Hey Alex… 2.23.09

Hey Alex… What spawned your fascination with P.T. Barnum?

Hey Alex… 1.28.09

Alex, as always, feel free to post in the comment section, or just email me and I’ll post it as a response. Thanks bud.

Hey Alex… Everyone has an ego (especially creatives), but what balance of ego and humility is needed to foster the creation of great advertising?

When Five Feet is a World Away

As I’m writing this, my roommate sits five feet away typing away on his computer. What ever happened to human-to-human interaction?

There are lots of reasons why the virtual world can be more alluring. I’m not going to run into Alex at the local Piggly Wiggly, but I can contact him here. I can’t talk to anyone in Des Moines about Michigan football. But I can go to MGoBlog anytime I want and interact with hundreds of die-hard Maize and Blue fans from across the country. With chat and email, I can talk to friends across the globe who would otherwise be, well, half way across the globe and impossible to communicate with. It’s powerful. The virtual world takes location out of the equation.

But what about when the virtual world doesn’t meet your needs? When we all crave real life, human-to-human interaction? Well… often times everyone else is still in their virtual world. It’s an odd conundrum. You are right next to so many people, but yet don’t even interact with them, never mind connect. And nothing can replace sharing a moment with someone face to face.

For capturing this sentiment, I love this Coke Avatar spot. Perhaps I’ll remember this the next time I get a text during dinner and ignore everyone around me. Or as I blog about a commercial while my roommate sits five feet away watching Youtube.

Guest Writer: Alex Bogusky

From Alex Bogusky.

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Matt,

Found your answers in my overly aggressive spam filter. Sorry about that.

You had asked about what get’s me excited. I think I get most excited about the little things. The everyday things. When I was first in the business I really focused on awards. It was my sense that they would somehow change things for me but eventually I noticed that no matter how “big” the award was I woke up the next morning and my life was the same. What I did was the same. All of us get so caught up in the next award or the next meeting that we don’t notice that life is all the stuff in between. But when I did finally realize that the “goal” moments are so fleeting and non transformative I was able to learn to love all the stuff in between. I learned to love the struggle to think of something. The process of sitting there thinking of one bad idea after another. I love it. Of staring into the face of somebody as confused as you are. This is the stuff that matters and if you can learn to love it then you favorite moments stop being the “big” things and they start to be the thousands of little things that happen every day. Today was nothing very unique. But it makes me smile just to think about it.

It’s critical to define success on your own terms early on. Right now CPB enjoys a kind of success that fits the definition that a lot of people have. But I felt like I was successful a long time before many people had heard of us. Because my definition was getting paid to do something I enjoyed. That’s it. No more or less and the first time somebody ever congratulated me on my success I was almost taken aback and almost offended. In my mind I thought, “how dare you suggest that I wasn’t already successful? I’ll have you know I have been paid to do something I love for several years now!” I still refuse to use any other definition of success.

I’m excited about this too. bcycle.com

Peace,
Alex

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Thanks for post Alex. I look forward to more. -Matt