Peter DeLorenzo:

I happen to think that these themes are thinly disguised attempts at getting back to another, more romantic era, where the simple act of driving was such an adventure unto itself that whole car companies rose up around that notion. These spots are trying in their own way to capture that magic again, even though we live in an era where surprises quickly well up and subside in a fleeting, momentary social media blast, only to be buried by the next story, which is soon to be swallowed up by the next story, and so on.

Are they as artfully done as some of those calls to action of the past? In a word, sometimes. Certainly there are bursts of brilliance in some of the individual executions, with the majestic power of words showing up on occasion and the equally powerful imagery present and accounted for just as intermittently, but it’s hard to find the real enduring power in some of these new car campaigns.

I’m going to remind you of one advertising campaign that set out to create majestic imagery for a car and instead ended up defining the craft of advertising for decades.

I’ll set the scene for you. When Edward S. “Ned” Jordan, a former advertising guy, founded the Jordan Motor Car Company in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916, he had dreams, big Technicolor dreams of fame and glory and of the world beating down his door.

Jordan’s cars were for the most part a collection of other manufacturers’ parts, but they were high-styled machines, because, as Jordan was quoted as saying, “Cars are too dull and drab.” He was out to change all that, so his designs were arresting and his bold advertising forays, which created an aura for the brand, were even more so.

And change it he did. In the June 1923, edition of the Saturday Evening Post, an ad for the Jordan “Playboy” – a rakish roadster – appeared. In it, a flapper girl was wrought low behind the wheel, with a cowboy racing beside her off the right rear fender, framed by wide-open skies. And the words:

“Somewhere west of Laramie there’s a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is – the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There’s a savor of links about that car – of laughter and lilt and light – a hint of old loves – and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing – yet a graceful thing for the sweep o’ the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.”

The Financial Times.

John Battelle:

I know that when I do write here, I tend to go on, and on – and those of you who read me seem to be OK with that. But sometimes the best posts are short and clear.

That was my thought when I read Journalists Need Advertising 101 by Brian Morrissey, writing in Digiday last week. In fewer than 500 words, Morrissey issues a wake up call to those in journalism who believe in the old school notion of a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising:

What’s crazy is journalists seems almost proudly ignorant of the business of advertising. …it’s time journalists take a real interest in how advertising works. I’d go even further. It’s time they get involved in making it. Hope is not a strategy, as they say, and it’s better to deal with the world you live in rather than the world you wish you lived in.

Philipp Franziskus:

After a long day of work I sometimes had this feeling that I had done a lot of things but nothing really important. I had made all these little decisions that take a fair amount of time and I felt exhausted. But my business didn’t move forward during that day. What was the problem?

A truly fascinating thing I have found to help me focus more on important tasks is killing some variables in my life.

Variables are usually recurring tasks that are not important but take a lot of attention because you have to make decisions. The more decisions you make the more you feel exhausted even when you actually didn’t do something important.
To keep my mind focused on my important goals, here are three things have worked well for me over the last years:

Cristene Gonzalez-Wertz:

If “muchness” were actually a word, it would be that modern blend of the right things greater than the sum of their parts. Or at least that’s the way I’d define it. So how will consumers discover their own personal muchness in 2013?

1. “Expressive Devices”

It used to be that 3D printing was for prototyping or for people who wanted to connect their Lego blocks to their K’nex. However, this technology is finally moving out of its geeky roots into the potential for people to make their own “art,” from Nokia allowing consumers to 3D-print device cases for the Lumia 820 or in Paris, for Fashion Week. The flexibility of the materials, and now the ability to combine them in a single item generates unprecedented levels of customization. And in all it’s geeky chic-ness, Wired announced a 3D Print-Off. We think so much of this whole notion of 3D printing, it’s one of the 3 pillars our Institute for Business Value colleagues are putting in an upcoming study (more on the other two over the next few months).

John Keane:

Lying on his desk is a biography of Martin Luther, the man who harnessed the printing press to split the Church. To add to his collection, I hand my pale-skinned host a small book I’ve mockingly wrapped in black tissue paper with red ribbon, tied in a bow. The noir et rouge and dead arm pranks aren’t lost on him. Nor is the significance of the book: José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island. Inside its front cover, I’ve scribbled a few words: ‘For Julian Assange, who knows about journeys because there aren’t alternatives.’

I’d been told he might be heavy weather. Fame is a terrible burden, and understandably the famous must find ways of dealing with sycophants, detractors and intruders. People said he’d circle at first, avoid questions, proffer shyness, or perhaps even radiate bored arrogance. It isn’t at all like that. Calm, witty, clear-headed throughout, he’s in a talkative mood. But there’s no small talk.

I tackle the obvious by asking him about life inside his embassy prison. “The issue is not airlessness and lack of sunshine. If anything gets to me it’s the visual monotony of it all.” He explains how we human beings have need of motion, and that our sensory apparatus, when properly “calibrated”, imparts mental and bodily feelings of being in our own self-filmed movie. Physical confinement is sensory deprivation. Sameness drags prisoners down. I tell how the Czech champion of living the truth Václav Havel, when serving a 40-month prison spell, used to find respite from monotony by doing such things as smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror. “Bradley Manning did something similar,” says Assange. “The prison authorities claimed his repeated staring in the mirror was the mark of a disturbed and dangerous character. Despite his protestations that there was nothing else to do, he was put into solitary confinement, caged, naked and stripped of his glasses.”

Alex Thornburg @ Westminster Madison

Today is the first Sunday in Lent; the season of confession and reflection that walks the path of the cross. The liturgical color for Lent is purple. For Lent this year, we have chosen to explore a few of the confessions in our Book of Confessions. While we may be unfamiliar with many of these confessions, they express many of the challenges facing Christians throughout the ages. In the Presbyterian Church we call ourselves a confessional church meaning we seek to express our faith in God in particular times and in particular places. What we believe matters in times of confusion and uncertainty. While we do not often think of the Confession in this way, they do have something to say to the world and our own lives.

Our worship today focuses on the Theological Declaration of Barmen. (See insert) Using the Biblical story of Jesus temptations in the desert (the traditional story for the First Sunday in Lent), we explore the temptation to power for the church and for individuals. Our Prayer of Confession is taken from the Book of Common Worship liturgy for Ash Wednesday. We will be using a different portion of this confession throughout the season reminding ourselves of the opening action of our Lenten season. Rather than an Acclamation Hymn following and celebrating the Assurance of Pardon, we will be singing a Song of Confession reflective of the meaning of the season. A portion of the Barmen Declaration will be read in unison as our Profession of Faith.

The Sunday Morning Post:

It all happened between the ’50s and ’70s, when Shenzhen was a small fishing village. Every single dark night during that time there were many mainlanders leaving their homeland, diving into the deep and dirty Dapeng and Shenzhen bays, and swimming the deadly four-kilometre journey to Hong Kong. The years 1957, 1962, 1972 and 1979 marked the four major booms in illegal emigration to Hong Kong, as mainlanders had suffered greatly from the Cultural Revolution, which included vast famine.

According to my research and investigations, about two million people flooded into Hong Kong as illegal immigrants, often with great personal loss, and more people died on their way or were caught and repatriated.

Neither East Germans climbing the Berlin Wall nor the tens of thousands of North Koreans crossing the Yalu River to the Chinese city of Dandong could compare to the exodus from the mainland to Hong Kong. It’s an epic account of the fate of communists seeking a better life in a capitalist harbour, at a cost of life and blood. So I called it The Great Exodus to Hong Kong.

John Sharp:

With the broader availability of data from electronic health records, the secondary use of this rich clinical data presents the opportunity for data mining. However, data mining has received negative press when used by pharmaceutical companies to monitor physician prescribing patterns.

In many industries, mining of Big Data has become a profitable source for business intelligence. Everything from financial trends to social media sentiment analysis is game. With the ability to search personal data through new tools like Facebook’s Graph Search and increasingly targeted marketing based on huge databases of personal data, the concept of data mining is becoming synonymous with invading privacy.

In health care, the expanding use of EHRs creates opportunities for secondary use of health data collected at the point of care. Such data are unique in that they enable data mining of real-world clinical practice on millions of patients in large health systems. Unlike data collected in the carefully structured setting of a clinical trial, large groups of patients can be studied retrospectively as were treated for a variety of conditions.

Dan Frommer:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk shreds* the New York Times review of his Model S, using data to argue the writer is telling the wrong story.

I won’t pretend to know who’s actually right or wrong here — Tesla certainly only has an interest in telling its side of the story — but the fact that a company has the tools and distribution to quickly publish something like this today is pretty amazing. (See also, OXO’s wonderful takedown of rival Quirky.)

Even a few years ago, something like this probably would have required finding a rival newspaper — the Wall Street Journal, perhaps — to collaborate on a takedown. Or maybe an expensive full-page ad campaign in the top five papers, which would have looked defensive and seemed less convincing.

But now that every smart company has a regularly updated blog, Elon Musk has 136,000 Twitter followers, etc., brands can speak for themselves very powerfully. And if the tone is right, they don’t even look lame: Tesla actually looks pretty great right now*. The balance of power has shifted.