The Dinosaur Room Is No More

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The previous owner of our house seemed to have a thing for two-toned rooms (and awful taste in color selection to boot).  We called one of the bedrooms upstairs The Dinosaur Room, owing to the fact that it had an awful-looking border with dinosaurs on it midway up the wall, running around the entirety of the room.  I spent most of my three-day weekend turning this into a habitable room. I have no idea what type of glue was used to adhere the aforementioned dinosaurs to the wall, but it took a thorough soaking - about 8 hours - in undiluted DIF to get the glue to loosen up.  From there, it took several hours' worth of elbow grease using a wallpaper scraper.  And I still didn't get all the glue off.  Here's a tip to remember - when you use a wall sander on a wall that still has semi-moist wallpaper glue sticking to it, your sander will start going through sanding discs at an alarming rate and flinging glue boogers all over the room.

Once the walls were sanded, it took two coats of primer to cover the awful colors on the wall.  Above the dinosaur border, the walls were an ugly cobalt blue - the type of paint that probably was more popular on Dodge SUVs than it was on the wall of a bedroom.  Below the dinosaur border was a color green that was quite close to what the production team on The Simpsons used to paint the control rods in the Springfield nuke plant.

Two coats of primer later, Lauren and I went to Home Depot and picked out a teal green color that matched the rug I brought from Wading River.  It took two coats.  So, effectively, I've painted this room four times.

I moved Rob's desk and all the other stuff from my office into the new room.  I hung some shelves in the corner and unpacked a ton of books that have been sitting in cardboard boxes since I moved from NYC to Wading River.  My computer is up and running, and I relocated the cable modem and router from the old office to the new office.  This required pulling the cable wire and a phone wire through the wall from my prior office.  There was an existing hole, but the cable wire wouldn't fit through it.  Lots of finagling with long drill bits and fish tape.  But it's in.  When I get home, I have to swap out our Linksys router for the Netgear MIMO router I had in Wading River, which I brought with me.

Last night, I dropped by Wading River hoping to pick up my fish tank, but Rob and I discovered it was way too heavy to move without taking all the rocks out.  That's a project for next weekend.  So I picked up the basement freezer instead and helped Rob get the basement fridge out of there and pushed to the curb for the garbage man.

Needless to say, I'm very sore this morning.  But at least I have a new freezer and no dinosaurs on my walls.

The 80/20 Rule of Ad Management

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In our consulting assignments for ad management and ad serving companies, a common theme emerges.  Ad management companies claim the 80/20 rule.  That is, 80 percent of their customers use 20 percent of the cool features built into ad servers, and getting media planning types into advanced training sessions to learn how to use the rest of the features is difficult at best. I had a refresher course from one of the ad serving companies recently, complete with an overview of some of the cooler stuff they can do from the agency side.  It really started the wheels turning.  New features are coming out all the time, and when they do, media people need to be on top of them so they can be leveraged tactically for clients.  I walked out of the overview with half a dozen solid ideas for how we might use advanced ad serving features for our clients.  Among those ideas were new applications of domain targeting, retargeting based on action tag data, geographic segmentation and auto-optimization.

This all reinforced the importance of training in my mind.  No matter how busy your people are, sacrifices have to be made so that everyone understands the full capabilities of the tools available to us.  This extends well past ad management into syndicated research, rich media and a bunch of other toolkits we use every day.

Sometimes, I notice folks (not just here, but at other agencies as well) doing things the hard way, when technology has already eased a particular pain point for them, but force of habit and inertia keep outdated practices solidified within a day-to-day routine.  There are a lot of efficiencies to be realized across the industry.  Training is one of the things that gets us to more efficient processes.

Learn to use tools the right way.  Not half-ass.  Not "just enough to get by."  The right way.  And take steps along the way to make sure you stay on top of new developments - don't take vacations from training sessions for years at a time.  Sign up for regular refreshers.  Ad management, rich media, research and tools companies wish you would.  It helps you get the most from the tools your agency pays good money for.  Most of all, it helps your clients.

Star Trek: TOS on iTunes

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I downloaded a few of the Star Trek episodes that recently went live on the iTunes store.  Last night, I set my TV up with a cheap docking station so that I can play my iPod through my stereo, but I also ran an S-Video line to my TV set so I could watch all the TV shows I've downloaded on a much bigger screen. Surprisingly, the video plays on my TV with amazing clarity.  I figured it would be somewhat distorted, but it looks really nice.