Sustainability and advertising don't exactly fit together like peas in a pod. Yet, after hearing industrialist-turned-environmentalist, Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, speak in Savannah two weeks ago, I know there is a place for green practices in the ad biz, just like there is at home, at school, at the gym, etc. Inspired chiefly by Paul Hawken's treatise, The Ecology of Commerce, Anderson reinvented himself and …
Respect The Audience. Remove The Target.
Edelman account exec, Jeffrey Treem, left a thought-provoking comment on Amy Gahran's Right Conversation. While I agree with your analysis about the value of strategic commenting, I wish you would have used a different phrase other than "target audiences." Audiences, are a passive, static group subject to the traditional linear sender-receiver model. I think we need to think more in terms of communities of interest. …
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Modern Day Dinosaurs Still Have Time To Adapt
Grant McCracken is sure there is an "anthropology of decline" that documents the symptomatology of regime transition. In fact, he keeps a simple typology on cardboard in his wallet....to make it easier to identity institutions in their last days. Stage 1. Benign neglect In the early days of regime transition, the incumbent (aka New York Times, Wall Street Journal) treats the new challenger (aka bloggers) with a …
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The Old Swipe Swindle
Do you like to raise hell against retail stupidity and injustice? Good. Here's one for you. According to Consumerist, stores that ask for a minimum purchase to swipe your credit card, are most likely violating their merchant agreement. …
Let Words Work For You. Let Them Be Your Friend.
Todd at The Bullshit Observer dug up some wonderful thinking from a premier actor in one of his old concepting journals. MALKOVICH: We're incredibly inarticulate, as a culture. We don't really like language; I think we have a fundamental distrust of it. It probably has something to do with the fact that, to a great extent, ours is a culture of image and we find language pretentious, difficult, time-consuming, and …
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Blackberrylicious
The team of trend spotters at Trendwatching have coined another new term, something they're more than slightly adept at doing. This month's term is "Infolust." Experienced consumers are lusting after detailed infromation on where to get the best of the best, the cheapest of the cheapest, the first of the first, the healthiest of the healthiest, the coolest of the coolest, or on how to becomes the smartest of the …
Contribute Something To The Culture
Deborah Morrison, an academic with a storied history of preparing creatives for the ad biz, recently penned an interesting column for Talent Zoo. Her thesis is that creatives often look beyond the brief, to make larger commentary on the society. There's a solid group of professionals working out there, creating content beyond the simple obligation to sell products honestly, beyond persuasion and strategy, beyond even …
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Adapting To Marketplace Democratization No Easy Feat
Steve Rubel wants brands to "get down with the people." What Rubel left unsaid, is that to successfully do so, marketers must first get down off their thrones. And while this makes perfect sense, what royal wants to freely give up their seat to save the kingdom? Today I participated in a meeting with a group of senior marketers from one of the largest global companies in the world. At one point the exec who convened …
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