Ads Worth Spreading

Ads honored through Ads Worth Spreading can be as long as it takes to communicate the idea powerfully, up to five minutes, whether that’s through state-of-the-art animation, lush imagery or an individual talking directly to the camera. What matters is the “a-ha” moment -- the central idea. The thing that makes consumers connect to the idea in the same way that TED speakers connect with their audience. Ads Worth Spreading began as a clarion call to the global advertising community in 2011, asking for ads that inspired and engaged audiences. In 2013, six nomination teams of two – made up of one renowned TED speaker and one rising star from the advertising industry – nominated compelling ads from diverse areas of interest: Talk, Social Good, Cultural Compass, Creative Wonder, Brand Bravery and Education. Over the last two years, the search for compelling campaigns with strong ideas provided the opportunity to think about advertising differently. This is not an award show.

The 20 most-watched TED Talks to date TEDTalks The 20 most-watched TEDTalks (so far) Today, on the fifth birthday of TEDTalks video, we’re releasing a new list of the 20 most-watched TEDTalks over the past five years — as watched on all the platforms we track: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes, embed and download, Hulu and more … What a great, mixed-up group this is! Talks about education and creativity, sex […] Playlist The 20 most popular TED Talks, as of December 2013 UPDATED: To see all these talks at one click, check out our updated Playlist: The 20 Most Popular Talks of All Time. The Future of Social and Mass Media: Wilber, Wang, and Weigend Weigh-In This whole thing started at a playground. True story! While letting my little boy climb on a retired railroad engine – black and shiny and ominous in its stillness – I was struck that when you get up close, you see vast number of levers, dials, valves, and raw equipment required to run such machinery. Many of these individual pieces had patent numbers or company names stamped into the metal. Did any of them see that the automobile – or the airplane – was right around the corner and was about to disrupt their way of life? Time and again, that next “disruptive” event happens and changes any and every industry forever. I asked R “Ray” Wang, Principle Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research Group; Dr. Relationships are more important than ever Throughout his storied career, R “Ray” Wang has helped to business leaders gain keen insight into new technologies, emerging trends, and helped them harness innovation. Trust is the new social currency. “‘Where are we going?’

TED talks are lying to you The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl. One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties — financial engineering — had come back to bite us. And in other departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. The literature on the subject was vast. It was to one of these last that our puzzled correspondent now decided to turn. Anecdote after heroic anecdote unfolded, many of them beginning with some variation on Lehrer’s very first phrase: “Procter and Gamble had a problem.” Had our correspondent developed the gift of foresight? No.

Leadership Is All About Telling a Great Story It is not ironic in that the two business leaders that I most admire and have had the pleasure of working for were great storytellers. It is also telling that both started out in the entertainment field – one in magic and then later representing “talent,” (he is awash of great dinner time stories about uncomfortable celebrity requests and of meeting some of the nicest people on the planet) and the other was trained in standup (more the how-to-tell-a-great-story type and not the one-liner type). As I was given a heads-up that Forbes was compiling their Celebrity 100 list again this year, I reviewed their ranked list and found that once I filtered sports stars, teen pop, Charlie Sheen, and supermodels, that most of the remaining influencers were storytellers. Storytelling filters out the noise We are deluged with our popular media. Storytelling allows us to relate Really great storytelling helps us connect to the others in the audience and share that experience. Storytelling inspires us