Alan skiing in Utah at age 5. Skiing is one of Alan's favorite activities. He's been a member of the National Ski Patrol for 19 years.

RIESTER: What do you do at RIESTER?

Alan Perkel: I wear many hats at RIESTER. I was brought on board to head the digital department where I hired an entire team to support the ever changing needs in digital marketing. We define digital strategy, build websites, send emails, build custom Facebook apps, build texting campaigns and build mobile applications. I also manage the IT support staff at RIESTER to ensure all our servers and desktop users are up and running. I focus on strategy and user experience design. I help with new business and I am the go to expert on Keynote.

RIESTER: Discuss one project you’re working on right now.

Alan: We have just kicked off the rebranding and website realignment for FirstSolar.

RIESTER: What book or film do you recommend?

Alan: I just finished listening to a book on audio, the unabridged biography on Steve Jobs, it was truly inspiring, I have a 20 minute commute to work and I am on a plane a lot, so I enjoy tuning into books on audio. The most recent movie I saw was Hugo, it was great for the whole family. It focused on individuals and their purpose in life.

RIESTER: What advice do you have for people?

Alan: My best advice is to follow your passion in life, love and work. And stay positive!

RIESTER: What separates the good from the great when it comes to marketing campaigns?

Alan: Execution separates the good from the great. Great campaigns tell intriguing stories that get people to engage. Many good campaigns fail at execution.

RIESTER: What trend in our industry is the most exciting to you?

Alan: The trend I am most focused on right now is called Mobile First or Responsive Design. I love the iOS and the simplification of utility applications that make my life easier. I am very focused on mobile development.

RIESTER: What are you excited about for 2012?

Alan: I am very excited to help grow our LA office, there is so much opportunity and I feel RIESTER has a great story and the ability to deliver.

The changes in how we communicate, because of social media are not small. And the revolution in Egypt was not only tweeted–Twitter and Facebook were important communications tools during the protests that brought down Hosni Mubarek.

This month as Mubarek’s rule was teetering on the precipice, Gladwell wrote that “people with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”

As an agency devoted to finding better ways to communicate, this statement is of course objectionable. But on a broader scale, it’s simply a stubborn refusal to face reality.

Radio and television were hardly uninteresting innovations in communications–they changed the world. How much social media changes the world remains to be seen, but it is changing it. Egypt is one example, an important one, but one of many.

I have high regard for Malcolm Gladwell. He has written outstanding books including The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. His usually excellent articles in The New Yorker are additional examples of his proud body of work.

It’s precisely because he is such an innovative thinker and writer that his queasiness with social media is especially notable, and odd.

It’s time for a new article from Gladwell: “Big Change: Why more revolutions will be tweeted.”

The goal was to assemble the footage into a full length documentary time capsule of a day in the life of the world. The filmmakers received over 80,000 entries from 192 countries with over 10,000 hours of footage.

The footage was edited into a 90-minute film called “Life in a Day.” It premiered last night in two venues: to a live audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah and to anyone on the planet with access to YouTube.

When I first came across this project in June of 2010 I was inspired to participate after watching the short introductory films of the director and producers talking of their vision and setting the stage for content based on four questions: What do you love? What makes you laugh? What do you fear? What is in your pockets?

From the deep and philosophical questions of life to the simple mundane, I was curious and felt inspired to contribute. I nearly forgot about it until the morning of July 24th 2010 when I woke up abruptly at 4:00 AM – “today is the day.”

Having no idea what I would be inspired to shoot that day, I jumped up on the roof of my house in Arizona in the predawn hour with my Canon 5D and my digital audio recorder to capture time lapse footage of the sunrise while recording whatever thoughts or ideas would come along the way.

The day turned into a rather quiet, serene and contemplative day spent pointing the camera to the sky. All day I watched clouds shifting and building and spoke to the recorder as I began to sink into a rather profound connection to the thousands of other people around the world doing the same thing I was doing.

This was one of the gifts of the day. There was something deeply moving in knowing that there were tens of thousands of us out in the world experiencing something different, but sharing a single intent to capture the spirit of this day as it unfolded.

As the storm clouds grew into late afternoon, it was apparent that we were in for our first good monsoon storm. I headed to one of my favorite spots, Lookout Mountain in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It proved to be one of the most dramatic sunsets I have ever experienced, complete with distant storm cells, divine cloud breaks that let sun rays travel in all directions and an open horizon line at the end that exploded in the rich colors that Arizona sunsets are famous for. I knew I had captured something truly beautiful for the film.

I submitted the footage via YouTube and then waited. Slowly over the course of a few weeks, they started posting the raw footage in an archive library on the “Life in a Day” YouTube Channel.

It was fascinating to see this archive in its uncut state. You could get a feel instantly of what might come from the movie. Eventually I was contacted by the producers and asked to send in HD master files of a few of the clips, including the sunset time lapse. I signed the release waivers and was thrilled to be accepted into the final cut stage.

As it turns out, the sunset did not make the final cut of the film. It may sound cliché to say that it really didn’t matter if my footage made it in the film or not, but everything leading up to the screening was truly the reward including—the profound feeling of being connected to humanity on the day of filming, to breaking through the fear of sharing and publicly posting my personal thoughts on love and fear.

The moments of anticipation leading up to the screening and the subsequent support of my Facebook circle of friends who were supportive, proud and excited for me. WOW. This social media evolution is truly something.

National Geographic and YouTube will launch the film theatrically on July 24, 2011, one year from the date of filming.

It turned out to be an incredibly touching film that captures an abundance of ordinary and extraordinary moments all across the globe. It is a film about our connection to everyone else on the planet on a relatively simple day in time. There is something for people to connect with there and if you can see it someday – make time to connect and check it out.

The crowning moment of the entire “Life in a Day” filming adventure. Watch in full screen mode if possible:

Visit the “Life in a Day” YouTube channel for more video clips: http://www.youtube.com/lifeinaday

Advertising Professor JB Hester.

Breitinger: Can you to define the term social media?

Hester: I don’t like the term. I think that’s from being in advertising, when I think of media I think of things very differently. The term “media,” a real strict definition of it that we learned way back in school is: a carrier or deliverer of information, entertainment, and advertising. These tools that we’re talking about, like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, they’re more than that. They’re not just a channel and what people do with them is more than just one-way communication. And so, the term media just doesn’t seem to capture the essence of what is going on here. I like “social networking,” that’s kind of my favorite term for all this.

What are some of your favorite advertising and marketing blogs?

I was reading RIESTER’s earlier and I will give you guys credit, your blog is very nice. The thing that I like, is getting a good idea of who the people are at your agency. I told somebody earlier that I was going to do this phone call and that I probably know more about you than I do a lot of the people in the advertising industry in this area. Just because I’ve seen so much stuff on Twitter and I’ve read your blog.

I like that you’re creative. I get the impression that the people who work there are very much into their clients. Let me see if I can express that a little more clearly: When I was first getting started in advertising I was a big David Ogilvy fan. And one of the things that Ogilvy stressed was use your client’s products. And he wanted people who were passionate about those clients and I get that feeling from your agency.

Can you talk about organizations or brands tweeting?

This is one of those real interesting areas because Twitter wasn’t designed so that brands could use it. That wasn’t the purpose when it was developed. So it’s interesting to look at how brands have used it and some of them do better than others obviously and they do it in different ways.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of America's finest universities. This is the Old Well.

We have a former student named Alexa Robinson and she handles the Twitter account for Pizza Hut and she’s really fun to talk to because she tells stories about how she first started. The lawyers for Pizza Hut wanted to look at every single tweet before it went out. You’re thinking ‘okay, this doesn’t work that way.’

You’ve got a lot of different things going on here. Some brands are really flying by the seat of their pants. Actually I should re-phrase that—I think almost all of them are. Because this kind of stuff is so new, that we don’t necessarily know exactly the best way to do everything.

There are some brands that treat social networking tools as though they were just another broadcast channel. That’s probably not the best use,  but it is a way to use them. I hate when I read those articles by self-proclaimed experts that you have to do this or you cannot do this in these various platforms because you know if a company gets information out by using Twitter purely as a broadcast channel and it gets to who they want it to get to, good for them! That’s fine. That’s one way to use it.

There are interesting things that happen because social networking platforms are so very different from the traditional things we’ve been using.

What are some advantages for you for in using Twitter?

The most obvious advantage for me is that it’s a great way for me to connect to the industry. You can get isolated in the university if you’re not careful especially if you’re in a professional program where you’re teaching advertising, you have to be careful that you don’t do that. It does help me there. It helps with a lot with my students. I’ve got a class of 92 people this semester and I bet you that 80 of them were already on Twitter when they came to class yesterday. Students in that young demographic have discovered Twitter.

We met JB Hester on Twitter.

Traditional broadcast media channels aren’t getting the market share that they once did. What trends do you talk about with your students regarding broadcast media advertising and also how important is that as part of the mix these days?

It’s still really important if you’re looking for a big audience. Joseph Jaffe wrote that book a few years ago about the death of the 30-second spot. Well I’m sorry Joseph but the 30-second spot is not dead yet. It still works and it actually can work really well. It’s not that social media is replacing traditional media, it’s just yet another tool and we spend actually in our curriculum we spend a lot of time talking about all of the various options that you have. TV is still a big part of it. The thing that happens now of course is you do TV, and then you’ve got a version of that that goes on YouTube and you hope you go viral.

Do you talk about the characteristics of something going viral in the classroom?

We do. You have to actually be careful because getting something to go viral is very hard. You don’t want to have a bunch of students working on a project and have every one of them saying “And we’re going to do this thing and it’s going to go viral.” Because that’s not the way it works necessarily. So we talk a lot about how difficult it is. It’s like everything else in advertising—to do it really well is really difficult.

Why does a particular ad catch the imagination of people and become part of popular culture? It’s very hard to sit down and quantify and say it’s x, y and z and that’s how we can reproduce and do it again. I think that if you have really good creative people who are really tuned into the world you’ve got a good shot.

What are some common misconceptions you see regarding social networking platforms?

Especially since I deal with students primarily and I have to be careful here because I’m not trying to say that students don’t know as much but they haven’t thought through things from a business standpoint. Having a Twitter account and having a Facebook page, great. But what are you going to with it? It’s the strategy behind it and I think that’s the biggest misconception that people have. The other misconception is that it’s free. It’s not going to cost anything to do this. Sure it doesn’t cost anything to open up an account but somebody’s got to do all the tweeting. But back to the strategy point, if you’re a business anything you do should be strategic. You should have a goal in mind. You’re trying to increase sales or increase foot-traffic or whatever it is. You set out a way to do that and all these tools are things that you can use that relate to various strategic goals that the company has. I think the biggest misconception is “Well we have a Facebook page, so why aren’t people coming in the door?”

Please expand on that a little bit? Say you’re speaking at a conference to business people, how would you describe for them the characteristics they should look for in who they hire to do their social networking?

You just get an intern, didn’t you know? Sorry that’s kind of the joke these days. I think a lot of it’s going to depend on what you’re trying to do. If I’m going to use Twitter to pump out discount codes where today only if they come in and mention this they’ll get 20% off that’s a totally different thing than if you’re trying to build a relationship with key customers versus if you’re trying to get foot-traffic versus if you’re trying to build followers. There’s all these things. If I were giving a speech to business people, my question is not what you can do on Twitter or Facebook or insert social media here, but why should you use it to begin with?

Professor Hester likes Doritos. He discusses one way this brand is using its social networking tools to interact with customers.

A lot of businesses probably could do a lot more with it but you’ve got to figure out what the heck you’re trying to do with it and go from there. In terms of hiring people, obviously you need people who understand the various tools. But it’s like hiring someone to make ads, if you’re hiring an art director to do magazine ads obviously they need to know a lot about typography and color and all those wonderful things about production but they also need to understand advertising. They need to understand what gets a reaction from people. How you can combine a headline and a visual to sell a product. So it’s the same issue now. It’s really not that different. It’s just different sets of skills.

What about Facebook? How do you see that fitting into the world of marketing?

Facebook is fascinating because there’s so much information that can be used to target in Facebook. If you want only men, only in a specific age group, only in a specific part of the country, who only have expressed an interest in underwater skydiving or whatever. Facebook has got all of that information and can do that for you. And so you can get incredibly targeted things.

When I go on my Facebook account which I do at least a couple times a day, it’s real fascinating to look at what ads I’m being served and to see if they relate to what Facebook knows about me and most of the time they really do. Probably the two big Internet success stories advertising-wise are Facebook and Google ads because in both instances you’ve got a situation where it’s highly, highly targeted.

What about a Facebook page?

A Facebook page is a little different story. And I actually picked Doritos because of some interaction I had with them on Twitter. Because I’m a big fan of the Habanero Doritos and they were taken off the market and I learned through their Twitter feed that the flavor was coming back. So that made me go to the Facebook Doritos page and become a fan there and sure enough they brought back that flavor even though I still can’t get it. But in terms of an ad on Facebook for a lot of companies that’s not really going got drive sales or anything. But for others it may be very, very good.

That’s a good example of interacting with a brand. You don’t usually have that opportunity, at least not very easily.

Right. It’s also a good example because I think most people would say “Why on Earth would you want to interact with Doritos?” That’s a lot different than other types of brands. But that’s my favorite flavor.

Returning to the more common and broader term, there’s a lot of hype about “social media.” What’s on-mark, what’s off-mark, what’s the potential?

I think you can probably just look at history. Every new channel or medium to come along that can be used for advertising has been hyped as the best and going to totally get rid of what came before, etc. etc. And that never really happens. Other channels and other media adapt. TV did not kill radio. Even reports of the death of newspapers are greatly exaggerated. I think there is a lot of promise in social media.

Thanks professor! You can follow Joe Bob Hester on Twitter @joebobhester.

Note: You do not need a Twitter account to check out Hester’s Twitter feed. Just click here. Be sure to follow @RIESTERAgency here and “like” us on Facebook here.

Today President Mubarek stepped down after 18 days of protests that were fueled by social networking sites, including Twitter. This post was a direct response to Malcolm Gladwell’s article: “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted.” The original title of the post was: “Strength in weak ties: Connecting with people through social networking.” Despite the revolution in Egypt, Gladwell is stubbornly sticking to his guns that things like Facebook and Twitter are worthless. Why can’t one of the great thinkers of our times admit he’s made a mistake and move on?

Amidst an explosion of communications channels, what is the best way to connect with people and really make a difference? This is a critical question at RIESTER, a company based on Brand Activism—for causes, products and services.

Are Malcolm Gladwell's "weak links" an adequate description of social networking connections? Photo by Pop!Tech on flickr.

Malcolm Gladwell, in a recent New Yorker article “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” asserts that social networking connections will not drive activism leading to impactful change.  But is Gladwell, one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, missing something?  He refers to the kinds of connections people have on social networking platforms as “weak ties.” It’s true, social networking platforms make it easy to build connections with people you’ve never met.  Even reconnecting with old friends and acquaintances is often an example of people you have a weak tie to.

While he emphasizes the limitations of weak ties, Gladwell also sees benefits to such connections. Crediting sociologist Mark Granovetter, he discusses some of the advantages: “Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency.” He asserts, however, that the revolution referenced in the title of his piece still depends on more traditional tools to bring about real social change.

People lazily posting links and blathering away online won’t cut it.

Fair enough.

I often describe Twitter as an international cocktail party that is going 24/7. Even if you don’t drink, stick with the analogy. You meet someone at a party, you exchange chit chat. More often than not, you don’t establish a deep and lasting connection. But, sometimes you do. Think about it, most of the more successful people in this world—from many different fields—are those who are effective at turning weak ties into strong ties.

A relationship must begin somewhere. Gladwell bases his argument on a paradigm of either-or. His activists either rely solely on social networking via the Internet, or they utilize more traditional real-world organizing techniques based on “strong-tie connections.”  This is a false dichotomy and it’s why his essay is incorrect.

As a tool for people working to bring about change (or communicate any message), social networking platforms offer new and unique ways to connect. What happens with those connections is what makes all the difference. That’s just as true today as it was in the pre-Internet era.

Social networking platforms are not just stand-alone communications channels. They are new tools that need to be leveraged in any contemporary communications situation. In Gladwell’s essay, with the either-or paradigm he provides, he is likely more correct than not. Social networks are not the be all end all and by themselves they are unlikely to change the world. Yet they don’t exist by themselves. As tools in a larger toolkit, they are potent new platforms.

In over a year of active engagement on Twitter, I’ve developed connections with many people whom I would never have become acquainted with otherwise. Some of these connections have already grown from very weak ties, to stronger connections.

Tomorrow I am going to introduce one new Twitter friend. His name is J.B. Hester. He’s an advertising professor from the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, one of America’s top universities.

We work on public awareness campaigns to promote ideas, raise awareness, decrease negative behaviors (like smoking) and increase knowledge.

Here’s a photo by International Space Station Commander Douglas Wheelock to get you thinking:

From Wheelock: “The Earth at night is a masterpiece of light and motion. Aurora Australis dancing on a moonlit night…a new dawn just beyond the horizon. The small pinpoint lights that you see in these night images are pixels on the camera’s image sensor blown out by particles of cosmic radiation…one of the hazards of the job out here.”

This image is one of many that Commander Wheelock is making available via Twitter. View more via his Twitpic feed. These are amazing shots and important persectives of our planet.

In 2010 computing is shifting from local resources into the clouds.

Dan Peterson is RIESTER’s IT Director. This post discusses the shift to cloud computing which is Internet-based computing, where “shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand.”

Lately there has been a lot written about what cloud computing is, is not, and what it will be. Like any new technology, early adopters attempt to gain a competitive advantage. But economics drive widespread adoption, and today with costs dropping, the migration to the cloud is accelerating. Cloud-based services also often come with added features and benefits.

My head has been in the cloud for quite some time. It just wasn’t called the cloud five to ten years ago. The hype of the day then was SAAS (software as a service) and ASP (application service providers). I was hooked after we deployed our first SAAS product, SPAM filtering. From then on I would ask questions like, “Can we do this through a web browser? Why do we need another server? Can’t we find a service to do this for us?” I didn’t want to build it if I could rent it or pay per use.

Noted technology writer Nicholas Carr makes the case in his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in how computing resources are consumed and delivered. Carr, a former Harvard Business Review executive editor, coined the term World Wide Computer to help define the shift from in-house and personal computing resources to Internet based services.

Carr argues that widespread adoption is driven primarily by economics. He draws a parallel example between the electrification of the United States in the early 1900s and the shift to cloud computing today. Early power plants were isolated and local. As the early electrical grid matured, and it began to make economic sense, industrial electric users began to shut down their internal power plants and started to buy power from the grid. A critical point is that adoption didn’t occur until larger power companies could deliver power cheaper than what it cost local entities to produce their own power.

Enterprises have been building their own data centers (power plants) to deliver computing resources (power) to the business. These data centers are individually owned, maintained and run by the business, usually at considerable cost. Cloud-based services are starting to replace in-house data centers because it’s becoming economically viable. There are other issues that also hinder cloud adoption. Security, compliance and regulation have been hurdles of various heights to market segments like healthcare, finance and government. But those issues are being aggressively addressed and the industry has made great strides. Evidence is the ever growing use of cloud services in the public sector. But the true driver of adoption is still economics. When decision makers see that money can be saved, the other issues quickly get resolved.

The combined use of cloud services and virtualization of in-house servers is a common strategy enterprises and governments are using to reduce costs. This strategy also has an overall “greening” effect. As organizations consume more cloud services, their in-house data centers become smaller. As more users are served with less hardware in a shared cloud environment, the result is an overall a smaller carbon footprint.

At RIESTER, we use various cloud services, including: Google Apps for email, calendaring, and contacts; online backup of laptops and file servers; and virtual servers for testing and production. While all of our moves to the cloud have resulted in cost savings, most also have included feature enhancements. Examples include laptops we can back up from anywhere, video chat, super fast server turn-up, and many more. And who knows what the future holds? If you asked me three years ago if we would be backing up a terabyte of data online I would have told you our Internet connection was too slow and it would cost too much.

The shift to the cloud is having profound effects to our core business as well. The prolific new social media channels that are now available to individuals, organizations and marketers, almost all live in the cloud. These channels include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, other video delivery services and many blogs.

I am looking forward to Mr. Carr’s newest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, it is the newest download to my Kindle. Carr is always a provocative prognosticator and an insightful analyst.

Read more from Nicholas Carr at his blog.

Born over two thousand years ago, Roman orator Marcus Cicero was an early supporter of the STAND FOR LESS movement:

“Special care should be taken, if you build yourself, not to go beyond reasonable limits in costliness and splendor. In such extravagance great mischief is done by mere example; for very many are anxious to follow the example of distinguished men. Here there certainly is need of a limit, and of a return to a moderate standard. The same standard ought to be applied to the entire habit and style of living.”

Today’s post is dedicated to Ashlye Kennedy.

Skip is second from the right, with his ABC colleagues in 1963.

In the late summer of 1963, a young man named Skip Branch set off from Salt Lake City for Los Angeles with his wife. The couple temporarily left their one year-old toddler at home in Utah with his grandparents as Mom and Dad set off for the big city to pursue a new life. Skip was putting himself on a path that would land him squarely into the world of TV’s Mad Men.

At 21 years old, Skip was only a few years younger than the fictional advertising executives and creative staff of the hit AMC show. He had no job lined up, not even any interviews — just a notion that he would become a writer or an actor. Somebody mentioned advertising to him as a possible career so his job search expanded in that direction.

In a month, Skip landed a job with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network working in advertising sales. His starting salary was $400 per month. The family moved in to a basement apartment next to the freeway and they barely had enough money for food.

Skip Branch had arrived on the ground floor of an industry at a time in America that Skip says is faithfully captured by Mad Men’s creator Mathew Weiner. His office was at Hollywood and Vine. The famous Hollywood Brown Derby–a place where deals were made–was around the corner. Brooks Brothers suits were the uniform of the day. Skip had arrived.

His first day at work played out like a scene from Mad Men. “Two of the guys I worked with took me to lunch. When we arrived, the waitress already knew what they were drinking: a vodka gimlet and a vodka martini on the rocks. I ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. Before we ordered our food we had to have a second round. One of the guys was on to his third drink by the time our food arrived. By then my cheeks were getting numb and I think I was slurring my speech, so I stopped there. Back at the office I had a cup of coffee and went in to the bathroom and slapped my cheeks so I could face the rest of the day. By the time I drove home I had a hangover. All of this on my first day on the job!”

When asked if he continued to drink after that initial lunch, he didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely. I loved it. I drank vodka martinis on the rocks the whole time I was at ABC.

On Mad Men there is hardly a scene without someone dragging on a cigarette. Skip confirmed that this was indeed the way it was. Offices were filled with ash trays and “98% of the people smoked.” Skip began smoking when he was 16. “It was considered a rite of passage at the private school I attended. I continued smoking until 1966. At that time I was skiing with a friend at Mammoth Mountain. He told me he was going to quit smoking that weekend and I decided I should too. Cigarettes gave me headaches and I knew they weren’t good for me. While people generally knew smoking was bad for them by this time, not very many people were quitting yet. Back at the office I had to explain to people that I didn’t smoke anymore and to some extent I was the odd man out. This remained the case well into the 1970s.”

“Honey,” “sweetheart,” “cutie,” these are the nicknames of the professional women of Mad Men. Skip confirms that this was the norm of the day. From his perspective it wasn’t derogatory, it was just the way things were. The secretarial pool was where most women in the workplace could be found but there were exceptions.

As a 21 year-old starting out at ABC, Skip had his own secretary and it was a 33 year-old man. “This was very unusual.” Skip’s second secretary was a woman and somewhat like Mad Men’s Peggy Olson. “My new secretary was very good and was eager for the job. She would do anything to break in to the advertising business and this was her chance.”

In the 1960s there were “a few women who were executives and they were treated like executives. I didn’t notice that they had less power than a guy. One thing I did know, however, and it’s something that everyone, especially women, knew, is that a woman always made less than a man. This was just accepted and I never heard anyone complain about it (although they may have privately).”

During his ABC years he was sent on a sales trip to San Francisco to meet an advertiser who was “an old broad in the business—that was the term people used at the time.” He was told to be prepared to match her drink for drink when they met as well as the admonition that no matter how she looks and acts, she remembers everything. (For Mad Men fans, imagine someone like season two’s character Bobbie Barrett, but 15 years older, at least 10 pounds lighter after years of rough living, and still very much in the game.) At the lunch they started putting down the martinis. Skip began to slow down his consumption while she steamed ahead. “She began to totter in her seat, and her face finally made contact with her plate. She sat back up and had a piece of lettuce on her forehead that stayed there for the rest of our meeting. Luckily it got knocked off as she stood up to leave.”

Skip says that the feel of Mad Men and the way that the show portrays the social mores of that era are “spot on.”   “I’m as much impressed with the set design, styling and wardrobe as anything else. The smoking looks overdone but it was that bad – enough to make you choke.”

In late 1966 Skip Branch returned to Salt Lake City. At the time ABC offered him a promotion with a good salary to take a job in New York. It was a great opportunity, but he missed the mountains and Alta, his favorite ski area. He was ready to return home. His first job in Salt Lake was as a copywriter. He quickly moved on to become an advertising sales manager at a Salt Lake City television station. In the early 1970s Skip opened his own advertising agency and has been on that side of the business ever since.

In the fourth season of Mad Men the show jumps forward a year from where it left off. The fictional agency from the first three seasons split apart and the show’s protagonist, Don Draper, just got divorced. With a new agency and a new life as a single man in New York this season opened with Don struggling to find his footing.

In 1963 a young Skip Branch found his footing with a start on the media side of the ad business. He had more children and his career flourished. The ABC experience was treated like an elite MBA when he returned to Utah. Skip remains actively engaged in the ad industry as a senior partner at RIESTER, a regional advertising agency with offices in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. To many of us the early sixties seem very far away. For Skip Branch, it was when he came of age and launched his career as a Mad Man.

George Mallory. Photograph courtesy of The Alpine Club Photo Library, London--via National Geographic.

Why do anything? From getting out of bed in the morning to going to the moon, our species often does things because we are driven to do them, often by intangible forces. We are driven to conquer new frontiers, driven to uncover the mysteries of life, driven to discover and to learn.

In the early 1920s George Mallory’s obsession was to do something that had never been done before: Climb the highest mountain on Earth.

RIESTER strongly identifies with people and organizations with a burning mission. We have a diverse group of clients. One group of our clients broadly includes clients with a cause. Causes we work on include promoting recycling, sustainability–including renewable energy, education, exposing the severe dangers of addiction (our work serves as a deterrent) and a variety of issues related to promoting better health.

George Mallory died in his effort to conquer Mount Everest, yet what he did speaks to me in the broad sense that the men and women that change the world do so because of a burning desire to break through boundaries.

RIESTER client Clark Planetarium has been offering a preview of the National Geographic film “The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest” which opens at Imax theaters nationally August 6, 2010. The film is constructed around the story of the discovery of Mallory’s body on Everest in 1999 by American Conrad Anker. Directed by Anthony Geffen, “The Wildest Dream” reconstructs Mallory’s story from the early 1920s, including his final and fatal ascent of Everest.

Thank you to Salt Lake City’s Clark Planetarium for the special screening last night. Thanks too to Conrad Anker, George Geffen, the people at National Geographic and everyone else behind this film–especially George Mallory.

What do you do, or what challenge do you take on, because it’s there?