Why Code 96?

23Oct08

First off, I’m a pretty opinionated individual so at the very least maintaining a blog gives me the opportunity to make my opinions known. If people find them interesting and happen to agree with them then great. If not then no harm done and you can move along I suppose.

With that out of the way – I like to tell stories – I like to infuse technology into my life where ever I can (much to my wife’s chagrin) and in order to do so I do quite a bit home work, trial & erroring and failing & regrouping; this will give me a place to store that work and hopefully others can benefit from it.

I like technology and gadgets and how they apply to business and personal life and plan to write about that frequently. I’m most often amused by human nature but recognize that I’m a cog in the machine too so it’s not in a self-righteous way. I just think we’re all inherently greedy, selfish, insecure and curious and how our behaviour maps to those four themes can be kind of interesting.

Some factoids (if you call these insights that’s annoying…these are just facts):

• Mechanical Engineering degree – never practiced though – but as a result I don’t look at the world and marvel. The universe is one big decision tree made up of squares and diamonds  – there’s the odd magical moment here and there.
• I’m a husband and a father of 2 boys.
• I own a BMW M5 – was the car of my dreams and I feel like barfing every time I climb into it because it’s so inefficient.
• I try to run our household at 50% consumption of the average 4 person family – so far so good.
• I’ve worked in the Internet/interactive consulting/Interactive agency space since 1996.
• I’m not easily impressed but when I am I become obsessed with whatever has impressed me.
• I’m obsessive about topics and themes and then drop them and never really look back.

Why Code96?

A few years back I stepped out of the interactive consulting space to take a crack at traditional marketing. I was motivated to do this in an effort to gain a wider perspective on people’s relationships with brands, their behavior at retail and pathways to making decisions. A few months in the president of the agency I was at pulled me aside and said:

“I think you’re too trusting of our clients. I think this comes from your history in Interactive but this is traditional marketing and people don’t operate with the same level of honesty you do. You can’t tell a banking client that their customers really don’t like them. You can’t tell them that they’re engineered to kill innovation, no matter how polite or diplomatic you are.”

NB – I’m very diplomatic with messages like this – it’s never my goal to be mean or cruel. I’m just trying to help and if a CXO is surrounded by people just telling them the good news then they’re not doing them a service in any way. I would do this in closed door meetings and one on one…anyway, on with the story.

“So Alec, next time I see you going down this path I’ll incorporate the number 96 into the discussion and that will be our little secret code for you to dial back the honesty.”

So I said ok, went back to the office and began to build a strategy for re-entry into interactive. Code96 acts as a reminder to me why I love the interactive space. Yes there was a silly period in the industry around DotComs in the late 90’s to 2001 but despite that all of my colleagues came to this industry because they were drawn by a need to be part of something more honest, truthful and impactful.

I’ve been meaning to start this for quite some time so I’ve got a long list of topics I’d like to cover so come back soon, there should be more to follow soon.

al

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