a digital learning adventure

On my birthday last year I had just flown into the US to start studies in digital marketing.

New York is a crazy beautiful city and was an awesome backdrop to the learning adventure I started in 2010. The city felt like a long-lost home and was home indeed for the first three-or-so months of my 27th year. 

I had hit a stumbling block in digital and had decided that I wanted to learn the rules from someone else (experts?) before trying to figure out how to break them at work. I headed to New York University to learn from "the best" with a sideline at MRM Worldwide, New York. 

Silly me - there are no real rules. Funny that I had to go all the way to the first, very mature-marketed, world to learn that? But it confirmed that I wasn't the only clueless person in digital marketing. What then? 

I got a happy illumination on a seemingly unconnected trip to the Museum of Natural History. I saw a caption beside their gigantic blue whale that said that, to this day, only 5% of the ocean has ever been explored. It made me happy to imagine that if such a small part of a bounded space has been discovered by man, how much more there is for us to express coming from the limitless space of ideas and creativity.

Coming back after months of art, music, theater, avenues, blocks, burgers, food trucks, footseps, free Wi-Fi, subways, trains, classes, work days and learning that I couldn't even process, I was grounded in the thought that ideas, especially digital ideas, can still break new ground. 

I hit reset on this blog, in how I thought it could help me keep processing this crazy space, and headed home.

are we listening?: brands & trust online

A think piece I worked on over the weekend on brands and trust online. Are we listening?

Brands & Trust Online

View more presentations from Bea Atienza.

How about an offering for Pancake Extremists?

photo by Roslyn in Starfish Island	via PhotoRee

At Pancake House one morning recently I ordered two chocolate chip pancakes. (In case you're interested, I usually order three except in this case the pancakes were preceded by tapa and rice and therefore as my breakfast dessert I only needed two pieces.)

My dish arrived and I proceeded to set aside the peanut butter and slather the entire serving of butter on the top and bottom (both) pieces.

And then it occurred to me that Pancake House serves the same amount of butter regardless of whether you order two pieces, three pieces or a waffle.

This was disturbing to me because, if you are serious about your pancakes then you must also have some long-standing belief as to the proper butter-to-pancake ratio. In the case of Panacke House, spreading all, or half on X number of pieces. And the maximum amount of butter you would put on two would definitely not be the same as the maximum amount you would put on three, or on a waffle.

judge a book by its cover

I am guilty. Maybe metaphorically and definitely book-store-ically.

Yes I would (and did) buy this over...

 

*Insert moral of the story here: when Branding & Design are inspired by contexts and points-in-time*