Matthew Creamer of Ad Age has thoughtfully laid out a five-year plan for agency growth. One of the things I find interesting in his assessment is the emphasis on User-Experience Design, a.k.a. UX. User-experience design is too often thought of as a digital-marketing task, ensuring that website and app development meet and ideally exceed usability standards. It needs to be something bigger -- much bigger -- if …
Guest Post: Are Words Obsolete in Marketing?
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 author's POV, but I will consider these 10 examples from her book, and take it (to our comments …
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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 Ralph Brennan, President of the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group. …
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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 Austin. According to Greg Swan of Weber Shandwick, Whiting said marketing now needs to move …
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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 site, and start to see its possibilities, I want to know more about the company and its founders, …
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, Scoop.it and Storify. Last December on the Delicious blog, the team …
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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, there's a well developed pattern that visitors take. The website sections that drew the most …
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 from Rose Stallard... I like the campaign, …
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