Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Re-invent this blog (formerly A Creative Passionista is reborn)

I am re-inventing this blog.

I am reclaiming my own turf at the same time.

I am doing a one man project back to the future.

The smallest amounts of information (literally constrained) that are fired around the internet to nowhere in particular are obviously online ads. In all their myriad forms, they represent the millions of creative hearts, minds and hands that wake up every day to rethink how to get people what they care about, in a way they find acceptable, at the right time, and at the right place. No small challenge, and I am happy to be playing a part in taking this on again.

After a topsy-turvy career through the technology industry, all of my experiences, training and more are being brought to bear on my primary passion - advertising and design - specifically the creative aspects of advertising and design.

I have joined Yahoo! where I will be heading up the creative assembly and tools business, specifically focused on the advertising space, and how creative users can better and more easily create, manage, deploy, store, assemble, optimize and collaborate in an end-to-end process designed to replace the clunky, manual and disparate interfaces we have to use in order to create and manage award-winning creatives online.

I say award-winning because these are the creatives I ultimately care about. Flashy, gimmicky, noisy, irrelevant, poorly created advertising is the bane of the internet! But, clever, relevant, targeted and well-designed creative can actually add to the value of a surfing, or snurfing (yeah, I'm on a boring concall right now) the web.

So I'm on a mission. Go back to my roots as a creative director, designer and advertising professional - bore into this with my years of web services, xml and application platform marketing - and get it all together for some of the best creative soup we have seen in a while. Mix into the soup some really clever ideas on how user-generated content, mashups, social media and the online experience can truly begin to integrate with pure brand or direct response worlds, in ways that make sense, in ways that users really want - and I think we have a winning combination.

I may be wrong. I may fail. But if I do, the online advertising world will remain as harsh, dark and gloomy as it sometimes seems today, and eyeballs will continue to turn away in disgust and dispair, and millions of hours of personal effort by users around the internet will continue to go unnoticed and unrewarded, and the promise of the truly social and relevant internet will go unfunded and eventually only work when fully funded by unethical interests in the aggregation of personal data and information (wait, that may be happening now!).

I know - it's too much for just one man. I'm hiring...