Tag Archives: marketing

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

Share 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

Are we in a post-branding world?

Share Eco­nomic pres­sure has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion where mar­keters are ask­ing for imme­di­ate results before they ask for per­ceived lux­u­ries like brand recog­ni­tion. Clients are demand­ing met­rics that con­nect mar­ket­ing to sales. Met­rics for things like brand recog­ni­tion are tough to tie to con­crete things like sales and thus to ROI. They’re also push­ing for media

Why your advertising sucks part 5. It’s designed to make you feel good.

Share Too many mar­ket­ing depart­ments spend count­less hours navel gaz­ing, try­ing to find a omni­scient inner-voice. This ora­cle is sup­posed to com­mu­ni­cate who they are as a com­pany and what they need to tell their cus­tomers so that they will finally under­stand the value they offer the world. It never works. Sorry, navel gaz­ers, your belly

Why your advertising sucks part 3: You think people are stupid.

Share Image by byzantin3 via Flickr David Ogilvy said 40 years ago “the con­sumer is not a moron, she’s your wife.” It seems not every­one lis­tened because the indus­try con­tin­ues to insult her. Ogilvy’s quip may be one of the most quoted phrases in mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing but mar­keters often don’t think it applies to

Why your advertising sucks. Part one: Trust.

Share Image by thorin­side via Flickr You prob­a­bly agree that most adver­tis­ing isn’t cre­atively great or even good. From the out­side, one might think it’s a busi­ness filled with dumb, untal­ented peo­ple serv­ing mar­ket­ing depart­ments filled with bean coun­ters who couldn’t care less if their dol­lars are pro­duc­ing a fetid mess. Truth is, too many adver­tis­ing

Shattered. It’s time to re-imagine.

Share I don’t know a sin­gle per­son in my pro­fes­sion of adver­tis­ing, or in an ancil­lary field, who isn’t work­ing much harder for the same or less money then they were a few years ago. Most indus­tries have been hit real hard. But mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing pro­fes­sion­als got it right in the teeth. Mar­ket­ing depart­ments are

27 tips for business tweeters. Or a Twitter cheat sheet.

Share Image via Crunch­Base A few months ago a client asked for a cheat sheet on how to uses social media tools. Here’s more or less what I gave them on Twit­ter. See some­thing impor­tant miss­ing, let me know and I’ll add it. Note: This list isn’t a sub­sti­tute for a strat­egy. Fol­low some good

Top 10 signs you’re a douchey agency type?

Share Image by Tacit Requiem via Flickr Now more than ever, we agency pro­fes­sion­als can­not afford to have cliche’ agency jerks among our ranks. There’s enough ten­sion with clients and providers thanks to the eco­nomic hard­ships. So please, if you rec­og­nize any of these behav­iors as some­thing you or your col­leagues do, please do your

Halfway-serious webvertising predictions for 2010

Share Most pre­dic­tions are either easy, safe, or just wrong. So why not add a few more to the list? I dare you to go on the record on which ones of these are wrong. Mobile Web will become even big­ger. The kids will con­tinue to text at an alarm­ing rate — it’s pri­vate you know. Social

White elephants, advertising, and interactive and social media marketing

Share Today we’re doing our annual white ele­phant gift exchange. It can be a blast if you end up with a nice bot­tle of wine or an iTunes gift card. How­ever, the unlucky end up with gar­den gnomes and REO Speed­wagon LP’s. You never know what you’ll end up with in the end which makes