“Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. [...] One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t. [...] People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No.“

On a related note, It struck me recently how there are more and more companies selling experiences as gifts.

“I’m in a permanent state of intellectual erection.” – Salvador Dali

So I’ve decided to do the next best thing and brain dump a few interesting facts, moments, or whatever you want to call them, in a list.

• Video advertising is the next big thing. Not the 30-sec ad kind, but where you can click on an item in a video clip, like a t-shirt somebody is wearing, and more information displays, where you can amongst other things – buy that same t-shirt.
• VideoClix demonstrated a product that that allows you to do this at the conference, and it works pretty well.
• Microsoft adLab is fairly useful. Even though I’d say only about 5-or so people actually knew about it before the conference. Check out the ‘Demographics Prediction’, ‘Search Funnels’, and ‘Search Volume Forecasting’. Still hard to believe it’s a free offering from Microsoft!
• Digg co-founder Jay Adelson gave a talk on ‘Tapping into the Advertising Potential of New Media’, which was fairly interesting. He played the Fred and Barney smoking Winston’s cigarettes clip. That brought some things in perspective in a funny and surreal way.
• Mike Hudack from blip.tv skipped some of his slides to avoid paparazzi-style sneaky pics being taken of his treasured bar graphs.
• Jim Coudal from ‘The Deck‘ and ‘Coudal Partners‘ gave a very inspiring and funny talk on how things work at The Deck. One 120×90 ad per page per day, and only of services that The Deck have personally tried. That’s it. The advantage? Readers enjoy the clean layout, Advertisers don’t compete for attention on a page, and the site owner gets a fair cut. I was actually looking forward to his talk from the beginning as I had seen him in the viral video, ‘Copy Goes Here‘
• Met some interesting people. Namely Darren Rowse from Problogger, Andrej Nabergoj, and Chris Hart.

Overall it was a very refreshing week away in New York with my cousin Ivan. I’ll upload a few pictures on here soon.

In actual fact, all of those things are pleasures, not happiness itself. If you’re not familiar with the difference, then I’ll sum it up for you: too much pleasure becomes un-pleasurable. Just listen to that good song over and over and you’ll see what I mean.

Happiness on the other hand “is not linked to an activity”, argues Dr Matthieu Ricard — “Happiness is a state of being”. Dr Ricard has practiced this state of being for over 30 years, and has published a book about it titled ‘Happiness: A guide to developing life’s most important skill‘. Recently The Independent suggested that he may be the happiest man in the world, after they performed a 5-hour brain scan on him.

When he came out, he smiled and remarked “That was like a mini-retreat”.