Jan
26
The Cranky Communicator: Can’t anyone around here write decent copy?
Posted by Jack Lilienthal at 12:49 pm | Filed In Smart | Add a Comment
One of the most nettlesome characteristics of advertising agencies is their almost universal inability to write accurate much less effective copy. It drove my son-in-law to distraction when he was a product manager; it inspired me to leave the warm bosom of a cushy corporate job to start my own advertising agency.
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Jan
20
Replacing Face Time?
Posted by Erin Paulson at 9:37 am | Filed In Smart, Strategic | Add a Comment
Late last year, I learned of a Facebook phenonomenon called “the graying of Facebook.” It refers not to changes in the color tone of the display pages, but to a growing demographic of Facebook users. People aged 35-44 (hence, the gray) are a growing category of people not only joining Facebook, but also becoming avid users.
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Jan
15
Custom, Enterprise-level Off-the-shelf Software
Posted by Dan K. Snelson at 6:03 pm | Filed In Smart, Technical | Add a Comment
Recently we’ve been hyper-configuring some internal-use, mission-critical, off-the-shelf, enterprise-level software. Fancying ourselves as customer-focused developers, whenever we’re asked by a client how they’ll be able to maintain a solution once it’s complete, we usually respond with: “How would you like to maintain this solution?”
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Jan
13
The Cranky Communicator: It’s the Planning, not the Plans, That Count
Posted by Jack Lilienthal at 4:15 pm | Filed In Smart, Strategic | Add a Comment
A few missives ago, I humbly offered you the Five Paragraph Field Order as a simple yet powerful planning device for addressing immediate, short-turn problems. Now, I’d like to bloviate on the exercise of annual or longer-term planning. You know, share some lessons learned from the preparation of more than one hundred largely pointless and wholly ineffective long-range marketing plans.
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Jan
7
Online Gamers Can Be Brain Surgeons? A B2B Marketer’s Epiphany
Posted by Chris Eifert at 5:54 pm | Filed In Smart | 1 Comment
The last few chapters of Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital have left me a little confused. My usual rant that kids and young adults who play video games and spend exorbitant amounts of time online are bound to be dumber than those that don’t has been put to the test. In fact, Tapscott claims the opposite with arguments and statistics that support the following about his Net Geners:
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