A presentation of the quotes of the year from Influx Strategic Consulting- a division of BSSP

1. 2007 in Quotes Influx Strategic Consulting January 1st, 2008

5. Advertising

6. “ Our world in 12 months’ time will be dramatically altered. The agent of destruction – and rebirth – is technology, of course, and its pace is swift. Even as I write, the futurologists are surely forecasting their own demise: the future is no longer the next five years, it’s next month, next week, and by the time you’ve predicted it, it’s been and gone.” — Claire Beale on advertising- Independent Online Edition Media

7. “ It’s mostly not really about things being viral at all, it’s just about dark media buying.” Iain Tait

8. “ Definitions are difficult now. The boundaries between what is the internet and what is TV are becoming more blurred. As a result, media decisions are becoming more complex and puzzling. It is not that simple to separate the two any more.” Sir Martin Sorrell

9. “ We thought it was a great idea when we presented it. [Simpsons creator] Matt Groening said it was a great idea, and it’s a great idea [now that it’s] being done. I guess that’s why we’re frustrated.” Leo Burnett team quoted in Adweek over Simpsons Movie debacle

10. Architecture

11. “ It’s as if a list of all known human pastimes have been collected on PowerPoint slides and then casually voted on by a show of hands.” Mike Davies on Dubai

12. Brands

13. “ It seems that the best pieces of marketing at the moment are coming from bands not brands.” Naresh Ramchandani

14. “ Everything from your haircut to your clothes to the type of instrument you play to the melody of a song to the rhythm - they’re all tricks to get people to pay attention to the story, If you just stood up in a crowd and said your story - ‘I came home, and this girl I was dating wasn’t there, and I was wondering where she was’ - it’s not interesting, but give it a melody, give it a beat, build it all the way up to a haircut. Now people pay attention.” Jack White-The White Stripes

15. “ Lauren took possession of The Dream. He used it to define his company, and without blinking, he argued through his storytelling that his version of The Dream was perfect. Even when so many people found themselves left on the cutting-room floor.” The Lauren Legacy: A Pony Tale

16. “ One of the cool things about the edgeconomy is that you can’t fake the funk. There’s an always-on, real-time connection between consumers, prosumers, firms, markets, networks, communities, etc - and if you choose to ignore what they’re saying/doing/learning/feeling - as EA’s done for the better part of ten years - you don’t just earn strategy decay, you lose credibility and trust in the long run.” Bubblegeneration

17. “ HP analyzed a number of other consumer product categories and found that in each case a company could make money selling low-price products and premium products, but that no one selling in the middle survived very long.” IHT

18. Brand Experiences

19. “ We try to pattern the feeling to a 5-star hotel, Apple’s retail chief, It’s not about selling. It’s about creating a place where you belong.” Ron Johnson-Apple

20. Skeptics have said social-networking sites have an element of fad to them and can lose ground as users lose interest. Nike, however, is expanding its Nike+ site offerings this summer to include “virtual” marathons and group challenges. “It’s not a fad,” Edwards said. “This is the way that people will connect with running products in the future.” Edwards vowed not to let the site fade, as the company did with joga.com, a collaboration between Nike and Google around last year’s World Cup. “We learned very quickly you just couldn’t go dark with these experiences,” Edwards said. Oregonlive

21. China

22. “ I was shocked,” said the owner of Payless Dollar Plus at 5616 W. Madison, a store found with tainted tubes. He asked that his name not be used. “I don’t like to sell stuff to harm anybody.” Chicago Sun Times

23. “ More than 80 percent of (US) ascorbic acid, better known as vitamin C and also used as a preservative, comes from China..” New York Times

24. Collaboration

25. “ People need equal opportunity, a meritocracy needs to be able to emerge, roles should shape themselves to the individual’s abilities and social relations, and there has to be complete transparency about the process and the progress. In a sense, management comes after the fact in the scaled world, helping out where needed, but letting much of the organization emerge from the complex relationships among the co-workers.” The Year of Scale Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter David Weinberger

26. Demographics

27. “ Lily Wauters is “delighted” with her hip replacement. It means she can get on with the gardening. She is 101.” FT.com

28. “ Millard Kaufman, a début novelist whose book “Bowl of Cherries” comes out this month, has been described by his publisher, McSweeney’s, as quite possibly “the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation.”..Kaufman, who turned ninety in March.” New Yorker

29. DIY

30. “ In an era where everything seems so uncertain and traditional ideas of employment and the long term benefits of the corporation to the individual worker seem dubious, there is almost nothing to be lost in setting out for oneself. Taking what is in your individual head and making it into a physical reality is really in your best interest. You might make money, and you might, in your own small way, change the world. And that is pretty punk.” — Lipstick Dipschitz: The Mainstreaming of D.I.Y.

31. “ Nick Haley took just 30 minutes to pluck the Brazilian band CSS from obscurity and hurl it into the national spotlight.In September, Haley paired the band’s dance-pop song “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex” with his 30-second amateur video, displaying the capabilities of Apple’s new iPod Touch.”The video ends with the lyrics, “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” —SF Gate-Apple’s iPod ads are the new music-star makers

32. Economy

33. “ Here in California the P.F. Chang location list is like a tour of subprime-hit housing.” Paul Kedrosky

34. “ Computers failed to anticipate what the firm called “25 percent standard deviation moves” or events so rare Goldman had seen them only twice before in the firm’s history.” Washington Post

35. Environment n

36. “ How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.” Tom Freedman

37. “ Global warming doesn’t affect our visceral emotions.” Daniel Gilbert

38. Food

39. “ Though we may be reaching the breaking point in terms of menus identifying and lionizing their ingredient sources (sometimes a great steak is just a great steak. I don’t need to know the cow’s name) making farmers into heroes and promoting sustainable agriculture and humane animal-raising methods are never a bad thing. And when we see chains like Burgerville in the Pacific Northwest stressing and naming local sources for food, that represents progress.” Ed Levine

40. Life:Work Balance

41. “ In America self-help groups have sprung up to deal with workaholism, but people are too busy to attend.” The Times

42. Media/Technology

43. “ No longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.” Rupert Murdoch

44. “ The rumored 3G version iPhone will probably arrive in 2008 and all mobile video problems will be solved.” George Ruiz- ICM

45. “ Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.” Anil Dash

46. “ I’ve only begun to get my head around the possibilities of the Facebook platform — and I think that Facebook has only begun to open it up. This points to a new architecture to the web, an architecture built around people instead of content, the public instead of the companies. It’ll be exciting to watch and I’m glad I’m finally on the inside to watch it.” Jeff Jarvis

47. “ In 10 years, if not sooner, well below 1% of web page viewing and creation will be done by human beings.” — Connecting ‘07: Paul Saffo, Dunne + Raby, Janine Benyus

48. “ Maybe the first time you know you are pregnant is when a targeted piece of advertising comes through on your computer screen offering you some baby clothes because somehow the smart toilet, or some other aspect of your environment, leaked that information..” BBC

49. “ Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They’re the Soylent Green of the web.” Chris Anderson

50. “ Similarly, there’s something up with the ways we do our development practices. The web principles are release often and fail fast. We don’t do that. We plan for two or three years, putting something together and then dumping it out there. With the web guys, it’s just a whole different method of operating. Flickr patches every half hour.” Ray Koster-On the difference between gaming and the internet

51. Music

52. “ It’s an impatient ballet of subversions and expectations centered in gender, power, commerce, violence, and language, all coated with dripping wet sound.” M.I.A. - Kala - Review - Stylus Magazine

53. “ It’s just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now. I thought it was an interesting thing to ask people to do and compare it to whatever else in their lives they value or don’t value.” Jonny Greenwood

54. New Brand You

55. “ Actually, we don’t call it being online famous; we call it ‘famo,’” says Wilkinson, who conceived the “Internet Famous” course along with friends and semi-famo digital artists James Powderly and Evan Roth. The trio came up with the idea after realizing that their online strategies for distributing and promoting their own art would one day become essential tools for emerging 21st century artists trying to break through the static.” — Googling for Your Grade-Parsons New Course on Internet Fame for Artists - TIME

56. Predicting the Future

57. “ In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.” William Gibson