David Rakoff, a prizewinning humorist championed by David Sedaris, died Thursday night after two public battles with cancer. Rakoff cultivated a following among listeners of This American Life, the beloved radio show hosted by Ira Glass. In May, he made one of his last appearances on the show when TAL presented “The Invisible Made Visible,” a live stage performance beamed to movie theaters nationwide. Here, Rakoff reads the story, “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather,” about “the invisible processes that can happen inside our bodies…and the visible effects they eventually have.” You won’t want to his miss his poignant last dance. It’s yet another reminder of why he’ll be sorely missed.

Excel, the tool we love to hate. An artist created a sto-motion that makes us fall in love with Excel again.

Chemical Brothers ‘Velodrome’ – London 2012 from Crystal CG on Vimeo.

The Velodrome at the Olympic Park is one of the most stunning looking venues in this newly built sporting landscape—it’s a beautifully curvaceous sculpture of a building with wooden paneling that mirrors the curved wooden track that’s housed inside. A track that cyclists whizz around with their reflective helmets and aerodynamic, finely-tuned bikes like they’ve just ridden in from an anime sci-fi movie from the future.

This futuristic spectacle was used to create a three minute animation screened before each track cycling session, created by London based design company Crystal CG. The animation is an accompaniment to the Chemical Brothers’ track “Velodrome,” the official theme for the track cycling, and together they make for an audiovisual experience that pays fitting dues to the fast-paced action taking place at the venue.

The animation follows a race of two competitors battling it out to thumping electronica. Taking neon-inspiration from the go-faster world of Tron and its light cycles, we follow the racers in rapidly-harsh Technicolor—shards of light trail behind them as they zoom round the track.

Everything about this AV short punches you in the face—from the hard hitting snares to the shrill synth melody, so put it full screen, turn it up, and let it take you into digital psychedelic bliss.

We’re on an Olympic break. This image showcases everything the Olympics will always be about.It’s Oscar Pistorius running with 5-year-old Ellie May Challis. Images were taken from here, photographed by Andy Hooper. To learn more about Ellie May and her run with Oscar, explore here.  Power to all the people who keep on trying.

This lecture should be sprinkled on our breakfast cereals each day. It is a foundation for starting a day, a career, and a life. Demanding creativity is like yanking on a seed to pull out a flower.

Louis Vuitton “Word” – Directed by Stuart McIntyre in collaboration with Ogilvy Paris from Steam Films on Vimeo.

Louis Vuitton pays tribute to The Greatest – Muhammad Ali with the digital experience The Greatest Words. Spoken Word Artist Yasiin Bey and calligrapher Niels Shoe Meulman revisit the words of Muhammad Ali.

One of my favorites, Jonathan Harris of We Feel Fine, gave a talk during CreativeMornings’ Arts + Tech themed month done in partnership with RISD. Jonathan revisits different phases of his life and the medium that marked them in his work as an artist. Starting with paint, Jonathan speaks on data, life, himself, and tool(s) — addressing both the positives and negatives of each medium as well as what he hopes for the future of arts and technology.

When companies design a new product, the first thing they do is evaluate what the competition has done.

When agencies try coming up with a new campaign, idea or initiative, the first thing they do is a thorough, competitive review.

What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Consuming? Checking on others: their emails, tweets and Facebook updates?

When you start out the day checking what others have done, you surrendered an important opportunity to start something completely new, something nobody ever thought about.

As a marketer, you need to come up with fresh ideas to new and old problems. Obsessively observing what others have done in the past won’t get you there.

The Internet is great. If you like data, the Internet is perfect for you. You can easily get overwhelmed by stats, not understanding the metrics that really matter. All this data is worthless unless you count the numbers that really make a difference.

The Internet is enormous – you can achieve scale rather quickly and fairly easy. As easy as you might make the mistake to chase volume over meaning. If you want to attract a quality audience should you try to use every SEO trick in the book or facilitate an engaged community? If you want to make money with your site, should you deploy many slide shows and photo galleries with low value or engage through high value content?

People love to do stuff on the Internet. The best metrics are often those that relate to people doing what the Internet is best at – interacting. Unfortunately, humans are extremely complex, so the way in which we measure it can be over-simplified. Just look at click-through rates. The average is now 0.1% or lower. You could say that out of 1,000 impressions served, at least 1 person was clicking. Buy gazillions of impressions and you can get thousands of people to click. Or, you could say that 0.1% means, 99.9% of people didn’t care about ad and your work is an utter failure.

Some say banner ads don’t work at all. Or they are not working hard enough. Putting them in the right context makes sense, making them bigger and more intrusive definitely not. They should be more useful and relevant. When I see an ad that tells me the Hollywood Bowl will start individual ticket sales tomorrow at 10am, that would be useful. Good targeting works fairly well. Still, we are in danger of attributing everything to the last click, and very little to any other form of effect, or to any brand-influence or other communications the customer may have been exposed to. We tried solve that attribution challenge, the pace is too slow for my taste. Too many digital campaigns are measured on soft and unimportant metrics. It is not all about the click, and the last click is certainly not everything.

So, next time you report on campaign numbers, don’t go for the shiny number. Data tells a complex story. My guess is, you’re stopping at page three. Dig deeper.

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