One of the exciting things about working in brand communications is the work we do to help launch new companies, and sometimes new products or product categories. A new product is one that needs more than persuasive messaging. With a new product the brand must quickly answer: What is it? How do I use it? [...]
What Are You, A Schoolboy? Ask For The Order.
November 13, 2012 By 3 Comments
This is another guest post from Portlander Peter Levitan, a former ad agency principal and Baby Boomer with a new book out about Boomers “offing themselves” before they go broke. Ad agencies fail in many areas, but not asking for the order takes the cake. How can agencies be so passive when it comes to [...]
Modern Dog Finds Itself In A Copyright Dogfight
November 13, 2012 By 1 Comment
Anyone in a creative business is susceptible to having others take their work, copy parts of it to incorporate into something new, or steal it outright. Seattle design firm, Modern Dog, has found themselves right in the middle of this problem. A design of theirs, featuring illustrations of “Dogs we know” and “Dogs we don’t [...]
Chip Kelly’s Ducks Are Like Chocolate And Peanut Butter
November 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Context is king. Content is queen. I’m cool with that, as long a content is still on the thrown. Reese’s, for one, knows what I am sayin’… Naturally, this :15-second spot plays during college football on Saturday afternoons, and it is a reference to not settling for just one point after a score, when two [...]
What We Can Glean From Karl Rove’s Real Bad Day
November 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Now that we’re on the far side of the election, horribly misleading crapvertising like this has vanished from our public airwaves (although it is still plentiful online): Bloomberg reports that the maker of the ad above is under fire from conservative investors who spent more than $300 million on TV ads that failed to deliver [...]
You Need Quants And Coders To Rule The World
November 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Certain media personalities and business leaders like to claim President Obama has no traction with the business community. Such statements are wrong on two counts. First, we can not talk about the “business community” as a monolith. For most of us in America, are “in business” of one form or another. Secondly, President Obama and [...]
Do We Need Some Nate Silvers In Advertising?
November 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Political campaigns are marketing campaigns. And while Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wasn’t working for a campaign, he was absolutely on the mark in his projections of the election results this year. Anyone who bet on him, as opposed to pundit predictions on TV, made the right move. Advertising is relying increasingly on data and microtargeting [...]
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