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SUPER BOWL XLVII: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY No doubt you have an opinion on the best and worst Super Bowl commercials from yesterday's game. In my opinion, the best way to judge the effectiveness of an ad is by how well it fulfills the objective of the brief. An ad that doesn't appeal to me, but appeals to my Mom, may be a good ad because that is to whom the ad was supposed to appeal. So, from that perspective, I will give all the ads the benefit of the doubt that they each of them fulfilled their brief. Read more @Methodical Madness -
THE SOCIAL VOTE: OBAMA VS. ROMNEY OK, all the Americans at The Duffy Agency have now voted. Like many Americans, I'll be watching the results come in for the rest of the day trying to piece together fragments of data to divine who my country's next president will be. Read more @Brand Rants -
WHY THE CMO HAS TO GO The life expectancy of a CMO has reached an all time high of 3.5 years (nearly double what is was five years ago) but it seems the rift between CEOs and their CMOs has never been greater. That was the conclusion of a study released this summer by The Fournaise Marketing Group who found that 80% of CEOs don’t even trust marketers no less value their work. Read more @Brand Rants -
THE ILLUSION OF COMMUNICATION AND HOW TO PREVENT IT How to create your own marketing micro-profession
Before getting involved in advertising, I had planned on attending medical school. A lot of my pre-med training focused on establishing a very precise foundation of language to describe all things medical. Then I got a job in an ad agency. One of my first observations as a young marketing professional was that marketing was not a profession at all: A skilled trade, perhaps, but not a profession. Read more @Brand Rants -
COMING TO TERMS: WHAT IS A BRAND? WHAT IS BRANDING? Christopher Kenton is one of my favorite writers on the topic of brands. I first got hooked when I read his Business Week article "What, exactly, is a brand?" It was said to have sparked the sharpest response of any marketing article they’d published. So its not just you and I, the whole world seems to be asking this question: What is a brand and what is branding? Read more @Brand Rants -
Why Business Schools Need More Street Smarts It's back to school for over 150 million university students around the globe. Millions of them will be studying business and hundreds of thousands will be seeking their master’s in marketing. Of these, about a hundred will wind up in front of my lectern. And when they do, I want to find some way to have them turn out better than the business leaders who have driven revered brands like Sears, Borders, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Kodak into obscurity this year. Read more @Brand Rants -
4 QUICK STEPS TOWARDS A UNIFIED MARKETING VOCABULARY THE GREATEST ENEMY OF COMMUNICATION IS THE ILLUSION OF IT
Marketing professional share an extensive vocabulary of marketing terms. Unfortunately they don't share common definitions for many of those terms. In day-to-day office chatter the differences don't reveal themselves. But the minute you start trying to do any real strategic work it becomes an obstacle. This causes a lot of miscommunication and misunderstand that can burden a company's marketing and brand development efforts. Read more @Brand Rants -
The Value of a Facebook “Like” Facebook has turned many brands into a neurotic mess. Like some smothering and needy friend, brands are constantly asking us to show our allegiance to them with a “like.:” And we do. In fact, according the CBS News, people post 2 billion “likes” to the social network every day. The problem is that a Facebook “like” is not a good measure of social media success. Read more @Methodical Madness -
David Brier’s lay man’s guide to brand fail David included this venn diagram in his recent Fast Company article "What Every CEO Can Learn From Best Buy’s (Continued) Branding Mistakes". The article presents a great real-world brand case. Worth a read. Read more @Brand Rants -
How to spot the warning signs of Brand Dementia Confusion, loss of vision, incessant babbling. They used to call it old age or senility. Now we recognize these as the symptoms of brand dementia. Read more @Brand Rants -
Confessions of an Email Skimmer Yesterday during a presentation in Stockholm, my desktop was put up on screen. The CEO of the company began to laugh. “I thought I was bad,” he said, “You have almost 95 thousand unread emails!” I hadn’t realized that since I considered myself to be pretty good at keeping up with my email. Nonetheless, some serious navel gazing ensued on the flight home and I thought I'd share. Read more @Brand Rants -
The rise of the “ROI Marketer”? Hell Yes! - part 2 of 2 To recap from part one: Although their tenure is increasing, CMOs are still the most frequently fired members of the C-Suite. Read more @Brand Rants
