As a creative marketing guy, I love a good idea. In fact, I’ve spent many hours sitting in conference rooms brainstorming with teammates to come up with them. So when I first saw Verizon Wireless’ big new campaign called Share America – I was instantly engaged. It is a great concept involving an up and
Continue reading »It is Thanksgiving day and you’re probably thinking about food. Or spending time with family. But one thing you won’t be able to avoid is hearing about all the great retail deals. Thanks to early store openings and a relentless marketing machine promoting all the deals – there is a growing backlash against the commercialization
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If it seems like everyone has some advice to share about being an entrepreneur, it is because they do. The trouble often starts from trying to figure out what advice to really pay attention to. The method most of us use is to look at someone’s track record. If they have started or sold a
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When I was 17 years old, I wanted to be a playwright. Deciding that I was going to try and learn from within, I landed an internship at the well known Studio Theater in Washington DC. It was 1992, and they were producing a show called Spunk – which adapted several short stories from Zora
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Groucho Marx once quipped, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” I always feel his sentiment just a little bit everytime I agree to speak at any event because I am passionate about trying to share the stage with people much smarter than I am. So when
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I was on a short flight from NY back to DC yesterday and opened a copy of the NY Times to find a full page ad with the simple declaration “Marketing is BS.” Beneath that attention-grabbing headline, Adobe called this “Myth #1” as part of their campaign to speak to marketers and business people about
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For Nate Dern, the unlikely path to acting micro-stardom would come from a simple three letter catchphrase that most people would barely consider a word. As the artistic director of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York and a sociology PhD student at Columbia University, Nate had spent years auditioning for different roles. In
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Several weeks ago I saw a television special about television (no, that wasn’t a typo!). It was one of those programs where they look at old shows and interview the actors about what their lives are like now. When they came to Garry Shandling, the former star of the self-created Larry Sanders Show – this
Continue reading »Business is unpredictable, but its amazing how much time is spent in corporate marketing and PR teams trying to anticipate and avoid any sort of unplanned events. So yesterday when an Air France flight had to divert from landing in Beirut to an unplanned landing in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Unfortunately for them, payments
Continue reading »Last week I had the chance to deliver a keynote presentation at a merchandising event put on for some of the largest retailers in the US by the trade association Shop.org. I shared some trends built upon consumer behaviour and incorporating some startups that are getting a lot of attention right now. I don't share
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