“Sam has the uncanny knack for capturing the essence of the communicated word in a way that’s global in its thinking, no-nonsense in its approach and laser-like in its focus. He is a rare commodity in today’s skill-specific corporate environment. He is a gifted strategic thinker who understands marketing from both a conceptual and practical perspective. Bring him your most daunting challenges and he will provide you with exhaustive analysis, fresh yet sensible solutions and thoughtful execution. You need superfluous drivel? There are plenty of other places you can go for that.” John Cavanaugh, President, Burke Communications, Inc.
Greg Stene, who’s an ad guy and a professor specializing in creativity (and one of the smartest people in general that I’ve ever met) has some interesting thoughts on advertising recall (or the lack thereof) in a new post over at Scholars & Rogues. A snippet:
Secondly, simply because one can recall an ad, doesn’t mean it has had a positive influence in brand preference. Certainly, there is the facile argument that you can’t choose a product if can’t you remember the ad - but that is so disingenuous in its suggestion that the rest of the world (friends’ recommendations, past experience, competing ads we may remember, etc.) has no greater profound effect on our product choice.
A good read from one of the brighter (if lesser known, so far) minds in the world of advertising.
I’ve written here on two or three occasions about the looming macro-succession crisis threatening American business. Well, my colleague Whytawk over at Scholars & Rogues has a great post this morning on the dynamics shaping our emerging recession, and in it he put some teeth in the retiring Boomer piece of the macro-succession puzzle. If I’m a staffing leader at a company that relies on its ability to attract and retain talented people I just got extremely nervous.
At the same time the US has not reformed either of Social Security or Medicare and fully 76 million people out of the total 150 million of the US employment base are due to retire over the next 10 years as the Baby Boomers hit 65. [emphasis added]
If you know anything at all about the agency world, this new report tells you a whole lot of what you already know.
‘Agencies Don’t Get It,’ Survey Says
Feb 28, 2008
Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey.
TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony polled more than 60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K. to gauge how they are faring navigating the world of social media. It asked them for feedback on their agencies’ abilities to help. TNS found, in its words, “Agencies don’t get it.”
Opening night for NBC’s new Millennial-targeted series, Quarterlife, was an unparalleled disaster.
The drama series which made headlines about its transition from internet to TV, “Quarterlife,” succeeded in being a flop in its NBC debut Tuesday night, having the worst ratings in at least 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research.
The brazilian-dollar question now becomes: what happened?Read more…
Have you ever noticed how social networks don’t do a very good job of representing how our personal networks actually function? Sure, places like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn have their utility, but their flatness is a problem.
Think about your Facebook, for instance. If it’s like mine, you have friends there who run the gamut from “real life best friend” to “people I know” to “guy I couldn’t pick out of a lineup if my life depended on it.” You may have relatives, friends from school, co-workers and “assorted others.” And they’re all absolutely equal.
Our LinkedIn networks can be even less attuned to how our lives works. Read more…
Bill Strauss, who co-authored a number of important books on generational dynamics, is dead at 60.
This is a great loss. Strauss and his colleague Neil Howe were responsible for some of the most insightful and important analyses ever done into American generations. Thanks to them we now have a heightened ability to understand the cyclical nature of generations, affording us a tremendous capability to anticipate coming trends.
13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, their examination of Generation X, literally changed my life. Up until I discovered it in th early ’90s I had no idea about the broad economic and social factors shaping what I thought was my own personal little hell. Read more…
When a new innovation comes along, corporations typically follow a predictable arc. First there’s the “Ignore It” phase. Then, once it becomes clear that it’s actually important, they dive into the “Getting It All Wrong” phase. The first step in Getting It All Wrong is “pretend that the new thing works like all the old things.”
Eventually they get past these early “ballistic podiatry*” activities and begin to figure things out, although there’s often a step, which falls late in Getting It All Wrong, called “Hire a Consultant Who Was Successful at Other Things But Barely Knows More Than You Do About The New One.” Sometimes these outside hitters have read a book, but mainly they rely on the tendency of executives to overgeneralize about prior successes.
A quick-hitter here. I’ve done a little work on Electrolux’s behalf (this is actually me voicing this video) and I really like the philosophy behind their approach. I’m expecting more good work from them on the social media front in the future - so keep your eyes on them.
At Black Dog, we help our clients better understand themselves and their audiences (both internal and external). Then, using every tool in the kit, we help them communicate their value to those audiences in ways that are transparent and intuitively compelling.
Opening night for NBC’s new Millennial-targeted series, Quarterlife, was 
Have you ever noticed how social networks don’t do a very good job of representing how our personal networks actually function? Sure, places like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn have their utility, but their flatness is a problem.
Bill Strauss, who co-authored a number of important books on generational dynamics, is 
Last week I joined a legion of business bloggers in 
At Black Dog, we help our clients better understand themselves and their audiences (both internal and external). Then, using every tool in the kit, we help them communicate their value to those audiences in ways that are transparent and intuitively compelling.
