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A look at Blank's innovation
The big idea
story Meghan McCloskey | photo Tim Wallace | photo illustration Ben Mangin
Through the swarm of tourists, Zach Blank eagerly made his way
down 53rd Street, toward the Museum of Modern Art. His lanky frame was clothed in a black button-down dress shirt, a matching undershirt, and Banana Republic jeans in a light wash. His chocolate hair exploded in untamed curls. The University of Oregon had sent him to New York as the first-ever Bedbury Scholar, backed by a successful alumnus who funded his attendance at industry conferences that would prepare him for a future in digital advertising. Blank’s ingenuity and brilliance in electronic media had landed him the scholarship.
As he stood near the front of the museum, Blank noticed a short, poised man move toward him. The man spoke with a lisp, and the large medallion on his hemp-like necklace glistened when he moved — it was the same one he’d worn at the 2007 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Talks that Blank had watched and analyzed so many times. The man had pioneered the study of human-to-computer relationships in 2006, and his newest project was on exhibit at the museum. He was Blank’s idol.
“Jonathan Harris?” Blank asked. The man turned. They shook hands.
In January 2008, Blank began a project modeled after Harris’ 2006 program, We Feel Fine, a website that collects people’s feelings
and studies self-expression. Today, Blank’s project-in-progress taps into search tools and scans the world’s newly posted blog entries for ideas — about anything. His program tracks blogging websites such as Blogger and WordPress, looking for sentences containing the words what if. When it finds a fitting phrase, the program stores it in a database, along with details from the author’s profile page. The compiled information is then displayed on a website just seconds after the authors publish the thoughts to their blogs.
their ideas expand in the world.
Blank envisions a design where his findings are displayed artistically. One aspect of the site will have a spinning centrifuge of sentences that responds to the user’s mouse placement, prominently displaying one idea at a time. “The presentation is cutting edge,” Blank says. “The website doesn’t have any allure without it. If it were just a big table with all this data, it wouldn’t be as interesting.” When the project is finished, users will be able to use filter tools and categorize the contents to discover the authors’ demographics and the time of day when the ideas were recorded. Blank will be one of the first people to publish such an application.
He anticipates that the website will allow advertising students and professionals to understand what their audiences think about various ideas because it will provide raw, candid opinions. The project may even help ad professionals better develop their target demographics. Blank hopes this knowledge will further promote diversity and creativity in advertising. “It will make rapid development of ideas possible,” he says. “[Professionals] can use it to instantly see how
[their] ideas expand in the world.”
Blank’s role as a digital innovator places him firmly in a niche for young, savvy college students and graduates worldwide. In February 2004, former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, the trendy social networking site that connects users with messages, photos, games, social causes, and events. Today, at only twenty-three years old, Forbes estimates Zuckerberg’s worth at $1.5 billion. In 2005, twenty-two-year-old Stanford University dropout Sam Altman founded Loopt, a cell phone social mapping service to track the locations of friends. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Altman one of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs.
Blank predicts his Idea Project won’t make billions by itself, so his goal is to become a recognized figure and travel the world speaking about similar projects. “I love teaching,” he says, “and people pay to watch those talks. That’s where the money is.” But profit isn’t his only motivator. “A goal of mine will be to get invited to a TED Talk,” he says. Each year at the TED conference, which sells out a year in advance, fifty of the world’s most innovative thinkers share their ideas in front of one thousand people.
UO advertising professor Deb Morrison believes Blank will get there. “His learning curve is a beautiful trajectory,” she says. “Many people are content to just take things in, but he’s taking them
in and inventing things — literally and figuratively — and that’s huge.” It’s the main reason he was chosen for the Bedbury scholarship: “We wanted
someone who was at the top of his game.”
Blank first became interested in building websites when he was ten years old. His parents had given him and his thirteen-year-old brother, Seth, a Packard Bell for Hanukkah, and it sat upstairs in the corner of their playroom. Each day, after his homework was finished — that was the rule — Blank would concentrate on the screen for hours, assembling and perfecting the many websites he’d created about skateboarding, complete with tricks, photos, and directories for users to locate skate shops and parks nationwide. “It all started with both of us being interested in [web] stuff, going through our dad’s books and goofing off together,” Seth says, “and he’s the one who carried it on. The web thing has always been a constant, no matter what else has changed in his life.”
In 2003, Blank dove into more advanced web programming when he and his father opened Rock Gear, an online equipment vendor and virtual community for rock climbers. By 2004, Blank was programming the site with almost no help. The store closed in 2006, but it didn’t hinder Blank’s newfound enthusiasm for programming.
His first big break came in 2007. While searching Craigslist for job postings, he came across a woman who needed someone to create a simple website for her church; Blank did it for $100. His professionalism astounded her, and she offered him another job building a network for the online classes she taught. He created a site that charged participants $300 to sign up for her sessions. Within the first week, it brought in $13,000. Clients began contacting Blank to construct websites for their businesses: a Portland hair salon, an organic cookie manufacturer, a luxury fur company, and a Portland catering group. Today, he grosses about $30,000 per year while going to school.
“The money really gets reinvested right away,” Blank says. He grabs his iPhone and declares, “This is work” — he uses it to communicate with clients — “but it’s also kind of fun.” He treats himself to luxuries such as a 15-inch MacBook Pro and a brand new Nissan Xterra, but he also pays for a large chunk of his tuition. Blank’s Idea Project will bring in money based on the number of people who click the advertisements on his site. “The advertisers have deep pockets; they pay a lot of money for those. And [they] give that money straight to me, which is nice.”
Blank’s industrious lifestyle doesn’t allow time for relaxing. “I have very little life outside of work,” he says. During his freshman year at UO, he went to the Student Recreation Center nearly every day to climb the rock wall. Now, he admits, most days he’d rather work on his project or on his clients’ websites than climb or spend time with friends. He only makes it to the rock wall once a week. Even when he doesn’t have class or homework, he works in the journalism school for about six hours per day.
It was after 1 A.M. on Thursday, February 7, 2008, when Blank realized that collecting instantaneous ideas from around the world was nearly impossible. He hunched over his desk in annoyance, his eyes burning a hole into a 23-inch monitor. He rummaged through line after line of seemingly frivolous code; where was the data he needed? Phrases like “I have a great idea” and “that was a bad idea” meant nothing. Desperate, he e-mailed Jonathan Harris and asked him how to collect relevant sentences. Harris wrote back the next day only to say that he built his own program — and good luck. “I kind of thought, ‘Well shit, what I am going to do now?’”
Blank worried he wouldn’t finish before graduation. “Time is my biggest fear because I have so much on my plate,” says Blank, who must balance his time with clients and deadlines and flying to and from New York for job interviews. But after fiddling with his search tools for more than a month, Blank captured his first string of relevant data: “It might be a good idea to give some thought to avoiding sources of indoor pollution.” It was something, but wasn’t great.
“I feel confident that I can collect good data,” he says. “I feel confident that I can display it in an artistic way. But I don’t feel confident that I can distill that data down to exactly what the idea is.” To do this, Blank must teach his computer to perform a human task: recognize a big idea.
In April 2008, he met with Dejing Dou, a professor in the UO’s Computer Information Sciences program. Dou had a hard time understanding Blank’s American accent, and after repeating the word idea multiple times, Blank scribbled it on the whiteboard in Dou’s office. The professor eventually grasped the concept, and asked Blank, “How many years do you have to work on this?” “Years?”
Blank panicked. “I have a month.”
Dou explained that Blank needed to decipher the patterns in which people articulate their ideas and “explain” them to the computer. Blank realized that people don’t usually use the word idea when expressing their revelations; they are more apt to preface their thoughts with what if. He had been working for months on a dead-end project. “It was really discouraging,” he says.
Today, Blank reads multiple books about “machine learning” while he watches what if sentences roll into his database. He studies their patterns, jotting down the ones that seem consistent. Blank toils at this task on the third floor of Allen Hall, home to the UO’s School of Journalism and Communication, at a round desk in a corner that he calls his “second home.” His friends and classmates routinely stop by the table that they’ve coined “Zach’s office” to say hello, slap high-fives, or chat before class begins. They know about his project, but they don’t realize that he plans to change creative advertising.
The Idea Project will get Blank one step closer to his goal: working for a New York ad agency as an interaction designer, creating the user experience for web pages. “I love doing these big projects. I feel like I’ve never learned anything more from doing a single thing,” Blank says. “The magnitude and difficulty of [the project] used to be a reservation for me, but as I get deeper into it and start flowing along, that fear kind of recedes.”
His goal is to have one million users per day within the first month his site is published. For publicity, he’ll simply rely on word of mouth. “Interest alone will guide users to the site,” he says.
After a pause, he adds: “It’s a really cool idea.”