Kevin Kelley, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, has some deep thoughts about getting paid in a time where content is increasingly free. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied? There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase …
Everyone Breathe Easy, Mass Marketing Still Works
Duncan Watts is causing a ruckus. Just as Madison Avenue gets its head around niche marketing on a macro scale, the academic Aussie says marketing to so-called Influentials doesn't work. He says the whole idea is bunk and that he has the data to prove it. Watts has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that …
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Rabbits Uncaged
Ed Cotton of Butler Shine & Stern wonders aloud how well equipped clients are to forge ahead in today's decentralized media sphere. Marketing departments need fundamentally new skill sets, new positions/job titles and they are also going to need some smart technology to assist them. Given how little bandwidth most departments have these days, it's safe to assume that there are quite a few brands out there who risk …
Inspiration Move Me Brightly
Music blog, Motel de Mocha, is showcasing a great quote from W.E.B. Du Bois. It's one that creative professionals can certainly relate to. "Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, …
Scarcity Is for Losers
Ian Rogers, VP Video and Media Applications at Yahoo, spoke at the Creative Artists Agency conference in Aspen recently. Here's a small portion of what he said: There is more opportunity in leveraging the scale of the Web than trying to create scarcity. We’ve all been engaged in many attempts at creating scarcity in digital music and none of them have worked. Meanwhile, others have been leveraging the scale of the …
It’s Not What You’re Looking For, But What You Find
Jason Calacanis has some ideas for Twitter monetization. Namely, in feed advertising, SMS advertising and subscriptions. But that's not the interesting part of his post. This is: Ev shouldn't worry about a business model for another two years. Just build the service to *massive* critical mass. Get to 100M users--which is where the service is headed. If the service gets to 100M monthly users it will be worth a couple …
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Picking Up The Pace
One of the things I'm constantly muttering to myself these days is how agencies and their clients need to speed up their creative development processes. Six months is a joke today, at least when it comes to digital. Six days is more like it. Of course, radical change doesn't come easy. Apparently, I'm not alone with this sentiment. Catharine P. Taylor also has some thoughts on it. What I wish for the industry (in …
There’s One for You, Nineteen for Me
"I believe advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable." -Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad at Advertising Age's The Idea Conference While I love the audacity of the above statement, it's important to note that Geek Squad is not above advertising. Far from it. …
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