Tag Archives: Business

From the agency blog: Nine reasons the media revolution is really an evolution.

A recent arti­cle I wrote for my for­mer employer’s blog: Stu­dios are report­ing the biggest Memo­r­ial Day week­end ever.  Why is this impor­tant? The adver­tis­ing indus­try is con­sumed these days with arti­cles about the “chang­ing” media land­scape, detail­ing why it will never be the same. While it’s impor­tant that we keep up with the advance­ment

The General Specific. An ode to generalists everywhere.

It used to be an agency pro­fes­sional was expected to be a gen­er­al­ist in the specifics of mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing. It was under­stood that it’s impos­si­ble for a cre­ative, AE or media plan­ner to know every­thing about every­thing. Sure, you bet­ter know media buy­ing, strat­egy and cre­ative but no one expected a mid-level art direc­tor

It’s OK to be an idiot. Sometimes.

In the age of social media, every­body want to be an expert and nobody ever wants to be an idiot. Ones idiocy could be on their per­ma­nent Twitter-record after all. But I’d like to stand up and say it’s OK to be an idiot, at least some­times. Early in my career I worked with a

Top 10 things about being an advertising copywriter.

More than a few of my posts have been about the dif­fi­cul­ties of work­ing in adver­tis­ing these days. It’s always been a com­pet­i­tive indus­try with high burn out and turn over. But it’s been even worse lately thanks to the econ­omy and the rapid change in tech­nol­ogy. But there are also some really great things

The Rockstar Complex

One of the great things about social media is how it can con­nect you with thou­sands of peo­ple you would oth­er­wise never know. This makes it easy to  be exposed to new things, learn from them and become more informed and smarter about busi­ness every sin­gle day. Indeed, social media has helped to vastly improve

The business of Art

When I first started in the ad busi­ness I couldn’t decide if I was an artist, a crafts­man, or a hack. Now I’ve come to real­ize that I’m all of those at the same time, maybe even on the same day. It may be a cre­ative busi­ness, but busi­ness it is and some­times in busi­ness

Why your advertising sucks part 7. You forgot why you hired your agency.

Some peo­ple who get divorced from or break up with a lover often talk about how they for­got why they ever got involved with their spe­cial some­one in the first place. Or they just won­der what hap­pened to the love. As if it was a mag­i­cal thing that came and went with the wind. These kinds

Gordon Ramsey — Epic Creative Director

I’m not really the biggest fan of his or even watch his shows too often but I do find him a curi­ous spec­ta­cle. Mostly because he exem­pli­fies what so wrong and right about lead­ers in the cre­ative fields. First top five of what’s right wrong with his cre­ative lead­er­ship. 1) Yelling. If you have to

Turning the tables at the agency with social media

Prob­a­bly the most fun thing about the agency embrac­ing social media has been the inter­nal learn­ing around the agency’s blog. Along with Jonathan, I play a cen­tral role in edit­ing and admin­is­trat­ing it. Being a copy­writer, you may think I’m going “yeah, it’s funny to see an AE strug­gle with the blank page.” (It’s not, because