What keeps Sean Finnegan up at night?
Berens: You mentioned your bookshelf, and you mentioned history, religion and science. I am currently in the middle -- as I usually am -- of about seven books. But, two spring to mind that might interest you. One is a book called "A Perfect Mess" by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, which is about the unacknowledged value of clutter in our lives, and countering Americans' obsessiveness with being tidy.
The other (which is a truly fascinating book) is Daniel Goleman's book, "Social Intelligence," which is a follow-up to "Emotional Intelligence" from 10 years ago. It is a remarkable book and I am thinking of asking Goleman to come and chat with our iMedia audience at some point. What is on your shelf? What are you excited about? What have you really enjoyed lately?
Finnegan: I love biographies and autobiographies. One of the books I am reading right now is called "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage," by Alfred Lansing. Shackleton was Irish-born, so there might be a little bit of a connection there, and he set out on a series of expeditions that met with unbelievable challenges. The book is about his need to rise to the call of leadership, to motivate a team of men not to give up and to persevere through ungodly conditions.
Omnicom has a training program called Omnicom University that is taught by Harvard business school professors for senior managers. And the next book on deck, recommended by the University professors, is "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. It's about focusing, being "in the now" and taking every interaction, every instance of what you are currently involved with and just going deep on it, even at the expense of other matters.
In this age of a headline world where there are 62 ways to read the same piece of news, or translate information, or communicate to the variety of subsets of people in your life, I think it is pretty hard to focus. When you finally do sit down and stare into someone's eyes and get the true meaning and content of what they are delivering, it has real value, and it is probably a lost art that needs to be revived.
Berens: The currency of that kind of attention -- that total attention -- is becoming increasingly precious in an age of multi-tasking, or more characteristically, I think, an age of what Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention," where it is hard to focus on one particular thing. A lot of people think that by doing many things at once they are somehow getting more done, although, there are some new studies that are suggesting that it does not actually work that way. I am certainly going to go look up "The Power of Now," and I will make sure that we link to it somewhere in this interview.
Let's wrap up with the pessimist and optimist questions. What keeps you up at night? There is so much changing; so much going on. What is it that you worry about?
Finnegan: One thing is the speed in which we need to have everybody in our global network operating on a digital level. We have -- all of us, in our agencies -- people who go home, have a DVR, have an MP3 player, have a gaming console, certainly are texting, and are living the digital life. And, what we need to do is continue to translate that intuition, and that interest, into their day-to-day tactical responsibilities. We have now enacted a series of planning and executional programs to enable that.
What keeps me up at night? We have started to break down the walls, but how do we continue to break them down? How do we involve everybody? Clients included, of course. There is truly an opportunity and a need for the people with any sort of digital experience, or intuition, to involve all parties into their respective responsibilities. The days of "you do this and I do that" are thankfully waning. And, this is all coming from a structure and philosophy we need to have in order to best service our clients who are clamoring for more of a dialogue with a very fickle and fragmented customer.
Berens: It does sound like you are counting ceiling cracks from time to time, worried about that one. On the other hand, I still think that it is always worth saying (and, I say it frequently when I have a captive audience) that the internet is the best thing to happen to the human species since electricity. It has changed how people communicate -- democratized communication and media -- in phenomenal ways that are only growing more profound. It is an extraordinarily exciting time to be alive, and to be working in media.
And so, let's end on a happy note! What is it that excites you when you look at it and think, "Boy, two more years and that is really going to happen!"
Finnegan: Right now, I am excited about the power of metrics and analytics. Historically, this is something in our industry that has been an isolated mystery, executed by a few people who were never really allowed to spread their wings into the greater operation. When you can sit down and architect and guide billions of impressions into concise analytics, and then to be able to extrapolate and translate, and make use of behaviors and start to get a sense of what is truly going on -- even the freakonomics of a particular situation -- that is truly cool and interesting.
And it all leads towards an ensuing accountability that we are going to continue to have to abide by and embrace and appreciate across media. In the future, clients will be requesting the same level of insight and accountability into traditional media as they do in digital, today.
Berens: That is a great place to end. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today.
Finnegan: Thanks, Brad.
Brad Berens is the editor in chief and chief content officer for iMedia Communications. Read full bio.