Betsy Streeter provides a recommendation on how to let out your creative monster in 2 easy steps.

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• Does Your Content Marketing Make You Different? (myventurepad.com)
• B2B Marketers Need to Look Beyond Decision Makers (thecustomercollective.com)

Slide week is just about over, at least here. I have at least another 4 days heavily invested in PowerPoint.

At the top of the billboard it says “You are my soulmate forever – cep” and the bottom listed a web address http://charlesphillipsandyavaughniewilkins.com/.  People originally thought it was some romantic declaration of love . . . until they clicked through to the website. 

It turns out that the players in this saga are Charles ‘Chuck’ Phillips and YaVaughnie Wilkins.  Chuck is the president of Oracle Corporation and YaVaughnie is his long time mistress with whom he recently ended their affair and returned to his wife.  In what can only be described as one of the best revenge tactics YaVaughnie is estimated to have spent $250,000 on the billboards in New York City (where Chuck and his family lives), San Francisco where Oracle is headquartered, and in Atlanta.  The website, which is temporarily overloaded, has photo galleries, videos, and notes of endearment from Chuck & YaVaughnie’s relationship. 

Chuck is a pretty famous guy.  He was one of Morgan Stanley’s leading technology analysts in the 1990’s and he joined Oracle in 2003 where he played a critical role in the development and execution of Oracle’s aggressive M&A strategy.  I actually met Chuck in the 1990s at an analyst day for Sterling Software when I was a corporate development executive.  One can only imagine the horror Chuck went through when someone called him up Tuesday morning and asked why his picture was on a 100 foot billboard in Times Square.  To be fair the relationship between Chuck and YaVaughnie was well known and Chuck and his wife had filed for divorce in 2008.  Evidently Chuck recently reconciled with his wife and this revenge campaign was YaVaughnie’s way of expressing her displeasure.

Internet and social media revenge campaigns seem to have become the rage recently.  Last year, a brother got revenge on his sister who ratted out to his parents that he had beer in his room – he was grounded for three months.  His revenge?  He rifled through his sister’s room and found a notebook that listed her ‘hook up’ targets and progress to date.  He promptly scanned it and then posted it on Facebook page and tagged most of the young men targeted by his sister.  You can read the whole thing here (NSFW).  Tess Chapin, a 15 year old from Queens, New York recently launched a Facebook group entitled 1000 friends to get tess ungrounded.  Tess was grounded for five weeks for missing her curfew and getting caught drinking.  Rather than take her punishment, she decided to create a Facebook group to protest her parents’ punishment and embarrass them.  The group has subsequently shut down, but Tess’ Internet fame continues, with Google reporting over 31,000 links for the search ‘Tess Chapin Facebook.’ 

Social media technology has enabled anyone to become a publisher of life’s indiscretions.  The UK’s Telegraph reported that some divorce lawyers are seeing one in five divorces involving Facebook these days.  You have to take your hat off to YaVaughnie Wilkins, however, for raising the bar.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Oracle boss admits affair – after billboards of couple appear (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Oracle President Admits Affair After Billboards Appear (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Oracle President Admits Relationship with Woman on Billboard (blogs.wsj.com)
• YaVaughnie Wilkins Gets Revenge on Charles Phillips with Billboard (blippitt.com)
• Billboards and Web Site Were a ‘Gift’ from a Scorned Mistress (gawker.com)
• Oracle CEO Charles Phillips shamed into admitting affair with YaVaughnie Wilkins (inquisitr.com)

I have loved the Christmas season since I was a child.  Even as I approach the ripe age of 50 it is my favorite time of the year.  I remember to this day almost every Christmas from when I was a child.  My parents had a set of wonderful holiday traditions and regardless of the situation we were in our family always had a great Christmas season.  To this day my Mother remembers the Christmas when my three brothers and I served as Altar boys at Mass and my Dad was the lector.  When I was an adult, my father maintained a gift giving tradition of new socks, a ball, a book, and a game for Christmas.  It was certainly a bit corny, but it was just one of those simple traditions we enjoyed at Christmas time. 

Today, I am a blessed man.  I have a wonderful wife and five kids ages 24, 20, 12, 11, & 9.  In 2001 I started a Christmas tradition of my own that has become to known as the Santa Hat Believer’s Club.  The rules of the club are pretty simple.  Starting the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas Day I wear a Santa Hat every time I leave the house, regardless of where I am going.  Also, all of the stations on my car radio are set to the station that plays Christmas music 24 hours a day.  Finally, I end every discussion with someone I meet or talk to with either a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays as appropriate.  Two other members of the club, my daughters Marisa (11) and Jackie (9) do the same thing.  My 12 year old daughter Lily has been a card carrying member for years but decided that in the 7^th grade it wasn’t too cool to be seen wearing a Santa hat to school every day for a month.  My dear wife Leti simply thinks I am kind of nuts.

So why do I do this?  I may be an incurable romantic but in the United States the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when everyone at least tries to set aside their worries and concerns and celebrate the season, their faith, friends, and family.  Random acts of kindness abound and charity and gift giving are the norm, versus the exception.  I enjoy when people chuckle and smile at me when they see me and my children wearing our Santa hats when we are stopped in traffic or we are cruising the aisles at the local grocery store.  More than one person has stopped us and asked about our hats and the ‘Club’ and a few of them vow to adopt the tradition as well.  Wearing the ‘Hat’ helps to remind me to celebrate the season every day

Perhaps nothing sums up better the philosophy of the Santa Hat Believer’s Club than a story from 102 years ago – the infamous ‘Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’.  According to Wikipedia “In 1897, Dr. Philip O’Hanlon, an assistant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was asked by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia (1889–1971), whether Santa Claus really existed. Virginia O’Hanlon had begun to doubt there was a Santa Claus, because her friends had told her that he did not exist.  Dr. O’Hanlon suggested she write to the New York Sun, a prominent New York City newspaper at the time, assuring her that “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” While he may have been passing the buck, he unwittingly gave one of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, an opportunity to rise above the simple question, and address the philosophical issues behind it.”

Here’s the editorial that Church ran on the front page:

“DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’  Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”

“VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

 Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Please accept my best wishes for a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, or Happy Holidays as the case may be.  I encourage you to take out a trial membership in the Santa Hat Believer’s Club.  Dig out your Santa hat and wear it around town for an afternoon and see how many smiles and chuckles you can create.

John Mecke is the Managing Director of DevelopmentCorporate, an Atlanta-based corporate development advisory firm.  He blogs regularly on more serious topics at www.developmentcorporate.com

Sometimes you have to live up to the brand promise.  Not sure how you close that perception gap. Fore!

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dominiccampbell/4165108893/

Those who tell the stories rule society – Plato

I always thought there was a connection between marketing, branding and politics.