I recently acquired an iPad and am sold on it. It is a “game changer” as far as I am concerned. In my personal life, I am enjoying a much richer and more productive reading and research experience, although Angry Birds HD and Tower Madness HD do get in the way of my reading occasionally. As far as how the iPad fits into the agency workflow, here are some ways we have used it, and a couple ways we haven’t yet, at Trone:

Using iThoughts HD for brainstorming and mind-mapping

When working through a brainstorm, or meeting on a topic of somewhat unknown depth and breadth, mind maps are my favorite method of documenting
what is discussed. iThoughts HD is a product ideally suited for this that makes you not even miss the mouse and physical keyboard, not to
mention, it supports video out so the room can share your map and
collaborate on it.

Using the iPad as an impromptu web browsing device

In the hallway or in a meeting where it was unexpected, the iPad is perfect to pull up a website that needs to be discussed.

Being productive on a shoot

Whether it is by being able to quickly review or approve comps for unrelated jobs (on a nicer, more functional device than an iPhone), or review
footage from an editor that has been posted to a review site, the iPad is a great compromise between an iPhone and a MacBook.

DocsToGo to view and edit Office documents

As usual, DataViz did a great job making Office documents editable and viewable on a mobile device. I have had no issues with opening, editing
and re-sending documents via the iPad version of DocsToGo.

OmniGraffle to work through interactive document creation

Although it is expensive, there is no alternative that comes close to the iPad version of OmniGraffle for creating wireframes and flowcharts.
Being able to set the iPad on a table and look around it is also a big plus.

Noterize for PDF Annotation

It is a young product that needs much work, but my experience using Noterize to annotate and mock up PDFs has been for the most part pleasant.
When this set of products matures, there will be even another productivity boost for iPads in Agencies.

Of course there are other ways the iPad can be used in an agency environment, and these are just some basics in addition to checking email
and browsing the web.

Anyone out there using it in their work? And how?

As the new (again) dad of a four day old precious baby girl, my wife and I have been refining the keep-your-sanity-with-an-infant processes we first started a little over three years ago. My wife, ever the analyst (also a math major/teacher/tutor), pointed out that our son was three hundred and sixty five times older than our daughter yesterday. This is the same mom who wrote a web application to help track her diet and workout schedule back in 2003 (before the days of the likes of Lose it!). We have started using an application called Total Baby to track messy diapers, bottles, sleeping, medicines and anything else we would want to log/track. It will be fun to pull out the report at our first doctor visit.

How does all this relate to Trone’s blog, other than to brag on my new daughter? Well, I guess what I’m trying to say is my wife fits well into the Data Darlings mom type referenced in our moms study from November of last year. Not that all Data Darlings are as technical or data savvy as my wife, but there are many of the same foundational underpinnings. Relying on data makes Data Darlings the go-to person in their peer group for insights on brands. Fortunately, they’re also highly informed and constantly seek to be more so. All of this can be very beneficial when marketing to them, assuming you start and end in the right place.

Bottom line: when marketing, derive insights from data, create a reasonable compelling plan from that data, structure the data to hit your target and, especially if your target is Data Darlings moms, enjoy watching the data come full circle to allow you to derive your next set of deeper insights.

Before we begin, it should be said that the author, his employer, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America do not advocate circumventing copyright laws with file sharing software.

So. If you’ve ever heard of Guns N’ Roses, you’ve probably heard of Chinese Democracy, the album it took the band 13 years to write. The band passed the time in between records by starting side projects and taking each other to court over the G N’ R name. Fans got tired of this about five years ago and since have been steadily grumbling about release dates. Enter Kevin Cogill: music journalist by trade, he wrote for AntiQuiet, a music review blog, and posted nine tracks from the unreleased album.

In one of the few cases of this nature, and surely the most visible, Cogill was sentenced this week to a year of probation and forfeiture of his computer. He lost his job at AntiQuiet as a result of the leak but continues to write elsewhere. He stated that he was trying to promote the band because he is a fan, that he didn’t think posting the tracks would hurt G N’ R, and that he was trying to make a point about distribution in the digital age.

Kevin Cogill is old enough to remember when TLC declared bankruptcy in the 90s due to legal trouble with their label and when Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fought TicketMaster’s seemingly exorbitant service charges. He should remember paying upwards of $40 per import CD that had one or two songs that weren’t on American CDs, even though a band’s CD had the same title as its American release. Before Napster came along, the RIAA dictated how much access to your favorite bands’ music was going to cost you, and the price rose wildly the deeper you wanted to go into a discography. Fans got tired of intermediaries, and somewhere along the way they figured out that bands get most of their money from touring and live performances instead of CD sales. No one but the RIAA has looked back on that time fondly.

It’s an imperfect analogy, but it’s almost as if everyone suddenly realized that movie theaters charge you for the cup your drink is in, not for the product you intend to pay for.

Compare Cogill’s situation to that of Jammie Thomas, who was fined $1.92 million for sharing files (since 1,700 files were mentioned in the trial, it comes out to ~$1,100 per song). She’s going to have to declare bankruptcy, and, while she has the sympathy of the internet at large, the negative press isn’t going to help her career any. Popular sentiment says that Cogill got off easy compared to Thomas. Especially so since Thomas is representative of the thousands of illegal file sharers (except, of course, the author, his employer and its subsidiaries).

So Cogill is seen as the Fredo Corleone of the file-sharing community. His failure to garner sympathy comes from the fact that he leaked the tracks from an established blog, in plain daylight, with his name on it. He didn’t cast the files off anonymously into the ether of torrent hosts — he was looking to become The Guy Who Leaked Chinese Democracy instead of a guy who simply leaked Chinese Democracy. If message boards are any indication, he’s seen to have acted in bad faith, as if a journalist leaked an unfinished Billy Collins poem in The New Yorker instead of going to Plagiarist.

This is all well and good until you look at one of any various studies [author: sorry for the PDF] that says those guilty of file sharing spend more on traditional legal media than people who don’t use this kind of software. If the RIAA is “send[ing] a strong message” to Cogill and his ilk, they need to re-evaluate their marketing model. In an industry where fan = customer, marketers need to realize most people who took the tracks Cogill offered were going to buy the final version of the album anyway, and you can be certain they are the people who filled stadiums for the Chinese Democracy tour. From a strict marketing perspective, everyone else should be considered the white noise you can’t filter out of modern commerce.

My friend Jill told this story recently: a friend of a friend of her mother read on the Internet that pet owners shouldn’t clean floors with Swiffer wet products as they purportedly contain the same chemical as antifreeze.  When Jill asked her mom if she believed that, she said, “Jill, honey–it must be true. I Googled it and read for myself on the Internet.”

To paraphrase the cartoon caption: on the Internet, nobody knows you’re sharing a myth, a half-truth or a bold-faced lie. It’s on the Internet; lots of people are reading it as evidenced by its optimization on Google so therefore, it must be true. By the way, the Swiffer story is pure fabrication. What’s amazing is that it’s still out there after five years!

And therein lies the dilemma with relying on the Internet for the definitive word; anyone and everyone can speak with authority. And it seems the louder the voice, the greater the optimization, the more validity is given. Unfortunately, the Internet has created a whole new breed of muckrakers, many of whom seem more ill-informed than purposely untruthful.

In our work for pet clients, we’ve seen on the Internet a fair amount of ignorance if not out-right fabrication. One website in particular–which I won’t name because they’re already too nicely optimized–touts itself as a fair, unbiased source of information for pet owners. It’s far from being either fair or unbiased. It gets a lot of traffic so it’s easy to assume that visitors are reading and accepting what they read. Because the web is so convenient and pervasive, it’s not difficult to make this leap: most pet owners are turning to the Internet for information and advice.

That’s a scary thought, but here’s reassurance. While pet owners might read and research online, we know from Trone Brand Connections consumer studies that the overwhelming majority talk to their veterinarian and take his or her advice. That doesn’t suggest that we and our clients should ignore online information, especially attempting to correct misinformation, but must ensure that we’re engaged and communicating with most pet owners’ preferred source of information and education–the veterinary community.