Visited Sardinia for work. Beautiful, sunny place with a climate and landscape pretty similar to that of the coast of Sonora in spring (heresy, you’ll say).
It had been a while since I had been to Italy, which was the first country I visited in Europe back in the summer of 1997. Funny how I see certain bits of their behaviour with Finnish eyes now, even if I still speak something resembling Italian and can communicate with them.
I attended #n2hub last week and was originally planning to post my notes, but noticed the full presentations are now available online for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy:
Posted in in english, suomeksi
Tagged in english, marketing, social media, web2.0, work
Six years ago I worked on a project very closely with my Portuguese colleagues and was impressed by their mix of Iberian flair and European pragmatism. That project also took me to Lisbon for the second time (the first was interrailing back in the day) to one of my favourite cities in the world. It had been a while but work again took me to Portugal, and again it was an experience.
One of those things that always make me wonder is how in this day and age, we can work very closely with people we don’t meet in real life. We can learn to know them, and share a lot of experiences together without being in the same place or knowing how they look. Then, when we finally meet them, we realise we already knew them.
One of the best aspects of attending industry events is the opportunity to exchange points of view with other participants. This was brought home during the last panel I watched at SIME, where some of us in the audience didn’t necessarily agree with the panelists in one small point.
Don’t get me wrong: great creative is fundamental to a well-run campaign. However, as a former sales guy I’m a little tired of the intense focus we have as marketeers on the creative and winning awards. Cannes Lions are a beautiful thing and definitely don’t do you any harm as a brand or an agency, but when evaluating a marketing activity I’m more interested in understanding four aspects:
As mentioned, I was not the only attendee thinking about these topics after hearing the panel, and we had an interesting chat later on. Funnily enough I found a very relevant presentation of his on this topic below:
Posted in in english
Tagged advertising, business, marketing, social media, web2.0, work
Warning: this is quite a long post about marketing. If you’re interested, get a big cup of coffee and a comfortable seat
I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Scandinavian Interactive Media Event, SIME Helsinki for short. You can follow the real-time notes of the attendees in Twitter.While there was no streaming of it, I did take quite a few notes I’ll share with you below.
Because we’re from Finland, we’re so good at branding and marketing.
.Posted in in english
Tagged advertising, business, marketing, social media, web2.0, work
One of the first pictures I took with the Nokia N8
Was in Istanbul, Kayseri & Ankara to see through the project that has brought me to Turkey. Since we were over a week here we had some time to see some of the sights, which was more than welcome. A big thanks to my colleagues and business partners for making the project a success and the stay enjoyable.
Istanbul at night
Mosque in Nisantasi. Notice the minaret is in the style of a classical Greek column.
Dusk over Istanbul
Dervishes at the FIBA Turkey 2010 World Championship opening ceremony.
Another night over Istanbul
The only problem I encountered during the trip was that I had to wake up extremely early to catch connecting flights. This sunrise was taken at Istanbul Ataturk airport.
There's all kinds of things happening in Turkey this year.
Capadocia panorama
Interesting rock formations in Capadocia
Ivorian fans at the World Basketball Championship
These basketball figurines were placed all over Ankara
I was going to write a review of this Alain de Botton book whose theme is why and when work is meaningful (answer: when it creates delight or reduces suffering in others), but obviously somebody else had made a better job of it.
Somehow I found this ode to how important and significant jobs which we wouldn’t otherwise notice such as power transmission engineering or fishing and food logistics strangely uplifting for a simple reason: I can fully identify with the drive to create delight in others through the results of my efforts.
We end up coming back to the same thing: maybe empathy is what makes us human?
Chances are if you were born after1980 like countless others (including yours truly) you are marveled, intrigued and annoyed by the way older people see you, your habits and your value systems. You understand (but don’t always sympathize with) the way your elders understand technology and the web… or don’t. You are used to have the TV on at the same time as your music player while you read a book, browse the web and have friends coming over. For you video games are as much a social experience as a way to relax and pass away time, and there is no way you would look at them as “The Big Satan”. If you’re already working, you might have a hard time adjusting to hierarchies, but are a diligent team worker and require honesty from the company that employs you.
If you want to get a broader perspective of why these characteristics set you apart from your elder peers, or if on the other hand you are looking inside these brats’ fenced garden see how it all came to this this is the book you want to read.