Getting through to customers in the Post-Advertising Age

01 April 2016

It appears the oldest question in advertising is now the newest. (No, this does not include, “Can you make the logo bigger?”) The question is, “How do we get through to people?”  The traditional advertising industry is still confronted by …

Getting the News into “Brand Newsrooms”

10 June 2013

Celebrating Oreo’s now-famous twi-jacking (Or is it “twit-jacking?”) of the Super Bowl for the brand’s own milk-and-cookies purposes, the ad business erupted early this year with ecstatic chatter about so-called “brand newsrooms.” While the chatter focused in minute detail on …

Not Everyone is a Storyteller

29 May 2013

Lately, everyone in advertising has become a “storyteller” specializing in “engaging content.”  This isn’t true, of course. But I understand why everyone’s making the claim: Digital is the only part of advertising that’s growing rapidly; social media is the red-hot …

The Next Big Media Battle:
Publishers vs. Ad Agencies

12 January 2011

The media business has been in chaos for a decade, and there’s more coming. The next big media revolution will be an escalating and increasingly bitter competition between the content creators-especially newspaper and magazine publishers-and their former friends, the traditional …

A Story about the Future of Advertising

25 October 2010

The latest news from the upper-echelons of marketing and advertising is that storytelling is the path to advertising’s future. There’s still a lot of what can be called “TV thinking” hanging on stubbornly, but no one any longer denies the …

HP, Racism and Failing to Face the Music

22 December 2009

HP’s social media strategist, Tony “Frosty” Welch, aka @frostola on Twitter, has been getting mostly high marks for his handling of a YouTube video that dramatizes how HP’s facial recognition software tracks white faces a whole lot better than black faces. We’re not …