Finally a reason I might buy an iPad: Flipboard. Billed as your own personalized, social magazine, it gathers all of the social web content you care about into a single, pretty slick-looking application. Here’s an overview video.

Kind of a creepy video, though. Particularly when the half-asleep hipster dude tells me that Flipboard knows who my friends are. Reminds me of this.

You can download the app here. (P.S. Thanks to the nice people at Flipboard for sending me some press pics.)

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Good advertising gets people talking. Great advertising talks back. Example: Old Spice’s “I’m on a horse” dude responds to commenters and bloggers directly on YouTube. Here, he’s got a message for celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

Pure genius.

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Great American designer and filmmaker Saul Bass once said “design is thinking made visual.” We added, “yeah, what he said.”

So when it came to our first campaign for MAX Credit Union, we took inspiration from Bass and created a series of television spots that marry kinetic type and animation. And (drumroll please) here they are: Service, Spotlight, Mattress, Loan and Climate.

Long distance high fives to our friends at Shiny Object for helping us birth these bad boys.

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We’re experimenting a lot with Facebook, from the conceptual to paid advertising. As for the latter, these placements are proving to be some of the most cost effective in our arsenal right now. The ROI is pretty incredible.

eConsultancy just posted a great article on advertising via Facebook.

We are fans. I mean, we like.

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A friend emailed me about an article entitled “Closing the Digital Frontier” in The Atlantic and wanted to get my reaction. Here’s what I wrote back:

I still believe the web is the modern day Wild Wild West; in fact, I call it that around the agency. What we’re seeing now is the adolescence of the Information Age. An equally awkward time for those who create content and those who sell it.

Here’s my take, from a media standpoint: the media (newspapers, magazines and to a much lesser extent broadcast) didn’t take the web seriously enough in its infancy. It was something “they” didn’t understand, and it was thus cast off. To be nice they called it “added value” to their offerings. Content was free, because that was fair market value for online content. Now they are trying to move to charge advertisers more and creating paid content sections for visitors.

The real problem is: how do you shift from an environment in which the content is free to one in which you charge for it?

Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google were visionary enough to understand the coming seismic shift in consumer behavior. Apple and Google have figured out how to monetize the web, and it isn’t magical–they each basically framed a conduit to corral and distribute the massive amounts of content in an orderly fashion. This creates value. If I want a song, I go to iTunes. If I want anything else, I go to Google.

The move from free to fee is going to be interesting to watch. I suppose you could call the last fifteen years or so “product sampling,” but that’s probably a stretch.

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