Who doesn't love the internet? You can be sitting at your desk, thinking about someone you knew in third grade, and fifteen seconds later be looking at a current photo of them. Whether or not stalking old friends is a soul-deadening waste of time is a question for another post. There’s another issue up for [...]
If a five dollar bill flutters out of the pocket of the person walking in front of you on a busy street, do you grab it and hurry ahead to return it to them? Good. Now what if it’s a hundred dollar bill? Okay – and now what if you found that hundred dollar bill [...]
Have you noticed that what’s being served up as basic storytelling these days has traveled very far away from what was once considered entertaining? The same is true, to an even greater degree, in literature. Agents read with an eye to what will be published. Publishers choose manuscripts based on what they think will sell [...]
Everyone’s trying to do it. Create something engaging and compelling, syndicate it across multiple platforms, encourage sharing and watch it go viral. It’s a great strategy – or it would be if every other client in every industry on earth wasn’t doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, with the exact same [...]
Once upon a time, advertising agencies and clients formed relationships that lasted for decades. Personnel on both sides remained with their employers and held these relationships together through many years of work. It’s unlikely to have escaped anyone’s notice that things have changed. Recent studies show job tenure growing shorter and shorter; people are tending [...]
You’d think a Zuckerberg would know better. After posting a “private family picture” to Facebook, she became angry when Vox Media Marketing Director Callie Schweitzer – who legitimately saw the photo on her own timeline – tweeted it to the world. Instead of wisely leaving the situation alone, Ms. Zuckerberg tweeted back, "You reposting it [...]
It’s easy to love our big clients – the ones who make up the lion’s share of billing with the largest budgets. We can do great work for them, and a lot of it, which keeps the creative wheels turning and the overhead lights on. But let’s take a minute to really appreciate our smaller [...]
An agency type I once knew used to rail against what he claimed were “stupid clients” – a phrase which largely translated to “people who don’t agree with my ideas”. Still, it’s easy to get aggravated about some of the things we get asked to do. People who work in agencies are hired because they [...]
A lot of companies have been embarrassed lately by well-intentioned forays into social media that have gone horribly wrong. Most recently, Mountain Dew’s “Dub the Dew” contest did a great job of showing how immediately and totally out of control these things can go. On the other hand, crowdsourcing can be very effective at engaging [...]
The first sign of the internship apocalypse has arrived, and it’s wearing a super-trendy outfit. Anthropologie, the ultra-hip and uber-expensive retail clothing store, is now offering “internships” – basically hiring salespeople who they won’t have to pay. That’s right – they’re filling jobs with hardworking, aspiring sales personnel, and they’re not paying them a penny. [...]
