A Sea Of Information – Navigating With Coolhunters
Some cultural commentators talk about the current lay of the land as if it were a vast and scary sea of information and they were an amnesiac Jason Bourne floating in it. All of the old signposts, signifiers, and landmarks are gone, so they say, but that is just a...
Dove Soap & The Power Of Positivity Marketing
Being Positive As A Marketing Strategy I don’t use Dove products, but I watch Dove adverts. Why? Because they are popular with a lot of my female friends and they are fun and they end up in my Facebook feed. The videos are popular even with people who...
Advertising And Atemporality – From Buddy Bolden To William Gibson
Swimming In The Cultural Soup – How An Advertiser Navigates Is it a symptom of the way in which things that used to take a while to unpack and develop now seem to happen and cease to happen in such a compacted amount of time? Fashions trend and break and...
Oscars, Birdman, Superhero’s and Admiration Marketing
Gotta Love Top Oscar For 2015 being Super Hero This year’s top award goes to a brilliantly written, produced and directed movie that at its core is still based upon the type of fantasy we all grew up with loving – super heroes… Growing up, I was into...
Guinness Beer Ad positions well with our gratitude for military servitude.
A stout fresh Guinness combined with Military Patriotism equates to strong marketing flows… My father and I have shared our quota of drinks over the years and we understand how most people around the world integrate their social lives with feel good foods and...
Iggy Azalea is too fancy for Twitter
Iggy Azalea quits twitter because she is too fancy On February 18th at 11:27pm Iggy Azalea tweeted to all her followers a long string of reasons why she is leaving twitter and handing it over to her management team. Iggy has a track with a few incidents online...
Marshal, Me, Alvy Singer, And An Abacus
The Medium Is The Message – How You Are Viewing It Affects It If you’ve ever read Marshal McLuhan he is one of those thinkers that you find yourself constantly returning to. Why? Because his ideas make a lot of sense, and in terms of how the internet...
Brand Out Of Hand – IS And Their Image
Does It Matter How A Terrorist Presents Themselves? People really do talk about branding some weird things – I read an article today about the branding of the Islamic State, and I have previously read about the economic model that terrorists use as being...
Concept Cars Over Cookie Cutter Blandness
Innovation In The Automotive Industry I have to admit that cars don’t really interest me – or modern cars don’t; classic cars are a different matter … each one of them, especially now, given their age, are works of art that people have poured a...
GMOs – PR For A Problem Product
GMOs and the people who make them are not a good thing according to a lot of people, and Monsanto, in particular, are not objects of affection. Is it just mismanagement of their Public Relations at fault, or are they doomed because the products they are attached to...
Self Sufficient Artists And Merchandising
The Name Sells – Artists And Brands How do you react when you see a product that has the name of a musician or actor on it that you like? Do you think, wow, that’s kind of cool? Does part of you wonder whether the artist themselves had anything to do with...
Everyone Loves Metrics
Tweets And Facebook Likes For The Popular Kids Everyone is into metrics these days – even your not-bothered daily tweeter, Mr Average Joe Facebooker, and intermittent blogger anonymous. Every single person wants their posts to be read – even those guys who...
Mockingbird Sings Again – Harper Lee’s PR
The PR Around To Kill A Mockingbird Just because you haven’t been working on your social media presence, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have one, especially if you are noteworthy for some reason. This is true just as much in the real world as it is...
We Don’t Need Roads Or Robots Where We’re Going
PR For A Human Not Robot Future There have been a lot of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence of late: a machine passing the Turing Test designed to demonstrate a machine’s ability to think like a human being in a way that is indistinguishable from said...
The Talking Dead – Phone Calls & Bad PR
How You Speak On The Phone Matters Are you actually involved in the communication that you deliver when you call a client, or are you just thoughtlessly rattling out what you always say to the people you are calling? Do you see the statistic of your post as number of...
Bad PR For Journalists
Don’t worry, I totally get the irony of talking about the degradation of journalism into opinion pieces and personal platforms for writer’s grievances in a piece that is primarily my opinion, and not necessarily sourced from anywhere. I studied as as a...
Let’s Talk About Religion And Race
Why is it that some religions are loved more than others? Why is it okay for societies to hate and attack other religions? What is it about skin pigmentation that bothers people? Why do non-Euro-American people suffer more than the latter? These are questions that I...
What Does Keanan Kintzel, Lee Iacocca and The Statue of Liberty Have in Common?
Knowing marketing with purpose is hard to beat! Here is another fine example of marketing genius combined with purpose. When President Ronald Reagan asked Lee Iacocca to save Ellis Island and our beloved Statue of Liberty, it was a marketing engineers perfect storm....
Repackage, Reimagine, Reboot – The Movie As Pre-Chewed Food
The repackage, the reimagining, the reboot – never the rehash, the refried or the reheated. For every original franchise that makes it to the screens, or into print, there is an equal, if not greater number of established properties that undergo a periodic...
The Matrix Has You: Advertising & The Film Industry
The PR machine for Jupiter Ascending, like most other Hollywood movies was pretty slick. The usual striptease slow reveal of all the choice delicacies from the movie was rolling out months before the movie even had a trailer out there, and it made you want to watch...
Ello Vs. Facebook: A Simpler Aesthetic
Facebook does what it does pretty well, and it seems to, on the whole, be holding its ground a lot better than Myspace managed to. Livejournal is a cul-de-sac for nostalgia addicts; Plurk is a niche; some of the PHP forums are haunted by troglodytes who can just about...
Under Fire For Imaginary Grenades – Brian Williams & Iraq
What a PR disaster for a news anchor – to be found to have “misremembered” as he termed it, an event where he claimed to have been in a helicopter that was hit by a grenade in Iraq. Brian Williams, who is one of the faces of NBC’s Nightly News...
The Outspoken Artist & PR: A Handshake Is Better Than A Slap
PR is important. When you have uncompromising views about something, or are known for your forthrightness, is it still wise to not stand the chance of alienating a whole swathe of your potential audience by making blanket statements about a religion or a political...