Essays that explore the rapidly changing business world, through the lens of advertising and marketing, with special insight on SEO, Advertising Agencies, Lead Generation, Demand Generation, Process, Customers, Targeting, Millennials and more.
Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 3 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 18 months.
Let’s talk for a moment about Dungeons and Dragons . That’s right, the game that was a sensation in the 1970s. A sort of board game involving wizards and warriors and all manner of mythological, Tolkien -and-fantasy relevant species. In it you and the other players created personalized characters who would then go on various quests or adventures through a world drawn up by the game’s host (called…
I can’t get out of my head something that my friend Faris Yakob said a while back that I scribbled down but can’t find the source for. (Oh well, sorry Faris). He was talking about that perennial exercise of companies to identify what their “mission” is, what their “purpose” is. You know. When all the uptights book time at some swanky location so they can let their hair down and get all starry eyed…
So there are these things in language called discourse markers – phrases or even single words that don’t fall neatly into normal parts of speech. They serve primarily to alert the listener to a change in direction (“I’ve been talking about that , but now I’m gonna pivot and talk about this ”) or even to pay attention (“Look out, I’m gonna start talking!”). And you can see why they don’t fit into…
Recently I had the opportunity to judge an advertising awards show. In the past I’ve been asked to look primarily at videos and commercials, but this year I was asked to look at a lot of writing . And I usually try to avoid judging writing because life is short and I don’t want to spend what little time I have left reading bad work. If that makes me an elitist snob, I am absolutely okay with that.…
In Charles Duhigg ’s terrific 2012 book The Power of Habit , the author discusses – at some depth - the observations of football coach Tony Dungy , and his experiments with breaking down habits into their component parts in order to alter behaviour. But one of the things that I think was lost in all the discussion of Dungy’s insights, was his basic understanding that football players in general,…
I get it. I get why clients want to. They’re spending a lot of money on something they don’t really understand and the last thing in the world that they want is to be dragged to the “how come room” by their boss. You know, where they have to explain “how come” they spent all this money on a disaster, and “how come” they didn’t stop the agency from going off the rails and “how come” they’re even…
At the end of the popular and successful AppleTV series Ted Lasso , Ted discovers the soccer strategy called “Total Football” which ends up not only solving the problems of his team but also, in a sense, the personal lives of many of the show’s characters as well. Sort of. (Did that give too much away? Hopefully not). And sure, I’m a soccer fan, and sure, in many ways “Total Football”…
The history of American innovation is generally one of people inventing things that the status quo ignores until either the money becomes too big or the status quo feel threatened, or both. At which point the cops are called in to straighten this shit out. Often this is done under the auspices of protecting the goodness and purity of society. Sometimes it actually is. Sometimes it’s just a cash…
I’ve taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, and every time I do, I encounter students bemoaning their classes. “What’s the point of this?” they say “When am I ever gonna use this?” they whine. “Is this gonna help me get a job?” they moan (I hear this last one a lot from their parents as well, for what that’s worth). When they bring these complaints to me, I tell them about the 1946 movie,…
Once upon a time, an agency I admire was advertising for a Chief Creative Officer. So I did what everyone does: I sent them my resume, I tried to connect to key people on Linkedin , I pressured friends who knew their key people to say nice things about me in their general vicinity. You know, the usual. But I also kept thinking – if I was hiring a CCO, what would I want to know? Where they’d…
