Picking and choosing projects comes with a cost. If I turn away tube sock company, will thrilling project follow? If not, did I just turn down a paycheck? The risk-reward isn't just in personal satisfaction, its also in ability. There have been projects I've accepted that were personally thrilling but difficult to execute.

This week a PR firm tried to carpet-bomb bloggers with some new product endorced by a celebrity. They hit a blog that wasn't the right category as the product bring pushed. The end result was the PR firm's VP saying the blogger should be thankful they view her as important enough in the first place.

This message struck a chord with me. In executing PR plans with blogs, I take pride in strategically targetting specific blogs and making the bloggers feel special. They're doing us a favor, they're the first audience. Winning a blogger's approval is a huge victory. Taking that relationship and trying to twist it into a guilt-driven machine is insulting to me.

More importantly, with the emergence of social media as an avenue for reaching consumers, many companies are utilizing old standard techniques on brand new technology. While the transition from radio to television worked, it's not as simple with social media. In order to explain this concept to someone who isn't a marketing guru, I laid out the following explanation which should be work for anyone whether or not their involved in advertising. While there is more complexity to each of these categories, please bare with me in following these definitions in a "See Spot Run" kind of way:

Sales

Sales is the one-on-one interaction, person-to-person, in selling a product or service. It's the most direct, it's human to human. When you walk into Best Buy, you're approached by a person in a blue shirt and khakis. This is sales at the most basic form.

Advertising

Think of television commercials. The idea is a commercial is delivering information, emotion or both. It's telling a story to intrigue you into being interested in the product.

The idea in the Folger's commercial is to bring that feeling of family, excitement and thrill of Christmas morning. Add to that the implied context of Peter returning home for Christmas and awaking the house to the wonderful aroma of  Folger's coffee. It's goal is to strike an emotional chord and remind you of Folger's coffee. It's relating a positive emotion to their coffee. The overall intention is -- you'll buy Folger's coffee based on this commercial.

In explaining this to a group of high school students, I asked "Has anyone ever seen that old Folger's commercial where Peter comes home for Christmas?" While the commercial is decades old, it's added into rotation every holiday season. Someone responded, "I love that commercial!" That response is the reason Folger's chooses to run it yearly rather than produce something new.

The other side of commercials it to be informative, giving you all the information you require to make a purchasing decision. These are a bit more direct and appeal to rational thinking. This commercial for the Popeil Pasta Maker gives you all the information you need, even the ingredients you need to make pasta. The idea there is -- "It's that simple!"

Whether emotional or rational, commercials serve as a sales driver by imploring you to purchase a product or service based on what you're presented with.

Marketing

Coca-Cola developed a multi-million dollar business based on placing themselves in front of people in every positive moment of their lives. The reason Coca-Cola fights to put their insignia in front of your face at sporting events, amusement parks, holiday seasons -- it's all to identify Coca-Cola with your positive experience. When you remember that home run that won the game, you'll remember it went right over the wall with the Coca-Cola logo. You'll remember when you were thirsty after that thrilling roller-coaster ride, you drank a Coca-Cola (because of the exclusivity agreement, there's no other beverage company in the park). You get the idea -- they're connecting positive memories with their brand.

Social Media

Here's where the chain breaks. As much as businesses fight to engage customer's through social media, it's very personal. It's like e-mail or IMs -- you don't want to talk to a company, you want to talk to friend and family. With that, companies have battled an uphill struggle to engage in this new technology.

My agency focuses on social media. Our job is not to connect company with consumer, it's to connect consumer to consumer. Since social media is a personal engagement, you'll accept a recommendation to try a new yogurt shop from a friend who thinks it's amazing -- you won't try the new yogurt shop because the yogurt shop asked you to.

Many businesses have tried to follow the same techniques from traditional advertising and marketing when working with social media. It's possible it can work, but it's not as effective. An advertisement for coffee while trying to view a friend's vacation pictures is jolting. A logo for a soft drink plastering a website may bring some brand recognition, but it's not connecting positive emotions with a brand. When faced with doing something different, brands just create profiles or interactive games -- anything in an effort to serve and connect to Facebook or Twitter users.

The most effective way I've seen social media work with businesses is empowering your fans. Take your best customers, the ones that talk about how great your company is and gets all their friends to try your products -- take that person and make them your salesperson. Give them a t-shirt, a hat, just recognize them and turn that fan into a salesperson for your company. As I mentioned, social media is all about connecting friends and family. It's personal. If someone you know starts spreading the word about some company they think is amazing, you're going to listen (whether you like it or not).

Next time you're browsing Facebook, recognize how many times you pay attention to a company's updates versus a friend's (and make sure the company isn't your own). Social media is just a form of word-of-mouth advertising in the digital age.

It was 2007 and we were launching our agency. It was small, with a focus on digital design. The name "Wave" came from an internet radio project I worked on years earlier and I continued to use the stamp "WAVE" across other projects like little easter-eggs. When it became necessary to incorporate, I didn't hesitate and went with the name I knew. As our goal was to be autonomous, I wanted a generic name that would carry us. Thus the name "Wave Universal" was born.

As we developed into the operation we are today it became increasingly clear our name didn't stand for anything important. It didn't describe who we were or what we did. I went in search of a new name to describe what it is we did. That process took one year.

Anytime I wrote or typed a description of what we did I was always pulled into the term "Avant Garde". It really is the best description of the work we create. Everything we do begins with the mission to not do it the easy way (which is how everyone else is doing it). While the term stood for who we were, it's widely used and we needed to incorporate who we were.

New York City, or as I often refer to it as Gotham, is deeply integrated with everything I do. The city is a huge driver -- a secondary character in my daily life in the way Woody Allen makes it in his early movies. New York is at the epicenter of everything our company creates and it only seemed fitting to pay tribute to it in the title of our company.

Finally the logo. Once we had the name it was time to develop a visual distinction to what it is we do. The logo is a reminder of the New York City skyline, rising, growing and moving forward. It is a symbol for the work we create and what we strive for -- to always be better than before. Also, it looks really cool.