I had such a schadenfreude experience reading Christopher Chabris’ review of Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. Not only does he demolish the research and scholarship of Lehrer’s work, but like any good scathing book review, it’s well-written and tight in its criticisms.

Outside of this initial, I was struck by how much of what Chabris excerpts is really not about imagination or creativity, but instead simply about serendipity. Consider the first anecdote pulled out from Lehrer’s book, where Chabris notes the serendipity element:

Have you ever wondered how Nike came by its famous slogan “Just Do It”?” Neither have I, but it’s an interesting story. Dan Wieden was searching for a tag line to unify a series of ads his agency was making for Nike. Late one night he suddenly thought about the convicted murderer Gary Gil­more, whose last words before his execution were “Let’s do it.” Sitting at his desk Wieden turned that phrase over in his mind until it became “Just do it.” Accolades ensued.

Reflecting later, Wieden realized he’d thought of Gilmore because someone at work had mentioned Norman Mailer recently, and Wieden knew that Mailer had written a book about Gilmore. Without that serendipitous chain of associations, Nike might have wound up with a different slogan: “A sneaker is forever”? “Got kicks”?

First of all, I had no idea that Nike’s iconic motto was derived from the last word’s of a convicted murderer. You can call this a novel source of creativity but the reality is, it’s an unlikely coincidence and connection which fostered this from Gilmore (murderer) to Mailer (biographer) to colleague (of Wieden’s) to Wieden himself (at his desk).

After reading this, I was enthralled by this fascinating snippet about how Pixar nearly deleted Toy Story 2:

 (video share via Kottke)

My takeaway from this video — besides not to neglect the power of rm* in Unix-based systems —  is the serendipity of how the film was saved. You can thank then-new-mom Galyn Sussman who was supervising technical producer on the film. In order to work from home with her new baby, she was taking home large chunks of the film each day to review from her computer there. It’s a crazy story and it’s a great story since years of lost work were recovered.

Both of these examples make me reflect on how much of life really is luck and serendipity. Wieden certainly was creative by relating the disparate threads in his life (Gilmore’s comment back to his client, Nike, via Norman Mailer). But he was the beneficiary of good luck to have heard those things in the first place.

The Pixar team did what they could to arrest the data deletion in progress (eventually unplugging the machine entirely) but they were saved not by their ingenuity but by the luck and serendipity of a member of their team doing an inadvertent file backup.

Except for the last one, these aren’t campaigns that I have run myself but the below examples have come across my desk in the last few weeks and I wanted to share what I think are very cool creative concepts. These are international, across three verticals and have a mix of paid and un-paid media involved.

Here are three four (see update below) great creative executions on Twitter…creative directors and media folks alike, take note!

• smart car (Mercedes-Benz) Argentina made great use of three Twitter components to create a “video” composed of 140-character tweets. First, they took advantage of their Twitter Enhanced Profile Page. Second, they leveraged the fact that Twitter allows for helpful keyboard shortcuts to navigate the site. Third, they used infinite scrolling for Tweets to their advantage. The result is an experience reminiscent of a flip book. The animation moves down the screen of smart car’s Twitter profile page instead of through the pages of a flip book but the users can speed up or slow down the “video” by holding down or tapping less quickly on the j and k buttons to scroll through the tweets.

• Volkswagen Brasil in 2011 sponsored the Planeta Terra Festival (a big music festival in São Paulo). They had free tickets to give away and wanted to reward the biggest fans while also spreading the news about their newest car in the market, the Fox. They did this by turning the ticket experience into a scavenger hunt IRL. They dropped tickets in hidden locations throughout the city and then created a site with Google Maps’ locations of the tickets. With every tweet of the hashtag #foxatplanetaterra, the zoom on the map magnified and closed in on the location of the tickets. This was a great way to generate earned media and buzz while also creating a very compelling visual experience in a Mission Impossible or James Bond-esque map homing in on the locations.

•  O2 in the UK ran a cool campaign around the hashtag #myprioritymoment. O2 bought the Promoted Trend media placement which gave them the top spot on the list of Trending Topics in the UK for a full 24-hour period. The #myprioritymoment link took users to a Twitter search page where they were presented with a tweet offering up a hypothetical situation and a choice of two actions. When a user clicked on one of the actions (expressed in a clickable hashtag), they would see additional Tweets from O2 leading to more questions in a choose-your-own-adventure story.

• Kraft Mac N Cheese ran a fun Valentine’s Day campaign this year featuring Ted Williams, the man with the golden voice. Users would tweet their Valentine’s Day message for their sweetheart and append the hashtag #VoiceofLove and then Ted and Kraft would record a short :30s Valentine’s Day video with the user’s tweeted message. In all, they created nearly 300 of these videos — you can see all of them assembled on their YouTube here.

Update: Added in Kraft Mac N Cheese at the end so there are now four great examples shared here!

My birthday was this past weekend on 4/7 (woot!). I am always appreciative of those who wish me a happy bday and nowadays there are a number of ways to do this:

1. In-person wishes
2. Phone call/physical card
3. Text/email
4. Facebook/Twitter

What is interesting to me is how the Facebook experience in particular has for so long been rooted around birthdays. That and the poke. As a result, I’ve graphed the number of Wall posts I’ve received on my birthday (plus a day or two buffer) to wish me a happy bday.

’07-’08 are above the mean — the red horizontal line — and ’10-’12 are below it. In fact, the first two years of data (’07-’08) are overall nearly 20% higher than the last two years (’11-’12). Less love for me or did Facebook do something to de-emphasize the engagement on birthdays from a design or EdgeRank perspective? 

Add to this the fact that my total number of Facebook friends has grown by  56% from ’07-’12 so the percentage of friends posting is actually 50% lower.

Here you see the same dip in 2009 when viewed as a percentage of friends and then the slight “recovery” which still puts it at well less than the pre-’09 era.

This is just my data but I would love to see what others think about this. It’s very possible that it’s due to my decreased engagement with Facebook and therefore the site favoring me less, or friends posting less often since I do not engage back as much as I used to.

Why does the New York Times have different sharing options for wire stories compared to stories written by Times staffers?

Look at the differences on these articles and the sharing section in each (highlighting boxes are mine):

 Here’s another set of articles, the one on the left from Reuters and the one on the right by New York Times writer Mark Landler:

 Two different sections of the Times with the only different element being Reuters/AP vs. staff post.

Very clearly, the social box on the NYTimes articles proper encourages sharing to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and leaving a comment while the equivalent space for the wire stories allows for only email, sending to phone and printing.

In both cases, you can of course share the article via direct link on the social platform of your choice but doing is not encouraged.

I’ve put in a call to the New York Times main line and received no response on this but if anyone has any idea why this is true, I’m curious!

Identity and the Web is a big thing these days. People talk about it a lot.

Wrapped up in identity’s importance is the question of how we tie a public, digital persona back to a living, breathing human.

So along comes a New York Times piece about teens sharing passwords with each other as a sign of trust in their burgeoning relationships. This may seem only relevant to “spurned boyfriend [...] trying to humiliate an ex-girlfriend” in junior high school but it makes sense more generally. When so much of your individual equity is tied to your digital identity, one big sign of trust is sharing that identity.

I started to wonder, “Do grownups* do the same thing?” How might our digital password sharing mimic our real-world trust dependencies?

I assert that what’s important in a Web-connected conception of trust is: reliability, access and facility/ease.

Examples with three of the Web’s bigger players:

1. Google – When I first set-up Google 2-step verification, I sent my backup codes to the people closest to me. Coupled with my password, these codes are necessary for every device/browser session I want to log into with my Google Account. The point is not just about trusting these friends and family member. It’s about trust but also reliability that these friends will be able to locate and communicate to me one backup code when I need it most.
2. Facebook – Facebook now lets you recover a hacked account with the help of your friends. Facebook describes it as: “Giving a house key to your friends when you go on vacation.” Facebook’s implementation requires not only that your friends be true but also that they be available to access Facebook on their own to verify your identity for you.
3. Twitter – There is an anecdote we take to customer meetings as a sales team at Twitter: All the celebrities who have a social media presence — YouTube Channel, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter Profile — give their credentials to YouTube or Facebook to their agent or their PR firm. But they refuse to give their Twitter handle access. (People attribute this to Twitter’s mobile emphasis and because it is easy to take Twitter with them on their phone. It’s the easiest way to post a quick picture from backstage or before the game begins, etc.).

Identity and identity-sharing or identity-trust most go hand-in-hand. If you can supply a reliable, accessible and easy way to share identities then the “trust” is no different from the way it manifests itself for objects in the physical world.

*I firmly believe you’re not an adult until you stop saying “grownup.”

Want to know what areas in NYC are Scrooges this Christmas? Visual.ly analyzed more than 3.5M orders on Seamless.com and looked at three things: 1) cuisine ordered 2) tip size 3) neighborhood.

From this, they were able to determine popularity of cuisines and average tip percentages by region of NYC (data includes Manhattan districts plus Brooklyn and Queens).

For example, below is popularity of Chinese food. It’s most popular (on a relative basis) in UWS, Midtown West and Murray Hill — where it makes up 7% of all orders.

But it’s in Queens where people are most generous with Chinese food (again, on a relative basis). The average tip on Chinese food there is 16.28% of the bill compared 11.56% for all cuisines in that borough.

You can dissect this data in a number of fun ways; the Visual.ly team did a great job making this user-friendly). You can also, I’m sure, poke some holes in the findings and talk about variables unaccounted for, etc.

Even so, it’s fun to play with. Amanda Erickson of Atlantic Cities pulled out a fun tidbit:

Wall Street, it turns out, has the worst tippers in Manhattan, averaging just 12.31 percent per meal. Their neighbors in the West Village pay the most – an average of 14.24 percent.

I’ve been following the “Marxian Drama” with Michael Arrington outlining labor and time spent working in a hard-core start-up environment like the Bay Area. While I haven’t lived in the Bay Area for a few years now, I’ve identified what I believe is a key way to figure out if you’re in one boat or another of job happiness.

How do you know where you fall on the spectrum? From language.

Pretend you’re at a party. Or meeting someone for the first time. They ask, “What do you do?” How do you reply?

1. “I work for Twitter in X.” If you say this, it seems to me like “I’m working for the man,” it doesn’t exactly bestow a sense of ownership (or if it is, it’s your employer “owning” you). Either way, not good.
2. “I work at Twitter in X.” To me, it means, “I do X, it’s what I’m good at, and I do it at Twitter.” You certainly don’t feel like you “owe” anything to your employer other than your best effort — no soul selling here.
3. “I work on X at Twitter.” This is the best! This is when you have ownership over your product, your goal or your section of the business.

Last Friday night, I used OpenTable for Android. It’s so easy and very helpful, especially when you’re in an area you don’t know well. Later in the weekend, at #SXSW in Austin (which, sadly, I did not attend), senior folks from StumbleUpon, YouTube and Pandora got on stage for a panel called, “Recommendation Engines: Going Beyond the Social Graph.”

What a missed opportunity for OpenTable.

I don’t mean the event itself. I mean to build out a robust and trustworthy recommendation algorithm of their own.

OpenTable should have one of the best recommendation engines out there. They have insight into not only search and browse behaviors for restaurants but more importantly, they know when you’ve actually eaten there.

Amazon’s reviews are so powerful not just because of their numbers, but because you can verify which reviewers have actually bought the product. We know it because Amazon can verify the purchase and the shipment.

Likewise, OpenTable can verify that someone sat down for their meal. (Note: Yelp tries to do this, too, by incorporating its check-ins. But all that really proves is that I was close by. OpenTable can say for sure that I ate there). It would be really cool if they could reconcile table orders with their reservations to verify even further that I did in fact try the lamb chop, but it’s not that OpenTable suffers from a reputation problem. They suffer simply from a lack-of-effort problem. Perhaps the problem is the incomplete feedback loop with the post-dining experience. OpenTable doesn’t need specific reviews of the restaurant by me, they have all the data that they need.

Moreover, OpenTable knows all about my habits: my price sensitivity, my proclivity to certain neighborhoods or preference of dining time. They can guess what genres of food I like and they can predict even things like where to eat based on where I might be at the time I’m booking for — maybe when booking last minute I prefer one type of restaurant, while planned meals a week out are different to me. There are all sorts of things.

I hope that all these things are on the team’s roadmap — perhaps they are. Think Foursquare but with data you don’t have any reason to question. I think OpenTable is sitting on a lot of really interesting data and they can do a lot in the future with it.

But for now, it’s a big missed opportunity for them.

Quick: how much is an hour of your time worth?

NBC thinks you’re about $240 an hour.

To promote their upcoming show “America’s Next Great Restaurant” (which, incidentally, sounded like a cool concept to me), NBC recently ran a very interesting video campaign. NBC partnered with LivingSocial — the Amazon-invested Groupon clone.

After consumers completed their order they were given an option: ”Take 30 seconds to watch the trailer for NBC’s newest show and receive $2 off right now on the deal just purchased!”

Thus, NBC values your time at $2/:30seconds –> $4/minute –> $240/hour. That’s pretty good.

What’s interesting to me is not only their “valuation” of you and your time. What I like about it is the novel and creative way to spend online media dollars.

I can’t be sure, but as I see it there are two ways that LivingSocial and NBC priced this out:

1. LivingSocial charged NBC a flat CPM of, say, $15 and then the $2 savings to the consumer was essentially a pass-through. (NBC did a similar promotion last month for buy-one-get-one-free burritos at Chipotle).
2. LivingSocial considered NBC like any other vendor/client and charged them a $4 CPC and then took 50%, thus preserving their external-facing pricing model (to either advertisers or merchants), and in turn providing the viewer with a $2 savings.

Either way, looking at other forms of digital video, how does it compare? The best comparison to me would be YouTube’s TrueView model, with the payment method being a Cost Per View (CPV) metric, equivalent to the click-to-play that LivingSocial offered.

In both cases, you pay only for opted-in, engaged views. But CPVs on YouTube are much lower than $4. Despite/because of auction pricing, YouTube paid views are generally an order of magnitude or so lower. And with the LivingSocial deal, the advertiser does not benefit from targeting or reach/scale beyond the sales LivingSocial was able to put together that day. While not a raw deal for NBC, I think there are other, more efficient ways to spend those ad dollars. Granted, not all of them are as splashy (or as I said, as creative).

One question remains about intrinsic and extrinsic motivators — would you be moved to watch the video to save $2? Let me know in the comments. Ultimately, I think the psychological benefits are big here: at the end of the day, I’m getting paid to watch that video.