Michael Leis

What started as an innocent-enough giveaway app on Facebook blew up into a fascinating story of understanding just how important social capital is to people. Here’s how it goes:

Now months removed from the presentation that Brian Reynolds (Zynga’s senior strategist) delivered at sxsw, his main points are still resonant and useful. Here’s what I’ve boiled down, which I hope helps you think differently, critically about what and how you approach your next social effort:

There are a lot of discussions going on about how to create loyalty in a world where the next best offer is a click away. Should we change the cadence or targeting or content of our emails? How can we add badges? Do we need a redesign? Then, towards the end of the year, it [...]

There’s been a lot of consolidation in the advertising industry, and for good reason: at the Forrester Consumer Forum two weeks ago, Kellogg’s mentioned that it had over 100 agencies across the globe. Wow. Brands have become so large that their agency relationships grew into overly complex and unwieldy problems, forcing brands to simplify their [...]

In the last post, I tried my best to describe the challenge of Overlap10: solving for Wicked Problems. Now, I can tell you the story of scalable solutions (or, How To Solve For Wicked Problems): the basis for the work we did over the weekend. Everyone who attended was asked to post a short video [...]

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 [...]

Figured that this space has gone quiet long enough, it deserves something to preface the articles which will follow. Since April, I’ve left my own practice to join DraftFCB as Vice President, Digital Management Director. Clearly, you can see right in the title that if there’s digital management that needs direction, or directors who need [...]

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 [...]