Getting the News into “Brand Newsrooms”

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

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

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

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

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 …