Tag: marketing
The Strategy Layer: Why the Best Creative Work Doesn't Happen in Silos
Strategy decks get approved then tossed over a wall. Here's how overlapping strategy, creative, and production from day one makes work sharper and faster.
The Curation Comeback: Why Human Taste Beats Algorithms Every Time
Algorithms manufacture mediocrity. As AI makes polished content cheap, authentic human taste becomes your only unfair advantage.
The Unfakeable Factor: Why College Athletes Are the Only Influencers Who'll Survive the AI Takeover
Deepfakes and bots are eroding digital trust. College athletes offer verifiable, irreplaceable authenticity that AI cannot copy.
Where Your Video Money Really Goes: 400+ Real Budgets Analyzed
Analysis of 400+ real video budgets reveals the 70/30 rule, hidden costs that blow budgets, and how multi-asset strategies cut per-video costs dramatically.
Lights Out
Tom Bodett, the legendary cheap-motel pitchman, sues his primary client, Motel 6, for non-payment. What a sad way for a great ad campaign to end.
Dial-An-Advertiser
Considering the long history of phone books, particularly the Yellow Pages, where local businesses learned all the marketing tricks they eventually brought to the internet.
Corporate Casserole
Pondering Thanksgiving through an exceedingly corporate lens. Some of the holiday’s most important elements were brought to you by marketing and lobbying.
The Art Of Annoyance
When it comes down to it, it’s best to think of advertising as a coordinated, decades-long campaign to annoy the heck out of you. And it works pretty well.
Under Pressure: Creating Impactful Short-Form Content in a Fast-Paced World
From Bohemian Rhapsody to sneezing pandas -- why short-form video wins and three strategies to capture attention in fifteen seconds.
Video 101: Your Guide to Mastering Video Production
A beginner-friendly walkthrough of the three stages of video production: pre-production, production, and post-production.
Give ’Em Less Data
What if the problems with the news ecosystem could be solved by shutting off the data pipeline to the advertisers? After all, they’ve spent the last 30 years aggressively exploiting it—and us.
Hallmark Card Sharks
How an early embrace of national advertising put Hallmark in the pole position of holiday memories.
No Hiding These Logos
How Intel turned the PC industry into its collective co-op marketing partner through a strong sticker game, an idea Microsoft used to push Windows sales.
Cut-Up Culture
Pondering how coupons became the lingua franca of the grocery store, and why they might be important to the survival of the newspaper.
The Cold Cocktail
How NyQuil, the over-the-counter cold medicine of choice for millions of sniffling people, innovated by combining a bunch of drugs together in a novel way.
This Old Scandal
Why Bob Vila, perhaps the most famous handyman in history, may have set the stage for a digital era in which stars aren’t afraid to cash in on their names.
Billboard Empire
The evolution of the billboard, an object that very much tends to keep pace with the times. Who doesn’t love outdoor advertising?
Marketing That Sticks
From Big Red to Juicy Fruit to brands not made by Wrigley, chewing gum has surprisingly catchy and effective marketing with a lasting impact on pop culture.
Plastic Pail Perfection
Why McDonald’s is missing a major marketing opportunity by not handing out its ’80s era plastic pumpkin buckets to modern kids. (I feel strongly about this.)
The Backlink Economy
Businesses want to show up on the front page of a specific search term, and they’re willing to annoy you to get a backlink from you. Please never do this.
OK Branding
A quarter-century ago, a really big soda company attempted to subvert itself to reach Gen X. The problem? Coca-Cola’s OK Soda was a couple of decades too early.
Hydrogenated Marketing
How Crisco, which avoided naming its primary ingredient in ads, toppled lard more than a century ago—and made Americans believers in industrial food.
Taking Stock
My longtime fascination with T-Mobile CEO John Legere’s odd slow cooker social media promotion, now that he’s slow-cooked his way through a merger with Sprint.
Feelin’ 7UP
The marketing history of America’s favorite lemon-lime soda, 7UP, proves that sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.
Impeachment Growth Hacking
The reason we might all be using Netflix today could have a lot to do with a marketing stunt involving the grand jury testimony that got Bill Clinton impeached.
When a Brand Ruins Your Faves
For the last couple of months, Facebook has leaned on The Muppets to help salvage its damaged reputation on privacy issues. Hey Facebook, could you please not?
Marketing in Ernest
For two decades, Ernest P. Worrell was basically the perfect regionally franchised TV advertising mascot—and showed Jim Varney’s sheer brilliance. Knowhutimean?
The Golden Comedo
Why acne medication, from Clearasil to Oxy Pads to Proactiv, is pure marketing gold, and has been for generations of blemished faces. Just ask Dick Clark.
Mean, Green Marketing Machine
During the early 1950s, you could not get away from chlorophyll at the grocery store—all thanks to a thinly sourced belief that the plant pigment fought odors.
The Ballad of Yo! Noid
In the '80s and '90s, advertisers got the idea to market products to kids through video games. The games aren't half-bad (mostly), but they're still ads.
Leavin’ The Light On
The strange, fascinating career of Tom Bodett, who parlayed NPR radio essays into the longest-running spokesperson gig around. Not that it’s all he does.
Get Yourself A Treat
How movie theaters nudged film-goers out of their seats with short clips designed around the hard sell.
A Business Card With Impact
How the CD-ROM influenced a particularly tacky variant on the business card around the turn of the 21st century.
The Many Lives of Packard Bell
When it was a radio-maker, Packard Bell had a reputation for quality products. When a PC clone startup bought the name, that reputation fell apart—fast.
The Sound Of Science
Bose Wave stereo systems were legitimately innovative when they launched in the '90s—as was Bose itself. The marketing might make you forget that, though.
Generic Internet Article
Private labels are a common strategy retailers use to keep profits in house, but fortunately for everyone, house brands are a lot less boring these days.
Big in Brazil
The Sega Master System was an also-ran in the United States, but in Brazil, it's still on the market—and still moving units. Here's how it happened.
Brand bastardizations
Sometimes, companies do things that go against our expectations of their brand. Often, the result can be awful. Check out these examples of brand weirdness.