Conventional thinking in regards to Charlie Darwin’s theory of evolution is that biological change is the cumulative result of slow, continual and incremental processes. Think of changes happening in several, barely-perceivable units.

Another change model, punctuated equilibrium, states that species exhibit little change for long periods of time (stasis) interrupted by sudden and radical clusters or bursts of change.

Punctuated equilibrium has been applied to explain how change occurs in economics, organizational behavior and politics. And while an esoteric thought, it certainly seems applicable to the advertising business right now. Technological advances are revolutionizing the way people consume information, and those tasked with creating content for consumption are having to figure out how to adapt. Profoundly and at lightning speed.

Just a thought.

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Marketing and Nerdom collide in glorious fashion this week in Austin, Texas, site of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. And because Red Square lives at the center of both worlds, we’re there.

Digital wunderkinds, Karen Sullivan and Jeff Whitlock, are on hand to absorb as much knowledge as humanly possible. They’ll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and flickr’ing the whole deal, so stay tuned. If you want to catch up with them in Austin, hit ‘em up.

Also, a small aside: We are quite humbled and excited to be on the list of finalists in the interactive awards show for our BCBS work. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

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Our digital work for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama has been selected as a finalist for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Awards. Please excuse the serious tone with which that intro sentence was written, but this is some seriously awesome recognition. SXSW is the digital/media/tech equivalent of the Super Bowl. The awards “uncover the best new digital work, from websites to web applications and beyond, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow’s online trends.” Just to be considered a part of this movement is pretty amazing.

Our “Be You” social sharing site was selected as one of five finalists in the business category. Awards are given in an assortment of categories, and notable nominees include (watch your feet—we’re droppin’ names) Groupon, The Social Network, US Census, Unilever, Jay-Z, the Pepsi Refresh Project and Conan O’Brien.

We’ll be deploying to Austin in March to absorb as much knowledge and inspiration as our brains can handle, and hopefully we’ll bring back some well-deserved hardware for our great clients at BCBS.

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Recently Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, wrote a piece in the WSJ entitled The New Rock-Star Paradigm. The article is an astute summation of the present state of the music business, specifically how the business has changed in the face of maturing digital communications. The guy isn’t your typical rock group frontman. (more…)

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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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