My supremewifecommander Tiff and I are going to move to NYC soon, where I am going to join up with BBDO NY and be Director of Integrated Production there. This is something I’m immensely excited for, because it is an energized, great agency, and involves a city I have always known and marveled over but hadn’t figured out how I’d live there. It also comes with a great degree of emotion, because I am leaving the most singular place of personal and work growth that I could ever imagine, in CPB. There are literally 100’s of people there that I love, and the great spirit of the place is embedded in me like a chip. It would need to be surgically removed.

I thank all those that I hope will welcome me and Tiff in NY, and the cool team at BBDO and the agency for having me aboard. And all the friends and family that have worked with me and Tiff as we worked through this decision for a new setting. You all have to check with her but Tiff is more energized to carry on with CPB than ever, out on the west coast for a spell further and then to the big city.

To all my dear friends at CPB, best friends, partners, producers, loved and respected ones: I wish CPB the greatest and expect it.

I hate to add something as peripheral as this below, but what the hell, it’s not that peripheral and made me holler last nite in a bar, ruining dozens of innocent couple’s romantic V-day dinner.

Been thinking a bunch lately on the presence of “innovation” as core to the creative enterprise, in our biz. 

Innovation has been key to much of the great work at CPB. I think the collective innovation mindset played host to many of the great ideas we’ve made over the years. We toyed with the medium. A medium could be a form of media, or technology, or something tactile, or a service or product. We either jammed a medium—used it in a way that broke assumptions on how it was supposed to work. Or spun a new medium. And we fed this with an idea.

Ideas start it all though, right? I am debating that. That ought be the story, or the takeaway-- and it may have got us going, along with a strategy. But perhaps if there is an organizational, cultural preset toward innovation, then that context, or vision, will inspire the more disruptive idea. Even if the messaging itself doesn't end in a form of experimental media. And conversely, if you remove culture-based innovation, you will inhibit the route to the modern, truly breakthrough idea.

I’m going to avoid specifics, but we have hijacked twitter. Facebook. TV. Sidewalks. Game consuls. Stadiums. Hotel rooms. Direct response. Ipads. Billboards. Service and products. Was Domino’s transparency-onslaught an idea, or was it innovation? Both, but I think starting with the inspiration that we could actually build a communication platform directly extending from a product adjustment, exposing the very innards of an organization, is innovative. (So the example here is we almost hyperbolically started with product, in our innovation.)

This feels like medium-is-the-message stuff. But I’m speaking to an organizational disposition here. Innovation as a form of added cajones. And technology is particularly key on this. Center it, and force its overlap with creative culture. Perhaps the imaginative cultural mindset that fuels technology, tool or product-based advancement, is the handiest organizational setting for the creation of breakthrough big ideas.

Got this from David Evans. Interactive producer, filmmaker, CPB interactive producer, filmmaker, interactive guy at-large, filmmaker. A quote from Ira Glass, who I think can be over-earnest and a little self-important, but I relate to that weakness. So I take it all back, with this:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good. It has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”