Despite what advertising tells you, supermodels don’t generally eat mile-high bacon burgers. Yet this is exactly the type of fabricated reality we have come to expect from marketing. Often celebrities are hired as spokespeople for products they would clearly never use in real life. Actors in stock photos portray overly airbrushed people faking handshakes while
Continue reading »
I have spent far too much of my life thinking about marketing. It’s not a part of my brain that I can switch off. I see marketing choices in every interaction I have as a customer. I see brands in how people introduce themselves. I even see the branding in airport signs for the baggage
Continue reading »
I have suffered through reading more social media books than you can imagine. Thanks to ten years of blogging and writing several marketing books along the way, I’m clearly on the “official” list of potential book reviewers. Unfortunately after reading dozens of these hastily published books over the years, I find it hard to recall
Continue reading »
Marketers love to celebrate forgettable things. Every week I read magazines covering the most popular marketing campaigns of the moment. Reading about creative campaigns is fun. Yet it is easy to underappreciate the brands who take a long term view. The brands that choose to skip the quest for momentary results can be forgotten in
Continue reading »
There aren’t many people in the world who don’t love a good soccer trick video. And when the World Cup rolls around, you might expect that there will be lots of them flooding YouTube. So over the past few weeks I have seen everything from a freestyle champion soccer player dressing up as an old
Continue reading »
The worst mistake I ever made online was searching for a bow tie. In a world where credit card numbers and identities are being stolen en masse, that probably seems pretty innocent. Outside of the occasional danger of credit card fraud, online shopping is usually a fairly safe activity. Unless you happen to be shopping
Continue reading »As the three hour party RSVP line outside an Austin bar stretches around the corner, no one wonders why a surprising number of people seem to be wearing red clown noses. To my right, a guy walks towards me with a light up disco ball covering his head. He passes nonchalantly by a woman dressed
Continue reading »
This is the week to start saving money. Or losing weight. Or spending more time with family. In other words, it is the week for starting on a new year’s resolution. But there is a force outside your control that may help you either keep that resolution or break it … and that force is
Continue reading »
Every year, Advertising Age magazine publishes a report that looks at the collective results from nine of the most globally respected industry award shows in the advertising industry—from the Cannes International Festival of Creativity to the Clios. The number-one award recipient this year wasn’t a tear-jerking celebrity sports ad or a preview of a hot new holiday
Continue reading »
Sometimes you can’t fix a bad website. It probably took me about five years of leading digital campaigns for brands in a variety of industries before I finally accepted that sad fact. The problem is, when you know what to fix it is easy to think that no one will object to you doing it.
Continue reading »
