Yes, brands should be more like Bill Murray

+ I'm the kind of person who has way too many tabs open in my browser, pretty much at any given point, unless my computer is shut down. To illustrate my point, as of right now, I've got about 26 open in Chrome and 4-5 in Safari.

Anyway, in one of these tabs was a link I am pretty sure I found through Twitter. It's a bit old, but it took me a bit to get to watching the video it contained.

Digiday posted a piece on Mike Cole, sales exec at reddit, and his presentation at the Digiday Publishing Summit at the end of October. One of Mike's key premises is that brands should be more like Bill Murray; flexible; not pass up opportunities.

The video is below and worth a watch. Since you can't see what's being projected, you can just let it run while you do something else.


Making Ads Suck Less (Or Why Brands Should be More Like Bill Murray) from Digiday on Vimeo.

But I do love the premise of this. The idea that ads need to suck less is important. It goes back to a point I made not too long ago about innovation taking balls and trust, because you need to innovate to break away from the current archaic advertising structure and set budget aside to do awesome things. You need to re-evaluate how your internal structure to be more flexible, fluid, and overall agile to an ever-changing marketplace.

There's some good ideas in this that go beyond advertising as well.
(and now I can close that tab...one down, 25 to go) ;)