a thought-provoking ramble on the state of life, clients and the universe at large
We love a good story. All people do. Most recognize this as a universal human truth—but those of us who work in advertising consider it a particularly critical truth that transcends time and place. As General Electric’s Beth Comstock once said, “You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.” But what is a good…
Irrespective of political alignment, most would agree that there is a leadership crisis in the world. As an antidote to this perceived lack of government guidance, citizens are looking more and more to private companies for support. BAV ®, Y&R’s proprietary brand measurement data tool, recently quantified this trend, finding that 82% of people around…
This past month at the Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, I spoke to an industry audience about purposeful brands, a hot and buzzword laden topic in the marketing world. During the course of my talk, I offered ten perspectives on the power of purpose, one of which I would like to share: “Purpose can be unifying…
The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2018 has come to a close. The streets are empty but for locals and tourists, who can now get a seat in any restaurant, and the window-shaking beach music is absent, returning quiet tranquility to the nights. Yet even as the final stragglers pack to leave, there remains unfinished…
A celebrity tweets a racist comment and her very successful show gets cancelled. Some 500 miles across the country, another celebrity, this one using her media channel-sponsored platform, calls the daughter of the U.S. President an expletive and gets her hand slapped. Interestingly, many considered one reaction or the other to be either overblown or…
What makes a media company? Most recognize that BBC, NBC or Aljazeera are unabashed (or perhaps grandfathered in) media entities, while Facebook continues to reject the label and Amazon has yet to even face the “accusation.” I say “perhaps grandfathered” because who would want to be a media company today, facing regulation, when you could…
Who doesn’t love a Royal Wedding? I mean really. All over the world people watch The Crown, Downton Abbey and The Queen. Full confession: I have always believed that if you scratch the surface of most Americans, (myself included) there is royal envy…and maybe just a little regret that we couldn’t work it out back…
A true story…short…and one that points out the issues with so called targeting online. I say so-called because there is targeting and…there is targeting. Its easy to find me…yes…but why and with what is the real question. Once upon a time… My daughter and son-in-law went way for the weekend. The spa they stayed at…
Crossing the country and back, I passed through five really sad airports. All were dirty and rundown (although all were making efforts at renovation). Services were spotty; food was old school and unhealthy… and one even still utilized the people movers of the last century to take people between terminals. I won’t comment on security,…
Can a border be closed off? Can a population be locked in or locked down? Seems that the topic is much in the news these days…all around the word. It got me thinking. Physical and political barriers—fences and road blocks—did used to keep people locked in…and locked up. Without going too far back in time,…
Amazon had yet another great earnings call, wowing the market with their growth. But these earnings have nothing to do with e-commerce, as MarketWatch explained: “E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc.’s earnings surge in the first quarter was largely due to major acceleration in its Amazon Web Services business, which is powering the bulk of Amazon profits…
On Friday, I met with a business acquaintance, an investment banker type, who was insisting that Brands were no longer important…as he pontificated from the depths of his brand-clad and covered self. On Saturday, I was in the local park with my granddaughter Goldy, when I noticed that she and half her friends had on…
Create viral assets. Design experiential moments. Used in one sentence, or better, used as one ask, “I want an authentic experience that will go viral.” Raise your hand if you have been in a meeting where you have heard something similar. Hmmm…I thought so…I have too. These days, we hear a lot about the need…
I don’t know about you…but frankly, it’s easy to fall into a funk and be depressed about today’s so-called Hi-Tech. So-called, because while there is a lot of real Hi-Tech out there somewhere, what we call and overvalue as such is really data sales, media, retail and transportation…with occasionally fraudulent biotech thrown in for good…
Maybe it was the confluence of Passover and Easter, or perhaps it was the continuing news saga of Taliban atrocities, young African-Americans shot in the back, fleeing refuges, hate crimes all over the world juxtaposed to stories about what exactly is Alexa listening to and what is really happening with all that data being collected…
What would you do? If you were a 100+-year-old company in a dying category, surrounded by hip new offerings and critics, analysts and pundits who opined on the category in ways that made you wonder why you were in business…what would you do? You could declare, “Disruption,” “digital transformation,” “millennial focus,” “mobile first,” “VR/AR and…
We use filters on filters on filters to enhance our world. Even ‘natural’ has a special filter to apply. But despite all these perfected images, Stephen Hawking still stood out. When Hawking was a graduate student in 1963, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting illness also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease,…
There is no app for it. There is no market “disruption” in play, shaking the foundations of business as we know it. And no one has said to put it first. I am referring to Diversity—with a purposeful capital D. This has been top of mind recently. Y&R is involved with a lot of great…
On the internet, no one knows you are a dog. Close to 25 years after the iconic cartoon, this still holds true. Back in 1993, illustrator Peter Steiner had little knowledge of this newfangled thing called “the Internet” or “World Wide Web”—but what he did know was that it was easy to throw up a…
On the afternoon of February 14, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 17 people were killed and 14 more hospitalized, making it one of the world’s deadliest school massacres. A terrible tragedy, to be sure. A seemingly avoidable tragedy. And sadly, a tragedy that has become mired…
If our marketing research was as off as political polling continues to be, then the Brandscape of the world would look significantly different. Companies would invest money in the wrong products and services, spending on meaningless messaging, squandering on irrelevant media, and generally wondering why the “wrong” Brands seemed to win. As I have written…
The PIVOT: a move made more famous by Digital/Internet startups than by sports stars. The agility, openness, hunger and passion to succeed (read: passion to make money) gave these tech entrepreneurs the impetus to switch direction and focus quickly…and most importantly, without ever looking back. Think about the companies who said they were ‘pure digital…