I mentioned Robert Polet back in July.

Here is some smart things he said in his Wall Street Journal interview today.
- The brand is always more important than the designer because the brand will stay with us, with our children, our children’s children and out into infinity. (Visionary/dedicated to the brand’s core values)
- The business side is intimately linked to creative. The CEO and the creative director have this particular relationship in actually marrying the creative and the business sides. (Be creative while not losing focus of the core business objectives)
- We never actually think about defending anything. The strategy of all our brands is to make sure that we go up-market as much as possible. You have more people who aspire to be part of the brand. That allows you to sell products at an entry price-point by buying, for example perfume and sunglasses, then shoes or ready-to-wear, then jewelry. (Be in tune with the market and your consumer)
- We get real data-market surveys from the Luxury Institute in the U.S., for example and continue to monitor the health of our brands. (Support your actions with concrete data)

What is interesting here is Mr. Polet came from Unilever’s Ice Cream and Frozen food division in 2004 to take over for Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole. Yet in the 2nd quarter this year sales rose 7.7%, faster growth than at bigger rival LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Between the Fortune and WSJ piece I think you get the idea that Robert Polet is a person who understands the importance in creativity that is free to stretch while remaining focused on the business objective, staying loyal to your brands value, having a vision, in-depth knowledge of your consumer and backing up your business decisions with concrete data.

You are what you watch – A cool NY Times piece discussing the enormous amount of choices on TV today. Captures the scripted marketplace well. “It’s a rich television age and a demanding one. The selection is now so plentiful and fragmented and good.”

TV Shows Getting Ambitious – A good piece in Variety discussing the soaring budgets in television and the challenges that lay ahead of this business. This is why Quarterlife’s performance is going to be so darn interesting to me. “Rolling the dice on a new series is a bigger gamble for studios than ever before, especially at a time when studio execs are fretting about how the new digital-world-order of viewers having insta-access to TV repeats via iTunes downlaods, DVRs and DVD box sets will eat into the long-term profit potential of shows in traditional syndication. Heck, media execs aren’t even sure there’ll be a traditional TV syndication marketplace in five years time.”

Q&A: CBS Interactive’s Quincy Smith – Mr. Smith says some smart things about the online marketplace and it carving out an interesting digital business for CBS. “The object of the game is multi-partner, nonexclusive, open syndication of content, meaning in this new world where people can watching anything, anywhere, anytime on any screen, you want to go t where those eyeballs are, as opposed to mandate that they go directly to CBS.com, for example.”

ABC Digital Chief: Networks Still Matter – Mr. Chen discusses ABC’s approach to the digital space. “Part of the reason for ABC’s approach: its online video advertising strategy is built into is video player, which inserts occasional commercial breaks in full-length episode programming and requires viewers to click to continue. This provides marketers with strong confirmation their ads are being watched. And that, in turn allows ABC to charge more per ad impression than it could with a conventional pre-roll or mid-roll video ad.”

BBH’s Kevin Roddy talks about the Axe Branded Entertainment project premiering on MTV called GAME KILLERS. Wall Street Journal did a feature on this project a few weeks back. It was difficult for MTV and BBH to find common ground but apparently they came to terms and everyone is pleased with the final product. What I always want to know is, how effective is this strategy for the brand?

Alley Insider hates on NBC/News Corp joint venture (Hulu). See why here and here. I wonder, what if Hulu let users do THIS (Veoh/Letting viewers create their own college football highlight reels) on their site with some of the content in their library? It could be a creative way to leverage their library online by giving consumers a reason to interact with the content, share their reels with their friends and engage with the brand/site at a high level.

MySpace Posturing? Jealous that Facebook is the media darling of the moment Tom and Chris? Go get that cheddar and leverage that platform. (MySpace to Discuss Effort to Customize Ads and MediaPost’s thought on it here and the Fortune puff piece here.)

Rumor on the street is that this is the future of online advertising.

I like the sound of this Nissan, Yahoo!, MTV deal. Nice branded entertainment play here, solid execution will be key. As I mentioned above, I am curious to know how it translates to sales or getting people to go from watching the content to directly interacting with the brand via Nissan’s website or local dealership.

Taken from Piers on PSFK:

The Economist runs an article that analyzes the growth and success of Apple. They say that Apple has at least four important wider lessons to teach other companies:

Not invented here, and very welcome
The first is that innovation can come from without as well as within. Apple is widely assumed to be an innovator in the tradition of Thomas Edison or Bell Laboratories, locking its engineers away to cook up new ideas and basing products on their moments of inspiration. In fact, its real skill lies in stitching together its own ideas with technologies from outside and then wrapping the results in elegant software and stylish design.

For the needs of the user
Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity and ease of use.

Stay hungry, stay foolish
Listening to customers is generally a good idea, but it is not the whole story. For all the talk of “user-centric innovation” and allowing feedback from customers to dictate new product designs, a third lesson from Apple is that smart companies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today.

Fail Wisely
The Macaintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa, an earlier product that flopped; the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple’s original music phone, produced in conjunction with Motorola.

From Peep the Technique:

The June 19th edition of Business Week is focused on innovation champions. See Marissa Mayer’s (Google) 9 notions of innovation.

1. Ideas come from everywhere – Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team
2. Share everything you can – Every idea, every project, every deadline – it’s all accessible to everyone on the intranet
3. You’re brilliant, we’re hiring – Founders Lenny Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience
4. A license to pursue dreams – Employees get a “free” day a week. Half of new launches come from this “20% time”
5. Innovation, not instant perfection – Google launches early and often in small beta tests before releasing new features widely
6. Don’t politic, use data – Mayer discourages the use of “I Like” in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics
7. Creativity loves restraint – Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines
8. Worry about usage and users, not money – Provide something simple to use and easy to love. The money will follow.
9. Don’t kill projects, morph them – There’s always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged.

NOTE: What are the similarities here? I believe what is stands out are the elements of dreaming big and reaching high, understanding the process of innovation, being open minded to the possibilities, never discounting anything and unrelenting devotion to the user experience, which probably is the most important here. The need to create a dynamic product is all about the interface, functionality and creative wit of the product. Good notes to be taken here for companies looking to create game changing products and businesses.

Some cool quotes from one Sally Singer (Editor of Vogue) from 032c magazine:

“Dita [Dita Von Teese] is willing to look perfect, and most of us are afraid to be perfect. Fashion now is all about being undone. Because undone is young.”

“It’s an approach to the world that’s inherently optimistic. It’s inherently kind of pro-active. It’s about creating and sustaining an approach to the world that is more interesting, more vibrant, and probably more beautiful in conventional and unconventional ways, and more captivating, more fundamentally captivating than what we started with at the beginning of the day.” – her answer on what it is to make something Vogue.

“Good design probably references the best of something we’ve seen before, matched with up-to-date engineering.”

“In that sense, I am very Vogue, because I am very optimistic, and yet I don’t think I’m entitled to anything. I don’t come to the world with expectations. I come to the world thinking: there is a set of options, what is the most interesting way to manipulate them?”

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

I like this Heron Preston online word from the streets of young creative hustlers. Scope out his blog here and see his YouTube page. Here are some of his fresh interviews.

Brought to you by Dazed and Confused magazine, a publication I highly suggest for people trying to stay up on the latest in fashion and other emerging artistic endeavors.

Shape of Broad Minds – A group of impressive hip hop artists with Jneiro Jarel spearheading the attack. Listen to Changes and OPR8R.

Tiny Masters – These youngsters out of Britain are straight dropping it. 11 and 13 year old siblings who are behind described as “cute” but are not responding too kindly to that kind of critique, they’re taking this racket seriously. Good/fun stuff.

Effi Briest – This all-female group are dropping some interesting music.

Blood Red Shoes - Although they hate the comparison, they can be easily viewed as the British version of the White Strips? Who cares?! I dig their sounds baby!