My name is Omar Rodriguez. I'm a marketing technologist, fan of agile, coder, traveler, and art fanatic.

Some wise words from OK Go frontman, that can be applied to everything from music videos to web development.

[...] don’t let your budget or your technology be the defining parameters of your ideas or your work. It doesn’t matter how great your idea is if you can’t execute it well, so define your creative boundaries more narrowly than your logistical ones: make the creative rules tighter than the financial reality, not the other way around. Then you’ll have all the resources you need to do that particular project well and people will see the work, not its failings. ~Damian Kulash

Content creators are in the best position for delivering engaging content. Brands want that. Agencies sell what brands want. Hence this idea.

This is the same concept behind Netflix “House of Cards” tv show. Pure marketing. It is intended to strengethn the relationshipt with the customers by adding value. It is doing advertising by the book.

It begs the question: Why shouldn’t publishers become the new agencies? After all, publishers know how to use content to capture a web audience far better than agencies do. They already own an audience and they know what resonates. —Publishers Poised to Become the New Agencies

A view from the designing side on how much better the creation process can be when designers know how things are build. The more cross disciplinal knowledge there is, the smarter the dialog and the better the end product.

An interface isn’t just a series of static screens pasted together. It’s a flow, with inputs and outputs. You can’t truly evaluate an interface until you can use it, and you can’t use it until you build it. Anything less than the real thing is a fuzzy approximation. —Learning Rails made me a better designer

Part of the goal of Agile Marketing is to analyze performance and track actual customer behavior (vs. untested hypotheses). As this article suggests, Advertising needs to shift its focus from the brand towards the consumer. Scary, though, because marketers are not used to loosing control and not being the single author of the message is really new to brand owners.

Typically, brands tell stories about themselves. In the shift to a newsroom model, we’ll ask “what will our user be interested in?” And then we’ll check that expectation with evidence: in a modern newsroom, data circulates continuously about the relative performance of each unit of content produced, from tweets to text-based stories, to images and video served — and future editorial content decisions reflect consumers’ response to previous content. —Advertisers Should Act More Like Newsrooms

David Armano explains how tv and print still rule the media budgets and how the advertising reinvention needs to come from content strategies.

[Advertising] now needs to create content designed for instigating second and third screen behaviors (like sharing). It needs to apply “journalism” sensibilities to the advertising machine so that a regular drumbeat of content and engagement can act as a foundation which supports the burst of campaign activities. —It’s Time to Re-Invent Advertising

The traditional vs digital conflict might not be the key to solve the future of marketing, but rather a distraction. Sometimes finding the right answer is about finding the right question to ask. What is exactly wrong with Advertising?

An open letter to the Ad world with a lucid message for reinventing the business. We need more critical voices and a vision for the industry that marries ideas, creativity, technology and —gasp!— results.

I love a great commercial as much the next person and am in awe of the creative and strategic minds that create them, but modern marketing success requires a whole lot more than great ads. It demands that we think and act more like inventors. That we’re capable of creating new products, constantly experimenting with new ideas, technologies, content formats, and are more prolific. This requires significant but not insurmountable cultural and organizational change. —Advertisers Must Be Inventors

The longer it takes us to adapt the larger the effort needed to meet the new demands.

Data seems to indicate that more and more people are pulling away from online activities to protect their privacy. I understand the concerns that drive this behavior but we don’t need to lock away our content/lives to secure our rights.

Privacy by obfuscation might not be an option as robots become increasingly powerful, but there’s much to gain from the wisdom of the crowds. Wisdom that will disappear if we all become over protective of our data.

[...] A new study by market researcher Ovum indicates that millions of people could start “vanishing” from the Web within a few years, causing major disruptions to the Internet economy. The reason so many people may go data dark? Privacy concerns. —Online Privacy: The Opt-Out Revolution Is Almost Here

Shaun Varga discusses the disappearance of the word ‘advertising’ from the agency vernacular. I would agree that (A) the stigma of advertising is becoming too unbearable and (B) we —as an industry— have realized that we must evolve and are now in the process of doing so.

Then you have the advertising agencies… if you can find one, any more. Have you noticed that the word ‘advertising’ is hardly ever heard nowadays in the halls of our former advertising agency greats? Not heard, and indeed rarely read in the pages of their websites. Advertising has been redacted. Instead we learn that these agencies are, in fact, ‘multi-disciplinary ideas companies’; or ‘media-agnostic, brand building business partners’. I kid you not. —Why Advertising Agencies no longer exist, and why it doesn’t matter.

Both Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity and Nicolelis’ ideas of human-machine symbiosis are exciting (and not mutually exclusive). However, for Nicolelis to dismiss the artificial brain because the human mind “most important features are the result of unpredictable, non-linear interactions amongst billions of cells”, it’s just an easy and unsatisfactory copout. It has no scientific basis but the old “it’s too big to grasp”.

Size, we should know by now, is not an unresolvable problem.

You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.” —The Brain is Not Computable

Nicolelis mixing apples and oranges.