We live in a digital age. We play in digital realms. And most of us work with digital tools. But, I am not cool; I can sometimes be found clinging to my Luddite ways. Personally speaking, I wish and hope that my kids will share my appreciation of the values and merits of the physical world.

For digital creators and marketers, I think the joys of analog should not be forgotten. It is important to touch a product and equally vital that a product touches us. And for manufacturers and sellers of physical widgets, it is also key to have a happening online extension of your brand.

Recently, I have become a big fan of two companies who really get this somewhat “simple” approach.

The first is a toy outfit, Melissa & Doug , who make the coolest stuff for little hands and growing minds. They have a great origin story, akin to that of the Woz and Jobs, starting the business in their garage. Their toys offer open-ended play and tactile real-world discoveries. The two favorites in our house right now are Pizza Party Wooden Play Food (mmm, yummy!) and one of their classic bead and wire mazes (I could sit there for hours). Not only are the toys fun but their website offers online content like “Extension Activities,” suggesting “More Ways to Play and Learn.” Plus, you can also easily sort through their online catalog, viewing toys by age, by skill, or by activity.

The second company we are infatuated with at home is Stonyfield Yogurt. Their YoBaby and YoToddler organic products are wholesome and pleasing to developing palettes, with colorful happy packaging. For us, blueberry is a big hit; you can walk into the room and you can smell the fresh fruit. On top of all that, Stonyfield’s website provides content like product listings, recipes, the benefits of organic, and a detailed breakdown behind their farm-to-tastebuds philosophy.

We are semi-digital creatures but our online wanderings cannot be time wasted. A brand’s web experience can increase the enjoyment of wicked awesome products. We should not forget to play and to taste, to discover and to smell the real world around us.

Click the photo, silly goose.

When we talk about deadlines with clients, most of the time it’s in terms of the final delivery date. However, in order to meet that date, we develop and share a schedule of shorter-term interim deadlines, both for us to deliver initial rounds, and for clients to deliver feedback – and those deadlines are critical. The more they are missed, the harder (and more expensive) it is for us to make the final deadline. And it’s not always a one-to-one ratio.

We treat each client like they’re our only one; carving out focused time for each individual project. In order to manage potentially conflicting deadlines, we create and compare timelines so that we can dedicate the appropriate attention to each project. When interim deadlines for feedback, as an example, are missed, we have to scramble to find something else to work on for the day we’d committed to your work. And the next day we probably have another project booked on a deadline, and the next day another – which means we might not be able to reallocate time to your project for a couple of days. In this simple example, the whole schedule is now pushed two days when a deadline is missed by one day.

Of course, we can make up some time when we can, and build in some buffer, but there’s only so much flexibility. We always try to do our part to deliver drafts when we say you will, but that’s only half the battle. In order to stick to the original schedule, we need your help by providing feedback on time.

Keeping up with your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Myspace, Friendster, or Geocities (anybody?) accounts can be a lot of work. Indeed, a lot of people find it overwhelming to have to maintain and share content on these sites, but it doesn’t have to be a hassle if you play your cards right.

Mashable! shares five tips to help you stay at the top of your curation game, but it’s the top two that people struggle with most. Curation is key; you either have a sloppy mass of content to wade through, not unlike the home of a hoarder, or you have a neat, well-edited collection, like that of a fine art museum. Don’t just throw a bunch of links and articles up like so much paint on Jackson Pollack’s canvas (after all, even he had a method). Remember Ashton Kutcher’s remark about Joe Paterno’s dismissal? A little bit of fact-checking and editing goes a long way.

Consistency is also hugely important. It does not mean posting status updates on Facebook 12 times a day. Consistency means respecting readers’ time by keeping to a schedule so that you neither inundate them with information nor post too infrequently to make it worthwhile for them to keep checking your site. Follow these simple steps, and you’ll have the rapt attention of your readers in no time.

The Heartland Institute, a conservative group that believes global warming is a hoax, recently launched a billboard campaign featuring Theodore J. Kaczynski (the unabomber) with the headline “I still believe in global warming.” Heartland’s ad men were just getting warmed up, and planned to feature Bin Laden and other mass killers. It turns out that even people who support the Heartland Institute’s anti-science beliefs were outraged and demanded it be taken down. And it was. But the damage was done, no matter how you look at it. Those who believe that climate change is real and man-made, which is now the majority of Americans according to the latest research might feel a tad insulted to be compared to the biggest mass murderers in history. And just because the billboard isn’t still flashing, doesn’t mean it’s dead. The story is all over the Interwebs, reminding everyone that the Heartland Institute is staffed by dodos. On the other hand, there are no doubt many people who are cheering the campaign, glad that somebody has taken the gloves off to battle the environmentalists. All this has happened before, of course: launch an outrageous ad, then pull it in mock-surprise when people object, while the campaign keeps getting legs on the Internet. In the case of the Heartland billboard, however, I don’t think they ever envisioned a backlash. Who knows? I just wish those of us named Theodore would get a break once in a while.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of meeting the President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, while traveling in Iceland, and after hearing him talk I was madder than ever at the US fossil fuel industry. Grimsonn credits his nation’s relatively rapid recovery from the financial crisis largely on their use of domestic, unlimited, 100% clean and renewable geothermal energy.

Ted Page and his wife, Nancy, with the President of Iceland.

Meanwhile, our economy continues to sputter, rich fossil fuel companies continue to get richer, and climate change keeps getting worse. The whole thing makes my blood boil like lava. Mr. Grimsson, let’s talk soon, and get this fixed. Maybe we could meet for lunch at Iceland’s Blue Lagoon – a geothermal power plant that doubles as a spa.

No kidding – check out this live webcam. The place is awesome!

Check out this short film for sports equipment maker Easton Sports:

They took 100 GoPro cameras (those tiny, inexpensive HD cameras that skateboarders and extreme sports people have been using for the past couple of years) and gave them to kids playing team sports. Mounted on themselves and their gear, they give a view of sports you’ve never really seen before. It’s not perfect, but it’s still awesome.

This, to me, is a fantastic example of crowdsourcing raw content, then making something remarkable with it. Too often, crowdsourced content means a lot of not very good pieces with the needle-in-a-haystack occasionally brilliant one. By controlling the editing, and letting the crowd provide the raw footage (with, no doubt, some help in setting up and positioning the cameras), the agency and production company were able to get the best of both worlds.

Nice job. This piece rocks. I’m grabbing my gear and getting out on the ice right now.

No matter how you slice it, the vast majority of traditional advertising is driven by the media plan. “I need 20 million impressions from men 25-40 who make more than $45,000 a year.” In other words, which eyeballs do I want to reach (men 25-40) and where can I find a bunch of them (Facebook, or watching Family Guy). The last step is making the actual ad, the content you want them to watch. This seems backwards to me, and kind of insulting to your customer.

So what if instead of putting the vast majority of your resources into buying space to force your target audience to watch your message, you started by asking yourself, “what would my audience actually want to watch if I weren’t forcing them to do so?” Shouldn’t we first think about what they want to watch, then make THAT instead?

If you have a product or service to sell, think more like the people making the TV shows and less like the people making the advertisements. Tell a great story, a story where your message organically drives part of the storyline, then use a little advertising to promote it (just like a movie studio promotes their films).

There are several advantages here. First, you can’t make anybody watch anything,especially if they have a DVR. Second, if you’re not restricted to 30 seconds, you can get beyond the superficial message and engage more deeply with your customers. Third, if you take the care to make something they really want to watch, they’ll probably help you spread the word by sharing it with their friends. And fourth, it is MASSIVELY less expensive.

This is kind of a big move. I get it. So just dip your toe in the water. Take 2% of your media budget. Use half to make some great entertaining web content, and half to promote it through online ads and social media. if it works even marginally better than those last few spots you took out of rotation, you’re going to be a hero. An innovator. A genius.

And let’s fact it – that last 2% is the crappiest space in your media buy anyway – are you really going to miss it?

A few weekends ago, I worked on a set for a short film that some of my classmates were involved in. Although the writer, producer and much of the crew attended Emerson, it wasn’t a class related project, just a film everyone involved really wanted to make. I met with the director prior to shooting, and he was clearly knowledgeable, passionate and focused, exactly what anyone hopes a director will be. So, I was quite surprised when someone later informed me that he didn’t go to school with us—because he was a junior in high school.

If no one had told me he was several years younger than everyone else on set, I would have had no idea. And once I found out, it took a little while to adjust to the idea of a seventeen-year-old running a set. But here’s the thing: filmmaking is no longer just for people with a film degree or a ton of money. As digital cameras get better and better, equipment of higher quality is becoming more available to more people than they ever have been before. If a kid has a part-time job and the ability to save some money, he can get his hands on a DSLR that takes high-quality video.

With this barrier broken, the importance of storytelling becomes even greater. It’s not enough to just make something that looks good—anyone can do that. What made the director I worked with remarkable for his age wasn’t his access to high quality equipment, it was his focus, skill, and professionalism, which is something not many people his age possess. I know I certainly didn’t when I was seventeen. That’s where working with professionals (like Captains of Industry!) is pivotal. Everyone may be able to access the technology to make something look good, but it takes creativity, experience, and professionalism to create something with a deeper value. In the end, it’s not the equipment you have that makes you a filmmaker, it’s understanding what to do with it.

You can generate content for your website or to market your business from just about anything. We at Captains like to test out various pieces of equipment. Recently we put some audio equipment through a set-up: a shotgun mic, an omni-directional lav mic, and a directional lav mic located in a small hard-surfaced room with interview subject stuck close to the wall and with simulated loud room noise / walla walla (a situation we actually found ourselves for a client’s press event).

Equipment tests like this are informative, usually somewhat boring, and very rarely sexy. But when is a simple “camera test” not just a camera test but a beautifully crafted piece of visual storytelling? When the cool folks of the Boston Creative Pro User Group—the Bérubé’s, Rick Macomber, Ben Eckstein and gang—get together on rainy night and “play” with the new Canon C300 Cinema EOS Camera.

The result is the fine short film, “Hustle”:

And like we spoke of previously on the Captains blog – the BCPUGers have also expanded on the media assets and mined the experience of the shoot and Rob Bessette’s post-prod process to tell the backstory of how they got their footage to dance. Just another great example of turning what your business does every day into content that can help engage your customers and market your business.

If you live on planet Earth, have interactions with other humans, and are under the age of 127, you were probably exposed to the catchiest song in the history of music sometime in the past two months. No, I’m not talking about “Never Gonna Give You Up,” I’m referring to “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen.

If you actually don’t know what I’m talking about you’re officially a part of the most exclusive club in America: people who haven’t heard “Call Me Maybe” yet are capable of reading blog posts.

Anyway, the most remarkable thing about the evolution of this song has little to do with its musical qualities, and more to do with the power of social media.

To give some background, Carly Rae Jepsen (former contestant on Canadian Idol) released the song on September 20th, 2011. The song was largely ignored by the general public, and nobody knew who Carly was. But one tweet and one youtube video later, the song exploded.

In February, Justin Beiber, along with a few semi-famous friends, recorded a home video with the song in the background. He proceeded to tweet about the song, and a few months later the video has 33 million views on youtube, and the official music video has 28 million views. The song itselfexperienced an unheard-of level of exposure on college campuses and among the younger social media-savvy population.

The song is undoubtedly very catchy, so why did it not take off the moment it was released in September of 2011? Furthermore, what can we learn from the medium through which the song was popularized? Song popularity is traditionally driven by radio charts, not Youtube and Twitter.

The argument could be made that the viral and somewhat underground nature of the song’s exposure drove its popularity far more than the music or lyrics. In other words, is the medium as important as the content? Perhaps.

The success of “Call Me Maybe” shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed as just another internet meme. Imagine a world where musical success is driven more by Youtube videos and trending topics on Twitter, than Sony Records and Clear Channel.