Laura Ries, is president of Ries & Ries, a marketing consulting firm in Atlanta. Laura and her partner/father, Al Ries have co-written six books on branding. In her new book, Visual Hammer, Ries argues that recent marketing successes are visual successes, not verbal ones. As a writer, I’m not certain how I feel about the […]
Design
Will The Newspaper Industry Save Itself By Reinventing Online Advertising?
Local advertisers in New Orleans are not happy about the recent announcement from New York-based Advance Publications that The Crescent City’s daily newspaper, one of the oldest in the nation, will be printed just three days a week starting this fall. “The Times-Picayune has long been a cornerstone of my restaurant group’s local marketing,” notes […]
You’re Only As Great As Your Last Big Invention
“If you just hire people with ads on the resume they’ll probably make you more ads.” -Robbie Whiting It’s not enough to just make ads today, ad people need to let their inner inventor out to play. That’s the message unleashed by Robbie Whiting, director of creative tech and production at Duncan/Channon, last Friday in […]
Visual Mosaics In The Stream
“We’ve been too busy to hire a press person yet,” Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest, said. Which is funny because his company doesn’t need a publicist–the public is all over it. According to Open Forum, Pinterest is the 16th most-visited website in America with 12 million users (like me). As I cozy up to the […]
I’m An Only Child, But I Learned To Share
Yahoo! sold its social bookmarking site Delicious.com last April to a company called AVOS, which was started by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. I hadn’t bookmarked a page on Delicious in 14 months until today, when I started playing around with the new design, which is visually interesting and oriented, much like Pinterest, […]
The Eyes Have It
When we encounter a new website, which parts of the screen do we linger on? Which parts do we find most interesting? Given how much revenue is on the line, it’s fair to say this is the $64 million question today. According to a recent eye-tracking research conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology, […]
A Handset For Illustrators And People Who Like To Draw
According to Trend Hunter, Samsung and social media agency Jam teamed up to promote the Samsung Galaxy Note, a smartphone-tablet hybrid device with an advanced ‘S’ pen that allows for detailed drawings and sketches. The “Create My Tweet” campaign features illustrators Rose Stallard, Steven Wilson, Danny Sangra and Natasha Lawill. Here’s a bit more content […]
Enough With “The Press Room” Approach To Web Design
You have 48 hours to come up with a new “daring and forward-thinking” website for a pop star. Go. That was the mission for some lucky ad peeps recently, when Beyoncé came calling. According to Ad Age, Ms. Knowles is personally involved in the online project, even willing to meet agencies in person. Wow, what […]
Microsoft Office Envisions “The Extensions of Man”
According to Fortune, hell froze over recently, as Forrester urged IT departments to support the Mac. Forrester’s report argues that Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives, or HEROs, at your company are likely using Macs, regardless of the company’s computing policy. These power brokers don’t want to show up to a meeting with a plastic laptop […]
Make Media Complexities Simple, Make A Lot of Money
I’ve been reading a lot of articles about the lack of talented people willing or able to work in the fast changing advertising business these days. Here’s one point of view from The New York Times: A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people […]
Help Fight Boredom With Coffee And A Sense of Humor
I love the black and white illustrated simplicity of Kaffe 1668’s website. When you load their home page, you find the first of 84 comic strip frames. I scrolled through all of them, but here are three to give you an idea.
Yet Another Facebook Story: Introducing Timeline
Your Facebook experience is about to become more visual. In a keynote speech at the company’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described Timeline as “a great way to discover all the things people have done their whole life.” Timeline’s aim is to allow users to easily browse through the history […]
