Michael Leis

About ten days after Overlap10, I have finally started processing what about 50 of us went through over a hot, humid, and intellectually exhilarating weekend around New York city. The weekend started with the presentation of our greater challenge: solving for Wicked Problems. Usually, when we have a problem of the ordinary variety, there’s a [...]

Two recurring themes I’ve seen lately that have me thinking Macluhan: Big Web brands are accelerating targeting, and now content creation that is hyper-local. From location-based services to ad buys, everyone wants to help you know what’s happening right around you. Brands really want to find ways to make every experience more “personally relevant.” What’s [...]

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “After about 20 years of work, will someone pay me to watch game shows?” The answer in my experience is a resounding, “Yes. Yes they will.” Seeing Andy Baio at SXSW give his game mechanics talk led a chain of learning to look more seriously into cognitive psychology, variable reward [...]

David Berkowitz posted the question today on AdAge with “Agencies Will Be Tempted by IPad’s Sizzle, Not Strategy,” and as you’ll see in the article, laments Apple basically creating a new semi-category of electronic device and ad platform, in turn making marketers lives somewhat worse. I feel like every time a new technology product starts [...]

In one of the sadder moments of SXSW, as I was feverishly typing away on a live post about Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play presented by Andy Baio when the WordPress iPhone app crashed. Worse yet, Mr. Baio has not published the slides. Hope he will soon, because he presented a lot of [...]

Though our wide-ranging crepe-based discussion panel on Saturday morning was a highlight, I’m seated in the cavernous ballroom A for Brynn “No relation to Will or Bob” Evans is sitting on this panel, so I really wanted to hear it. Brynn is kicking things off. She is concerned with the interaction design of search and [...]

Reflecting on my recent experience talking with a range of senior agency leaders, as well as senior practice leads in traditional shops across PR and Direct marketing, the race for the middle (as Forrester calls it) is not only on, it’s getting kinda heated. Regardless of the background of the agency, leadership understands that clients [...]

So Nick Jefferson at LikeMinded wrote this excellent post, but their CAPTCHA is hidden without scrollbars under an iframe on their blog. I did not realize this until after I was compelled to write a comment. So in the spirit of sharing, here’s the original Valentine’s day post, and my response. What Value Do You [...]

One interesting aspect of watching societal computing habits right now is around metrics. We all love them, we like to see who the influencers are, how many unique vistis happen over a period of time, how many times a cartoon got stumbled. Many companies right now, especially those that tout themselves as eminently “open” and [...]

Email has become the elephant in the room. For just about every single business and education institution, the utter dependence on email as a primary communications and knowledge sharing channel is putting a quiet stranglehold on every aspect of operation. Email as a problem space goes so deep and so wide, it’s difficult for most [...]