Orthodox Economy is an Oxymoron
I have very seldom display my thoughts outside the social media / web / marketing world lately. The sheer amount of stupidity that I have been reading lately has called for an intervention.
image credit: scriptingnews @ flickr
The world is in recession. Forget about being politically correct and trying to avoid panic by not using terms that sound "so very negative" about the economic situation. Things are screwed, not looking good and policy makers are as lost as they usually are.
I had a professor that once stated: "Economists are the only professionals who see their theories being grounded on a daily basis and still abide to their discourse". The concept proves to be right now more than ever.
According to wikitionary Orthodox means:
Adhering to whatever is traditional, customary or generally accepted.
Well, if economy was written in stone "Orthodox Economy" would make some sense as a general concept, but people would hardly make any money. But that's not the case.
Economy, as a general (and almost abstract) entity is always changing. People and companies find new ways to make and loose money on a daily basis. Markets adapt, laws change, conditions get altered. Prices rise and fall. It is a living and breathing animal.
This does not mean that crisis such as the one that's currently underway can't be foreseen; but rather that what has proven to be traditional, customary or generally accepted in the past might not be so as the world evolves.
I expect that as readers go through the previous paragraph I'll make a statement for the bailout.
Wrong.
The proposed bailout is too little, too late. The usual band-aid on a broken leg stuff. It will (if passed this Thursday) create little relief on the very short term and a big problem in the medium to long term.
Something must be done in the short term. Trust must be restored, credit must flow again. "Bailing Out" does not restore trust. Or would you trust the plane you just bailed out off?
A money injection into the financial system is just a minor thing, 700 billion can be sucked up almost overnight. But what's required is not a rescue, but a reform. Life without credit is not a nice thing, trust me. (Over Argentina mortgages have ~24% interest rates)
Over my 29 years I have witnessed 3 serious economic crises. To be honest I only have recollection of the last 2. The last time the banking system was so screwed up that the infamous "corralito" was imposed over all of us. People could not withdraw more than X amount of money per month. Things went down the drain, we had devaluation and now we live with inflation.
Things here weren't solved, just fixed enough to get going and sooner or later Argentina will be facing another economic crisis.
Final word is: timing for this crisis couldn't be worst. No politic wants to put out his head for chopping with less than a month left until the general election. But I'm afraid some serious and not-so-popular decision making must happen. And it can't wait 29 days, much less until Inauguration Day. Hopefully real leadership will surface as it has done in the past.
Unhappy advertising
Exactly the day after Industrial ticket drilled a hole in the ground the size of Portugal I head over to MarketWatch and see this:
Wachovia Ad @ MarketWatch
Guess one of their strategies would be: "get bought by larger bank"...
End of madness recap
Warning! Massive post.
As the events that happened between August 8 and August 24 start to slip to memory-land I thought it would be nice to do a recap of what we did last summer. Hope you enjoy it, or that you live long enough to read it thoroughly.
The right move at the right moment.
"Bird's Nest" Shot. Courtesy of Ogilvy 360.
Besides what our marketing statements said (that this were the first Games where athletes were allowed to blog) there are several other reasons why this made sense.
First and foremost: Amateurism. Yeah, I know, most of this guys aren't exactly amateurs in the full sense of the word, but you get the point. The same program applied to, say, the Football (soccer) world cup, wouldn't of worked as well as it did for the Olympics. Most athletes at an Olympiad are not celebrities. They might have a small degree of recognition, but the general public does not know them.
That radically changes during the Games. The public eye is in search of these people, hungry for news and stories. That is where we came in, providing content straight from the source.
The time zone difference also played a big part. Most of the action happened while the western hemisphere was sleeping or at work. This made the internet a key player.
The Right Mix.
Ogilvy 360 performed wonderfully during the recruitment phase. Voices of the Olympic Games ended up hosting 101 athlete blogs, representing 31 sports and 25 countries. Although this is a minimal sample of what goes on during the games it was, in my humble opinion, a very nice mix that portrayed their fellow athletes quite well.
Since the program was about hearing the Voices of this guys, recruitment was the key element.
I must admit that the idea of opening up and putting lenovo's brand behind people we didn't know raised some eyebrows here and there.
Now that the thing is over I'm delighted to say that what this athletes wrote about, the way they shared the good the bad and the ugly, the sheer openness and honesty did not cease to amaze me every single day during those fantastic two weeks.
They were sports heroes, now they became my personal marketing heroes.
One Idea. Endless access points.
PC at the iLounge featuring the "voices" site. Courtesy of Ogilvy 360
The idea itself was quite simple: enabling athlete blogging. After getting the right mix of athletes we needed to ensure that their words traveled far and quick.
The site and the way it was thought was just a channel, a place where feeds came in and went out to the various distribution services that orbited around the program. Simply put: athlete posts feeds were aggregated at the voices site and then redistributed as aggregated RSS feeds that powered Facebook Apps, Mobile Phone devices and anything anyone wanted to do with the outcome.
One example of this was what Mark Cahill did for Cycling.com; where he took advantage of the RSS filters we put in place to show only those posts written by Cyclists.
All of that was enabled with the help of Yahoo Pipes and quite a bit of programming on the Voices site.
Lessons learned
Too much happened over the past 9 months. Tons of ideas, reduced turnaround times, pressure, just to name a few. Here's the list of things I've learnt:
- Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters
- One must learn to focus and discard things quickly
- Anything can be done
- Outsourced stuff does not always work as it should
- Distributed content is the future
- Days can span longer than 24 hours. They can also last a lot less.
- I love chaos. I might rant, but I'd rather be underwater and crazy than doing business as usual.
- I am fortunate to work where I do and, particularly with the people I work with.
I know I left a ton of stuff out, maybe for another post. (Not likely to happen)
(Disclaimer: I have not posted results, targets adn the like because I'm sure David is going to take care of that).
Pretty useless
Yesterday I had a rather infortunate event regarding a packet sniffer and my ThinkPad's network drivers. Long storty short: upon installing a certain software the darn thing just went "kaboom" in terms of connectivity. No WiFi, no Ethernet, not even bluetooth.
After denial came action. Thank god for the Ubuntu R50 sitting around here. I went to lenovo support site and downloaded the drivers and access connections. Right then I realized I had no way to get stuff from Computer 1 to Computer 2. I have come to rely so much on using networks to get stuff around my various PCs, that I had no blank CDs (or DVDs) and no memory key at hand.
While I watched a perfectly functional but not-able-to-connect PC I thought on how much stuff has changed. When I started doing things with IBM-compatible computers (on an 086 PC that had a beautiful Orange Hercules screen that could give you a nice sun tan) one had just the stuff that coud fit the 40MB drive or that could get loaded into one or several floppy disks.
Then came dial-up. At that time I was at the university, so I had to be very careful that the cost of dialing up to the ISP would not take over my "eating budget". This didn't always work and I ended up eating just rice for a couple of weeks because the phone bill arrived inflated. I can remember going to forums, opening as many pages as I could, disconnecting, writing down all replies and stuff, reconnecting and hitting "send" all around the place.
Then came Broadband and the rest is history.
My email signature reads "I do web stuff". When I can't access the internet I feel pretty useless, I must admit.
Post-vacation, post-Olympic cleanup
Picture a bomb exploding inside your computer. Imagine that it scatters files, folders and emails all over the place. On the desktop, under various folders under that lousy micorsoft idea that is known as "My Documents", and every other corner of the hard drive. That should give you an idea of the state of (un)tidyness my ThnkPad yields.
I got to the point where I had more stuff on my desktop than my desktop was able to display. And I use small icons. And I have a 1400 x 1280 screen resolution. Finding anything had become an ordeal.
And I havent yet mentioned emails. Amidst 24 x 7 Olympic watch and way too much stuff to handle, admin and think some emails went without reply for far longer than I like. Usually I reply within the hour; while clearing stuff today I noticed some had gone without a reply for some 20-odd days. Shame on me.
So, after all the fun and exitement that the Olympics represented I'm down to the task of trying to put some sense back into my file system and email. It is similar to the day after throwing a party: you have to clean up everything. Only difference is that I get to clean my computer without a hangover.