Ted’s Take

Posted on March 30, 2007 by S Seward
Culture, Industry, Process

A bit of inspiration I’ve taken away from my recent travels at a dozen industry trade shows and events comes from a gentlemen named Ted Leonsis. Ted is the Vice Chairman of AOL and publishes a blog called Ted’s Take.

After a near death experience, Ted reflected on his life and what it means to be happy. He used his influence at AOL to commission a study of 50,000 households on what drives happiness for the average American. From the results of this study, the following definition was established:

You are a fundamentally happy person if: You are an (1) active participant in relationships in multiple (2) communities of interest. You have a deep need of (3) self expression (there are 54 million blogs). You want to (4) give back and volunteer and you want to (5) pursue a higher calling.

He points to the success of the internet as being deeply rooted in providing a tool for people to achieve these five conditions all in one place. Since hearing Ted speak about this, I’ve been loosely testing this theory with our work product and that of others and so far, I think he’s onto something. As we are building interactive communications we can improve our success rate with our end user or consumer if we can bolster, support or provide opportunity for the user to experience one or more of these conditions when interacting with our client’s brand. Test it yourself and see what you think.

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