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This morning I thought I would stretch my weary creative soul and attempt to make beautiful what I’ve always felt was a bit ugly. I grew up in northern Indiana, where lots of snow in the winter is still pretty common, so I love snow and what it does to a landscape. However, the part of lots of snow that always got a little ugly was when the roads were salted and cars started driving over them, defiling the pristine blanket and turning it into a ruddy, grey, and sloppy urban slosh-fest.

So here you are…part abstract art, part creative exercise. And I still love snow!

Here’s an interesting thought for all of you career-minded folks out there: if you went back in time as your current self and was able to meet your self at 9 years old, what would your younger self think of your current self?

I recently read an article in this month’s Popular Photography that said a key to creativity is “unleashing your inner 9-year-old”. In other words, allowing your unrestricted creative side to take center stage, ignoring aspects of practicality and the limitations of your current camera technology.

It made me wonder, “Would my 9-year-old self think my current self is cool?” And also, “Is this even remotely important to the world of advertising and interactive media?”

I’ll address the latter first: business of any kind without creativity is dead. And I’m not just talking about artistic creativity here, but creativity with finances (within legal limits), HR, infrastructure, sales, project management, IT, etc., is all critical to a properly functioning business. As a former project manager, I can often let my obsession with proper details ruthlessly crush the big idea of a dreamer, simply because the idea at the time seems impractical. But I digress. Indeed, we need to be at least as creative as a 9-year-old in order to be successful.

Now, the former: would my 9-year-old self think my current self is cool? After much debate, I think little Andy sure would, at least for the most part. The reason I can be confident about this is that I’ve been blessed to do now what I’ve always thought I’d do: have a career in advertising and in sales. So on the job front I think I’d think I was pretty cool (follow that?). Sure, my job isn’t as cool as GI Joe’s, but I wasn’t really allowed to have many of those anyway (thanks Mom).

Plus, I’ve done quite a few things to keep my 9-year-old dreams alive. Through luck, I was able to marry a wonderful woman who grew up in Kenya, and thus in 2005 I was able to drive in the African bush in a Land Rover, one of my childhood fantasies. I’ve also purchased several large kites, and thus fulfilled my childhood dream of regularly being dragged across the ground by a giant kite. I have a son, some incredible friends, and I get to do crazy stuff like stand in a freezing waterfall in January with my best friends pointing and laughing. I feel like these things would be cool to my 9-year-old self, because although I’m constantly creating new goals and priorities, I still come back to wanting to do something crazy every now and then. I think the day that stops is the day I stop being creative.

That doesn’t mean that I’m never constrained by the harsh realities of life; far from it. But I think my 9-year-old self would understand that in order to buy a new bike, you have to mow the neighbor’s lawn to make some coin. I just want to keep some dreams alive and parts of life ridiculously fun.

What things do you do to keep your inner 9-year-old satisfied?

…we just got an offer on our house! Sure, you tell yourself, “this happens everyday”. And it does. But you see, my wife and I are victims of the mortgage crisis. No, we didn’t take a ridiculous ARM that got hyper-inflated and then we had to foreclose; instead, we got a great rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage, bought a house we could afford within our budget, and were very responsible with payments, maintenance, etc.

However, we decided to move after only being in the house for a little over a year, and right as we moved (in March of 2007), the bottom of the housing market fell out where we were living. We listed the house on March 1, 2007, and from March until July or so we got about a dozen showings. From July 07 to December 07 we had only 2 showings. So an offer is a very big deal to us.

We’ve been shelling out mortgage and rent payments now for over 10 months, and although we’ve never been wanting for anything, it has been very frustrating. What a relief to know that the end may be near.

So, the next time you’re thinking about being fiscally irresponsible, or that mortgage fraud is a victimless crime, think of us. Every bankruptcy by an irresponsible person is paid for by responsible people, just like bogus healthcare claims are paid for by responsible people.

That being said, I can’t help but be a bit cynical at the idea of the federal government sending checks to everyone in the country as a reward for being irresponsible, but hey, that’s probably because I’m not in the government. And that’s probably because I don’t have any MySpace friends.

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. I’ll let everyone know how this turns out.

Advertisers can get such a bad rap in the name of trying to better the world, can’t we? A recent CNN article details some innovative (and presumably cost-effective) new ad placement technologies that Microsoft is developing for online applications. Of course, because it has to do with advertising and with Microsoft, all new technology must be “scary”.

What they are talking about actually sounded really cool to me. Check out this excerpt regarding the new role of advertising in streaming video going forward:

Microsoft — along with Google Inc. and other competitors — is also hard at work on new ways for companies to advertise their brands to Web surfers watching video clips.

One crunched a clip, looking for the most appropriate stretch of time and spot on the screen for an advertiser’s “bug,” or logo. For example, if a car company wanted to show its logo for 10 seconds in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen, the computer program would find the 10 seconds in which the logo interferes least with the action in the video.

Another used speech recognition to make a transcript of a video, then served up ads — in the demonstration, they were text links — alongside the video. As the topics discussed on screen changed, so did the ads.

The third program scanned a video for surfaces where ads or product images could be inserted later. The demo showed how the same frames could display a Coke ad one moment and a Pepsi ad the next, without having to reshoot the video.

This isn’t scary to me…it’s exciting for a couple of reasons. First, inserting bugs or other visual content into videos is already highly annoying, so any technology that reduces how obtrusive those elements are is great with me. Second, we’re all looking for ads to be more relevant to us – both advertisers and consumers. Most people are at best disinterested in an ad that is irrelevant to them, at worst they are downright offended. I remember watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs” online at Discovery.com, and every single online ad was for a “regenerating facemask”cream that I had absolutely no use for (this did, however, confirm for me that there must be a lot of middle-aged women watching Dirty Jobs, or there was a totally inept media buyer for the facemask company.).

How much better would your media consumption experience be if it were personalized to you? Every other aspect of consumerism is heading this direction, and with good reason, because we’re all unique as people. Ads finally catching up with this isn’t “scary smart” to me, it’s refreshing.

Debuting during the Super Bowl (and what a Super Bowl it was!), Coke’s new ads got my ad-sensibilities as tingly as Mitt Romney in a Utah primary. Gone were the ridiculous, “soft branding” tactics of bubbly music and roller-skating hotties, and in were a couple of ads that really get to the heart of who Coca-Cola undeniably represents worldwide today: America, and her uncanny ability to be the melting pot of the world.The spot with Democrat James Carville and former Senator Bill Frist is definitely my favorite. What other soft drink brand could make the claim to bring disparate people together and not be totally laughed at? Sure, Pepsi tastes better, but globally the world revolves around Coke. Overall, I was disappointed with the rest of the Super Bowl ads. Sure, it’s easy to be critical when my client’s $2.7 Million isn’t on the table, but I was pretty shocked at the overall mediocrity of the ads. Most disappointing to me (besides the horrific salesgenie.com ads) was the fact that several companies tried to bank on the success of a previous idea rather than coming up with something original. During the Bowl, I spotted the following:

• Audi R8 – parody of The Godfather “horse head” scene
• Budweiser – gratuitous use of the Rocky theme song
• Bud Light – “Breathing Fire” spot is a direct rip-off from the DQ and Taco Bell “breathing fire” commercials
• Diet Pepsi Max – ripoff of Saturday Night Live “Night at the Roxbury” sketch
• Life Water – ripoff of Thriller, with a dancing girl

I use the term “ripoff” and “parody” loosely, just to conserve words. What I’m talking about is using an existing, popular idea instead of a new idea in order to sell your product. Sure, it’s great to make your ad buck go the extra mile in today’s congested, information-laden airwaves, but using iconic, if not the classiest, entertainment parodies to promote your brand doesn’t seem that valuable to me. It was also unusual that only a couple of advertisers decided to push a website along with their ad (Tide and Doriotos).

Either way, even though USA Today would disagree with me, I think Coca-Cola won the day. And I’m pretty non-biased because I only drink a soft drink about once a month, and it’s usually a Pepsi product =).