Your Baby Is (Still) Ugly: My 2013 Deck About Bad Decisions Still Holds

November 29, 2023 by Dave Haynes

I was banging around YouTube last night, looking for a saved video related to travel plans, when I stumbled on my own little channel of produced videos … and this now 10-year-old presentation I did for a conference.

It has an elegant title: Your Baby’s Ugly. Basically my way of getting out uncomfortable stuff that someone in the industry needed to say. It was at a DailyDOOH conference in NYC (look closely at the baby photo).

I watched it again, and the funny part is, most of what I was talking about still holds true.

I’d say my one partial miss was suggesting short-form videos – back in 2013 they were called Vines – would come and go. They did. But then TikTok came on the scene, and that’s way more than a passing fancy.

This is the presentation deck, with me narrating via a crappy, pre-podcasting microphone. The Preset Group was a small consultancy I was involved in back in the early 2010s. We long since wound that down.

A different note: here’s what DSE looked like 10 years ago.

And going even further back, here’s a DSE Mixer in Las Vegas from 2011. I’d completely forgotten I did it one year at a brewpub in the old Monte Carlo, now the Park.

  1. Jason Cremins says:

    Very much still relevant, Dave. TikTok replaces Vine but other than that you could give the exact same presentation today.

    I have shared with our commercial team on Slack as a ‘must watch’ and to ensure the key points are considered for prospective and current customers.

  2. Wes Dixon says:

    Great stuff Dave – Right Message – Right Place – Right Time – makes for a pretty baby!

Leave a comment