Latest MARKETING articles

The Evolution of Evolution

As the final weeks of winter draw to a close, the annual advertising award show season will soon be upon us. There are the Marketing Awards – perhaps the biggest award show here in Canada – at the end of the month, followed by the One Show, the Bessies and the Clio Awards in May, [...]

IDEA In Spanish Is Still Spelled IDEA

So, a Puertorican, a Cuban, a Colombian, and an Argentine walk into a bar.
Nope, this isn’t some cheap, tasteless joke about our newfound multiculturalism. It’s everyday at one of the top Hispanic agencies in the US.
Once we get to the bar, the scene’s pretty familiar. We all have high expectations, and we’re pretty hard on [...]

Marketing In Accelerated Culture

The Changing Of The Guard?
The 21st Century economy, it seems, has a strange sense of irony. The former dot-com miscreants are now the darlings of Wall Street, while the corporate establishment has weathered everything from accounting scandals to bankruptcy. The Economist recently reported that Google “is now equal to the combined worth of [...]

List, Offer and Creative

There’s an old adage in direct marketing: the three elements of a direct mail test—in order of testing importance—are:
– List
– Offer
– Creative.
And that’s pure bunk.
Let’s take a step back and find out why the adage places creative execution at the bottom of the heap. In the olden days (read: prior to the 1950s remember, direct [...]

Making Sustainability Sexy

Sustainability. Sexy. Two words you don’t often see together.
Sustainability is a serious word. It’s about saving the world from ecological disaster. Getting humanity on track for survival. Heady, serious stuff best left to academics, Unions Of Concerned Scientists, and earnest tree huggers.
Sexy…now that’s a fun word. A word that implies pleasure. Tied to advertising, it’s [...]

Weapons Of Mass Distraction

“Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.” George W. Bush.
Years ago, the iconoclastic Professor Andrew Ehrenberg coined the verb ‘to SONK’. Sonking is an acronym that stands for the Scientification of Non Knowledge. It is a wonderfully handy term that deserves to be in more common usage.
With a word like sonking at our disposal, [...]

“You’re Fired” Really?

Donald Trump is the living legend with one of the greatest surname of our period.
Trump, a superb name brand that fits like a glove to his personality and his business empire, is also my hero. Don is a PR savvy global marketer with a great personality and now with this recent success of “The Apprentice”, [...]

9/11’s Impact On On The Advertising Industry

This is a weary topic, if only because the weight of attribution borne by 9/11 is both historically disproportionate and inflated, but more so because it dulls the reality of what preceded it.
In fact, the world of advertising is no different today than it was September 10th, 2001. It was then, as it is today, [...]

Everyone Take Their Places Please

We were once charged with the task of creating a document that detailed why a customer of an agency we were working with, should pass on the notion of bringing a web developer in house. Why? The answers seemed so obvious and flew into our heads faster than we could jot thoughts on a whiteboard. [...]

THE ABUSE OF THE SPECIAL OFFER IN DIRECT MARKETING

Direct marketing (DM) is full of rules, most written and considered unbreakable, but some unwritten and even harder to break. Dogged clods that we are, too many DM practitioners blindly follow those rules, to our own and our clients’ detriments.