This post on TalentZoo is excellent food for thought.

I’ve always had mad love for history. Was half a credit shy of adding a history major to my undergrad (focus on 20th century American popular culture). Spend way too much time watching historical documentaries (particularly love anything around culture, media, and technology). Read almost exclusively non-fiction, heavy on the biographies (my favourite remains Lou Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance – his commentary on performance-driven culture will blow my mind ’til the end of time). Am crazy for Mad Men. (But seriously! Don Draper is worthy of your time. And, FYI, season one is currently running Sunday nights on CTV).

I think the reason this post rings so true with me is the same reason that I’ve been pointing out the whole “this isn’t a new idea” thing so much lately.

By nature, I’m a student of history and a student of life. I love understanding people and how we engage with our world. I love seeing how our patterns change across media. I love how we respond to different types of content. I love everything around relationship-building and authenticity and conversation. Why? These elements are all central to the human condition and, as a history buff, I’ve seen it play out before me across pages and screens large and small time and time and time again – and I want to see what tiny altered variable can make it play out differently.

This paragraph from Danny’s post is particularly useful:

Yes, advertising is a young person’s industry, and we live in a short-term memory society as it is. But we can use the past to avoid costly mistakes. History, when it comes to advertising and marketing or business in general, should serve as lessons for us. Not to discourage experimentation and innovation, but as a building block to always consider the possibilities and prepare for contingencies.

If you weren’t around for the last wave? That’s okay. But do read about it. And understand it. And learn from their mistakes. Because, as we all know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again, expecting a different result. And the media may be altered, but that doesn’t mean that doing the same thing is going to change the outcome.

Taking real time to understand why things were the way they were the last time around is essential. Because – cliché alert! – it’s actually true what your history teacher said: if you don’t understand it, you’re bound to repeat it.