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This blog is dead.

This blog will remain public, but will no longer be updated.* 

Follow me at williac.tumblr.com for the same kind of content you've been getting here mixed with my photos, pop culture, etc. etc. 

UPDATE: Follow me at FuckYeahOhio.com (Tumblr) for Ohio awesomeness.

*I've been separating my professional interests from my personal for a long time now, but I don't have time or interest to maintain three separate blogs, so this one has to go. R.I.P. Brandcomments.com (formerly manage.tumblr.com).

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Multitaskers experience emotional benefits despite decreased productivity, according to study

Hey, maybe you’re not more productive, but at least you’ll feel like it.

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Our world is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and more and more about the networks that help connect these pieces. The total stock of information used in these ecosystems exceeds the capacity of single organizations because doubling the size of huge organizations does not double the capacity of that organization to hold knowledge and put it into productive use. In a world in which implementing the next generation of ideas will increasingly require pulling resources from different organizations, barriers to collaboration will be a crucial constraint limiting the development of firms. Agility, context, and a strong network are becoming the survival traits where assets, control, and power used to rule.

Joi (via brycedotvc)

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Improving poor taste in upper leadership is almost as difficult as treating severe paranoia: people who don’t value taste and design will rarely recognize these shortcomings or seek to improve them. With very few exceptions, companies that put out tasteless, poorly designed products will usually never change course.

Marco Arment - Time and taste – Marco.org

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In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates. And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.

David Lowery - Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? -Full Post | The Trichordist

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If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones – quite the opposite, in fact.

Michael Abrash - Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing | Valve

(via Kottke)

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But here’s the truth: most companies can’t innovate because everyone is paid to maintain the status quo. This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.

If your employees are stretched to the point that they never get to be creative or dabble outside their typical day-to-day, you risk not only losing a valuable player, but also falling behind in business.

Stop Blabbing About Innovation And Start Actually Doing It | Fast Company

(via amexopenforum)

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Disruptions: Innovations Like Instagram Are Tough for Large Companies - NYTimes.com

File Under: Required Reading

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Click through for more beautifully illustrated David Ogilvy quotes.

Replace every "motivational" business poster with one of these. 

Company of giants, muhfcka! (via WAY OF THE DAVID on the Behance Network)

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It's all too easy in our society to mock a person who forms brand relationships. Many charge that brand connections are dysfunctional in that they promote materialism, self-indulgence, and selfishness; and that consumers who engage in them are illogical, irrational, misguided and misinformed. This critique denies the very culture in which we live. Ours is a culture that is very much defined by consumption. In the U.S., the number one export is branded merchandise, both in the form of products and celebrities. We can critique this and lament the consequences, or we can embrace it and understand it for what it is.

Susan Fournier - This Is Why You Fall in Love With Brands - Hans Villarica - Business - The Atlantic

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The Oatmeal is spot-on, with a mix of outrageous humor and sincere advice, in this comic.

The Oatmeal created our new auto-response.

(via How to get more likes on Facebook - The Oatmeal )

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Facebook is a corporation with a database in which they would like to record every act that every person makes, annotated with the place and time, and another database that lists every social relationship each person has. They are persuading people to do this by being the world’s second virtual society, the first being the internet itself, the difference with Facebook being that everything in the society is recorded in a form that makes cross-indexing simple.

Webb (via brycedotvc)

The same thing applies to Google+, but Facebook is miles ahead.

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I wonder what it'd take to get one installed here. 

Marketing Campaign of the Day: A bicyclist in a sleepy Belgian town couldn’t resist when a giant red button caught his attention — it was just asking to be pushed. The dramatic fallout became TNT’s new ad spot in the country.

[reddit]

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If you're a creative, make the time to watch this video. These 52 minutes are worth it... and they're funny. 

Draplin is possibly my favorite working designer. He has all the right influences and it shows. 

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Listen to me: If you want to be terrific, don’t take the advice of all those assholes who don’t know shit. You gotta not only do great work, you gotta be a good person. And in order to do innovative, exciting, dramatic work that is unusual — in any field — you have to be courageous. When I did those Esquire covers that are in the Museum of Modern Art, I didn’t need the courage to do the work. I did these very iconic covers that were shocking, but I didn’t need balls. The editor needed balls to say, “Hey, Lois knows what he’s doing. I love his covers.” I’m saying, use your head. Think things through. You gotta be proud of yourself. You gotta believe in something. You can’t live a bullshit life.

The OG of advertising, George Lois, pulls no punches  (via flavorpill)

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This meets expectations a little better than the original video. Google is, after all, primarily an advertising company. 

That said, I want these... bad. I'm just not sure I want Google hitching a ride as I walk down the street.

ADmented Reality - Google Glasses Remixed with Google Ads (by rebelliouspixels) via A Remix of Google's Project Glass Video—Now With Ads - The Atlantic

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It's almost 2:30 AM and I have a sudden urge to buy some Method, because at 2:30 AM creepy + funny = good. 

A Method to their adness.

Remember creeper bubbles? Method returns with something that feels part Skittles WTF and part Fruit of the Loom’s self-effacing earnestness. Oh, and the people against dirty you need a cleaning anthem. Ya get it, ya got it, ya like it, GOOD!