Escape Secret Santa Unscathed (too much?)

My favorite holiday tradition from last year was the Secret Santa party at my part-time job. Unwanted gifts fly around like emails and the everybody's inner-Brando gets coaxed to the surface. I guess it's like any Secret Santa party. Only at my job, half of the attendees aren't actually present. They're on the other end of a video conference. All expressions of faux-gratitude are amplified for the camera, exaggerated like it's car give away time on Oprah.

This year, I'm going to follow the advice of this article on wired.com.

And I'm going to add one suggestion. If you happen to be so lucky as to have a Secret Santa who recently acquired the new Radiohead album, there's a 68% chance he or she paid nothing. So go ahead and send a $25 check to Thom Yorke. Thom gets the cash, your coworker gets a clear conscience. Everybody wins.

"Ahhhhhhhhhh." That Was a Heavenly Chant, if You Didn't Notice.

Airplane safety video for Virgin America done by Anomaly. I love how they have made something mundane fun and enjoyable.




I love "For the .000001% of you who have never operated a seat belt..."

Guzzling the Kool-Aid.

Now it's official: Google is the coolest company ever.

"We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."

Read all about it here.

What I Remember About Alex Bogusky's Talk.

I thought it would be fun to hold off on writing about it until it had a while to soak in. You know, wait and see what sticks. Unfortunately, I was tainted a bit by Danny G's post on AdPulp yesterday. So I won't mention presenting ideas as press releases or how Bogusky and Chuck Porter shaped the agency.

What stuck out to me was the way he deals with creative block. At the Circus, we've been taught dozens of techniques for breaking through. But they're all focused on treating it as it happens. Crispins' approach is more of a preventative method.

Teams will spend some portion of their day just sort of look at each other and say things like, "I'm so fucking creative right now. You look like you're feeling creative too." They also keep loose by playing little improve games. For example, someone will walk up to someone on another team and say "Hey, I had a great idea for that project you're working on..." without having an idea. Just start the sentence and see what comes out. As for Alex, he pictures ideas and creativity just dripping off him. Coming up with ideas is no problem because they're just falling off constantly. That's a pretty cool way to think about it.

Reason to Like JWT.