What's the Idea?

There are two factions in online marketing these days: Cashiers and Conversationalists. 
Cashiers
Cashiers care about the sale. They have the small dashboard that tracks click-to-sale and spits out an ROI calculations. Cashiers can’t wait to wake up in the morning to see the new numbers. They are in to usability testing, shopping cart abandonment, media optimization and other [...]

Steve Rubel is a “beyond the dashboard” digital commentator.  That’s what I love about him. He doesn’t spend his day looking through the rearview mirror, he looks ahead.  Check out this Paste from his stream today:
 “I believe business web sites will become less important over time. They will be primarily transactional and/or for utility. Brands will shift [...]

“Fall forward fast” is a marketing maxim many have followed with great success. Be bold, be quick, correct as needed. It’s a fist-mover approach and it was good advice back in the day.  But the Internet has sped things up a bit don’t you think? Fast today is a lot faster than it was 4 [...]

Happy Friday youze all…as we like to say in NY. It’s beautiful outside with everything blanketed in pristine snow. A fitting beginning for the Winter Olympics. Tonight, on the Olympics the new GE Healthymagination campaign breaks.  Knowing it’s from BBDO, I’m sure it will be heartfelt and striking…in its pieces.  It will also be a [...]

I’ve been writing for a few years with great admiration about Google and its amazing, transformative search tools.  Co-founder Sergey Brin’s original vision or brand idea “We deliver the world’s information in one click” is what allowed Google to become the NASA of the web. Case in point: Yesterday I was looking for a blog post [...]

We remember beauty.
We remember new.
We remember rich.
We remember melody.
We remember funny.
We remember nature.
We remember poetry.
We remember pain.
We remember educators.
We remember warmth.
We remember charity.
We remember happy.
We remember love.
We remember triumph.
These are the things we remember.
These are the things consumers remember.
(I post this annually, to remind myself.)

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Blackberry’s current TV campaign built around the Beatles song “All you need is love” is goofy. Pretty to watch, great editing, hum it and smile – but it really has no inherent brand building value.  And in a slipping market for Research In Motion, manufacturer of the Blackberry, this is not good thing. Enter a [...]

I read in the paper paper this weekend about O.K.R.s, which stands for Objectives and Key Results. The measures, espoused by VC general John Doerr, were developed by Intel and, supposedly, are used by Google.  The idea is that “the whole company and every group has one objective and three measureable key results.”  Whether the objective [...]

Quick, I say “brand strategy,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?  Okay, let’s try another.  “Brand plan.”  You say ______?  This sort of brand speak is really inside baseball to most businesses. Over the past couple of years I’ve spoken to some really smart people from many different walks of marketing life and [...]

Last week at the DMA/PMN social media conference, Steve Rubel, a digital honcho at Edelman, said “information scales, attention is finite.” He couldn’t be more right.  As social media adds more and more conversation to what is already being said about brands in the marketplace, the cacophony grows louder.  It is in this environment that [...]