The Roundup
At Jam3, like at most shops, we spend a lot of time reading about the industry — design, strategy, tech, storytelling, business trends, new products, whatever. (It’s sometimes kinda random in the Jamdom.)
We often share around links and talk about them — either in our readme Slack channel, around the lunch table, or over some after-work beers.
We decided it might be useful to broaden this out to a wider group — everybody. So every week or so, we’re going to send a few links around in case you missed ’em.
Hope you enjoy. We welcome your thoughts, suggestions and additions in the comments.
Here goes our first batch.
Burn Baby Burn
Back in May, Jules Eberhart of ustwo wrote an epic post on the State of the Digital Nation. In it, he made a case for a new kind of agency, the digital product studio.
Last week, he came back with an excerpt from that initial post called Rome is Burning to focus more specifically on why he thinks traditional agency models are toast. In his view, “The ad industry is tipping into an unprecedented existential crisis.”
It’s a thought-provoking article. Some will find it inflammatory. Others will just find it kinda hot.
Read “Rome is Burning”.
Off Target
Apparently, agencies aren’t the only one failing and flailing right now. A recent Harvard Business Review article by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan suggests that businesses, in the rush to find “targets” and market to them, are missing the elephant in the room: that they aren’t giving people what they want once they’ve found them. The upshot? Missed opportunities and potential revenue out the window.
“After decades of watching great companies fail,” the article notes, “we’ve come to the conclusion that the focus on correlation — and on knowing more and more about customers — is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they really need to home in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance — what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we’ve come to call the job to be done.”
We’ve always found Christensen’s “jobs to be done” framework a solid way to organize our thinking about the things we build. If you haven’t come across it before, this article’s a good crash course. If you have, it’s a solid refresher.
Just To-Do It
On the subject of jobs to be done, you probably have a few of them in your inbox, your calendar, and your Wunderlist.
A few months ago, ur own Michael Dobell dropped an article about how to run a to-do list like a boss.
Read that one, then tune up your list even more with James Clear’s Fast Company article on the “Ivy Lee Method”.
Spoiler alert: Ivy Lee’s killer productivity tip was stupidly simple: do the most important thing on your to-do list first.
Read This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Hack Still Works Like A Charm.
Working Titles
Lastly — hey, we warned you this would be random — our CD Dirk van Ginkel just shared around Art of the Title, a site that explores film and tv title sequences.
It’s not only a great repository for motion inspiration, it also features lots of interviews to get you behind the scenes and see how the sausage was made.
Right now, when somebody says “title sequence”, chances are that the first thing that pops into your head is Stranger Things. Check out a nice interview with Michelle Dougherty from Imaginary Forces that explains how they got to the memorable final product.
And now that we made you want to watch it, here it is.
