YOUR FATHER'S HALLOWEEN

How Halloween has changed over the years!

Here's a nostalgic trip back to Trick or Treating when chaperoning your kids wasn't altogether necessary.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

PIGGY BANK(ER)S

"I teach contract law at Harvard Law School, and I can't understand my own credit card. No. I'm not kidding you."

Elizabeth Warren, quoted above, serves as the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Shocking? You bet. And she eloquently elaborates on the greed and devious practices, albeit legal, that the financial community is lobbying to preserve.

The link to the clip here is worth watching.... Michael Moore interviews Elizabeth Warren.

If you agency happens to be among those that cater to these financial hogs, think twice. Is advertising helping or hurting? Your conscience rules.

It just might be time for this country to return to the morals in the 1946 film, It's A Wonderful Life.

YOUR DATA .... YOUR PRIVACY

Current web searches, even when anonymized, can still reveal personal information about the user.

Over a new quantum version of the Internet now being developed, search engines could return queries to users .... and with the assurance that no one has copies of the data.

A new kind of memory storage, required by quantum searches, is already being demonstrated in the laboratory.

The development of a quantum Internet is a new wake up call that will, in five to ten years, turn data providers, aggregators and behavioral marketers on their ears.

As the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room, Google stands to be most affected by these developments and will likely turn to a tiered business model that will require paid search, by the searcher, for it to remain profitable.

Free "search and surf" may continue to thrive for some time next to a paid model but it is only a matter of time before the use of the Internet will begin to mirror that of cable .... free search for those that are not concerned about privacy and paid search for those that want to maintain privacy.

It's my opinion that privacy will eventually trump free "search and surf".

How all this will affect the future of our business remains to be seen. Quantum technology requires the use of quantum computers which are yet to be developed and a new type of data storage (quantum RAM).

For a more technical overview of quantum Internet initiatives and data collection, read the article in the October 2009 edition of Scientific American.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

History always repeats itself.

Back in 1980, on the Myrtle Avenue station stop of the New York City subway, Bill Brand installed 228 hand painted panels viewed through a series of vertical slits. As the train passed through the station, the series appeared as moving art.

The piece works on the principal of a Zoetrope, a 19th century optical toy. The installation was recently restored and can be viewed from the "B" and "Q" trains from Dekalb Avenue bound for Manhattan.

Today, Out Of Home marketers are exploiting the concept for "ads in motion".

Back to September, 1909, one hundred years ago.

A New York City inventor proposed to mount a continuous band of pictures from one side of the subway station to the other and have them illuminated by lamps placed behind them. The installation never happened but the seed was planted for Bill Brand to bring it to full bloom eighty years later.

As we dash madly through our lives trying to keep up with technological advances, it's reassuring to know that we can often find our future in our past.