Jen Kuhn returns as last weeks champ in the new Photo Showdown: Water. Joining her are Ben, Sue, and Nick. Here are their photos:

A.) Catch Anything?

B.) Come On In

C.) Hush, Now

D.) What’s Lurking Beneath

VOTE HERE: 

This is a guest blog post from our intern Laura who reflects on her summer internship experience.

Throughout Fonzie’s life there were many girls who were influential to his career. Once upon a time the glorious…

And that’s what you get when you let all the interns try to write a blog post together. It’s probably better that you don’t ask questions about that, but if you ever get a chance visit the Bronze Fonz down on the Milwaukee River.

So for me this whole summer internship and experience started in Dublin, Ireland. I studied abroad for the month of May around Ireland and was sitting in the Dublin airport waiting for one of my three flights home when I got the news that I was a new OrangeAid sponge. I remember walking into the office on the first day and got paraded around being introduced and feeling like I was going through sorority recruitment all of over again (not something you ever want to do twice).  Then we got down to business.

We were given our client and dove right into their strategy and concepts feeling like the Mad Men themselves. This was in the beginning of June. Now it’s nearing the end of August and I’m already back at school waiting to spend my money on books, pens, and notebooks (because that is exactly what I want to spend my money on).

My eyes have been opened to exactly how a project is completed and the biggest lesson I learned all summer. Are you ready for it? Okay good. You can always revise something to be better. We wrote numerous amounts of copy for our client and through our own revisions about 89% of it is currently in a trash can or crossed out on paper in bright red pen. But seeing that and going forward was always encouraging. Everyone working with us wouldn’t just shoot us down but they would raise the bar a little higher so we could really write and be proud of our accomplishments. I mean, I learned a lot of other stuff too that I will take with me in life. For example, 62% is the best amount of cocoa to be in chocolate, and Icelandic candy is not yummy…at all. But in all seriousness, this internship has only strengthened my want to be in the  Ad World and find my niche in a place like Jigsaw.

This summer has flown by so fast, but Jigsaw and OrangeAid have definitely been a good time.  Seeing the orange gorilla sitting out, taking over an empty office looking out to the Bronze Fonz and having sticky notes upon sticky notes clinging to my notebook with reminders and ideas have all made my summer and provided a few good laughs.  It was also great being treated as an intern with a mind rather than an errand girl or copy girl, we even got graph paper delivered to us! (Bryan and Joel are probably still freaking out about that.)

Working with everyone and learning what goes on the big kid world helped me realize that I may actually survive and not get eaten by sharks when I eventually graduate college. But really, I don’t think I can say how much I appreciate everything I was taught and the experience I was given through OrangeAid. I even got to go on a field trip and take a picture with the Bronze Fonz! (ps. Where are those pictures?)

Orange FTW

It should have been obvious that the Jigsaw veteran of the team would win. As one of the first hires, Jen won the votes last week in the Jigsaw themed showdown. Picture shown below.

The results look like this:

1. “What, No Chocolate?”, Jen Kuhn – 40%

2. Retro, Allison Luebke – 31.11%

3. New Mission Statement, Trevor Eiler – 22.22%

4. Noteworthy, Matt O’Donnell – 6.67%

This line struck a chord with America in "Office Space"

In his book Drive, Daniel H. Pink discusses the motivation of different generations and the question of why people choose the careers/jobs they do. At a certain point most of us look back on our XX number of years on the planet and wonder “When am I going to make a difference in the world?”

Boomers are reaching the age where they are looking back on a lifetime of accomplishment and asking this question. For those that feel this question still remains unanswered, how can they make that difference? Many are starting second careers based on what they hold important to themselves, not just what pays the most. Purpose becomes the motivating factor for these individuals.

This soul-searching does not limit itself to just Boomers, however. Their children, the Echo-Boomers or Generation Y, seem to have inherited the trait of purpose driving decisions. Salaries alone are no longer enough to attract top talent. Incentives like work/life balance, charitable giving and work environment all play a larger factor to this generation than they did with their parents and generations before that.

So I’d like to pose a couple of questions. Why did you choose the career you did? Was it money? Prestige? Good will? And what benefits are more important to you than the almighty dollar? Are you willing to get paid less in order to enjoy life more? What motivates you?

Last week Eric wrote a blog post on text messaging and some of the promotional and advertising opportunities the medium provides. This week I want to look at texting not as a medium part of the mobile marketing mix, but as a way to change how products are used and even to provide new products and services.

Some of the greatest examples of how texting, and mobile technology in general, have changed the lives of millions of people come from Africa, where a mobile phone can dramatically improve living standards by saving wasted trips, providing information about crop prices, summoning medical help, and even serving as a conduit to banking services. Economist and emerging markets expert Jeffrey Sachs calls mobile phones “the single most transformative technology for development.” Leonard Waverman, chairman of the economics faculty at London Business School, has shown that a 10% increase in a developing country’s mobile phone penetration adds 0.6 percentage points to the economic growth rate of the country. The World Bank claims that number to be 0.8 percentage points. So how exactly is texting used in the developing world, and more specifically in Africa?

SMS has transformed the banking, agriculture, healthcare, education and non-profit sectors in Africa.

Mobile banking is probably the best developed sector. M-PESA, Orange Money, MobiPay, MiMoney, MTN Mobile Money and even Western Union are some of the major  players that allow customers to transfer money even without a bank account, just with a simple text message. M-PESA, the most popular mobile money platform, was first used as a way for young, male urban migrants to send money back to their families in the countryside. It is now used to pay for everything from school fees to taxis. Teachers in Rowanda receive their salaries via mobile money and retirees in Kenya receive their pensions the same way.

Since 2002 SMS has been changing agriculture in Africa. The biggest challenge for smallholder farmers in Africa used to be the lack of transparent information about the market prices of crops. Today such information and even more is available through a simple text message. CocoaLink, a program launched by the Ghana Cocoa Board, The Hershey Company and the World Cocoa Foundation, provides cocoa farmers with useful information about improving farming practices, safety, crop disease prevention, marketing, etc. Again with a simple text message.

mHealth initiatives have revolutionized healthcare in Africa improving communication between field and clinical staff, diagnostics and prevention. FrontlineSMS significantly improves the communication between field and clinical stuff thus improving the diagnosis process. Ghana’s 2000 GPs can send and receive free text messages from their patients. In Nigeria, teenagers can text questions about HIV/AIDS and receive answers. In South Africa, people can text “HIV” followed by their location and receive an SMS with the location of the two nearest traveling testing units.

There are numerous other examples of the innovative use of text messaging in Africa from providing resources to non-profit organizations to fighting corruption and violence against women. What I find incredibly interesting is that in the West we are obsessed with developing promotional tools and sexy smartphone apps when in reality we just need to provide solutions. The best solution doesn’t have to be the sexiest one, but the smartest one.

In the West, we use mobile and digital technology mostly for promotions without considering how these technologies can affect the other three Ps of marketing: place, product and price. We call it mobile and digital marketing when in reality it is just mobile and digital promotion and advertising. Even simple technology such as text messaging can take the cost and infrastructure implications out and affect the product, the price and the place, thus giving us the opportunity not just to promote businesses, but to profoundly transform them. With such simple technology, we can create new products, transform distribution networks and change pricing models. Now think what we can accomplish with smartphones.