How smart is Amazon.com? If their latest move to improve its music store is any indication, they're smarter than all their competition. According to Time, Amazon's new "Auto-Rip" gives customers a free online version of any album they buy — or have bought on Amazon in the last 15 years. I just logged in to my Amazon Cloud account and was pleased to find that Amazon had updated my library with purchases …
Automated Creativity Is Coming But Its Success Won’t Be Automatic
A while back, I wrote about the automated Fantasy Football recap articles I'd been getting this year. It got me thinking. With so much space to be filled (see David's post from earlier this morning), is it worth it for brands to get humans to do this work? If the data can be analyzed and used to create realistic writing, we could see a lot more automated creativity: Just imagine a friendly-sounding paragraph …
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Content for the Social Stream Is Mostly Junk. But, Let’s Dress It Up And Call It Something Else.
With a handful of specialists on speed dial, where do brand managers turn today to fill the gaping content holes in its various social streams? According to Adweek, when it comes to "native advertising," (a term I loathe), chances are the publisher or someone at the client is producing the content for the ad, not one of the agencies on the account. One premium publisher whose site runs a lot of native ads …
Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Make A Mark In Advertising
I like being a copywriter, but lately I feel like it is a bit of a lost art. An afterthought. Something the client supplies, or God forbid, the design team. This is not a positive development for copywriters, nor is it for clients and their customers who will ultimately judge the work (harshly by ignoring it completely). Sanam Petri, an associate creative director at R/GA London, writing in The Guardian …
Three Words For 2013: Socially-Optimized Microcontent
Looking into the crystal ball is a practice best reserved for characters in fairy tales. Unless it's your business to gaze ahead, which of course it is. Deep Focus, for one, isn't afraid to see things. Here's some of what the Ian Schaefer-run agency sees happening in 2013: Social platforms will become the primary digital reach mechanism for the savviest of brands The era of the newsfeed will …
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Make Useful Advertising, Make Yourself And Your Clients A Lot of Money
Journalist, turned blogging supernova, Andrew Sullivan announced this week that he will pursue a subscription-based revenue model and forgo advertising and venture capital support. We want to create a place where readers - and readers alone - sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture …
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From Traditional To Digital To Integrated To Social To Instagram
The lack of distinctive agency brand positions has been a thorn in our industry paw for years. We've all heard the cobbler's children's shoes metaphor and the harangues from agency consultants telling us that despite our own branding skills, our sales propositions all sound alike. Lately there has been a slow shift to agency USPs that has been brought on by the increase of communications channels. When there was …
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If Your’e Going To Make Up Terms, Make Them Make Sense
"Native advertising refers to a specific mode of monetization that aims to augment user experience by providing value through relevant content delivered in-stream." That's how Solve Media describes the latest buzz word to emerge unchecked from the depths of the marketers' group mind. Of course, there is a full menu of definitions to choose from. But none of them make sense to me. Not even this one from …
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