provided in both development as well as the added freedom in architecting & planning programs have lead to a new “freedom” in development.

OOP changes the way individuals and teams approach and solve problems.

This type of thinking also seems to come out when teams experienced in OOP start thinking about more open ended challenges. The style of thinking and concepting that occurs when one has a Object Oriented mindset seems fairly different than the “big idea” style taught by traditional advertising models. Not that it ignores the model of having a unifying idea, but by allowing thinking to encapsulate those objects and classes that define the experience rather than just focusing upon how the idea is pushed into various platforms the potential for value to the user/consumer is significantly higher.

This brings me to the reason for switching to Object Oriented Concepting as a creative model. Communications without value are useless.

Check out Hondamentalism....
One of the motorhead games:

More here: www.honda.co.uk/hondamentalism/challenge

So recently, Quechup, yet another social network, made what appears to be a rather large mistake. They sent out invites to entire contact lists of their users, with invites to join that appeared to be coming straight from the user.