Following the 14th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and as we anxiously watch Hurricane Dorian looming off the southeastern coast of the United States, I speak to Kenny Bellau, who has an inspiring story to share. That’s because he rescued over 400 people in New Orleans in the chaotic aftermath of Katrina. It’s a portrait in […]
In my first-ever podcast episode, I speak to Linden Griffith, a life coach who helps girls and women tame anxiety and find their best selves. In so doing, she presents a viable alternative to psychological or psychiatric care, one that is centered on our strengths, not our flaws. Linden knows a thing or two about […]
It’s a lot more complicated to be a marketer today than it was 25 years ago. Not surprisingly, I occasionally encounter marketers who feel dizzy at times by the overwhelming amount of tactical choices they have available. My reminder to them goes something like this: sometimes, the best way to cope with complexity is simply […]
In the earlier stages of my career, I like to tell people that I literally played games for a living. That was just one of my responsibilities as a marketer in the video game industry, though. I also budgeted for and planned TV advertising campaigns. On more than one occasion, I remember asking my media […]
When it comes to whether a brand should hire an agency or bring the work in-house, ask yourself this: is the activity in question revenue generating?
For decades, advertisers have relied on an index-based approach to determine audience concentration. This way, they can size up who’s consuming what content and figure out if it makes sense to advertise there. No one uses this method more than TV advertising planners. An index worked pretty effectively when we had fewer choices of what […]
Last week, I hosted an ANA webinar with LUMA Partners CEO and Founder Terry Kawaja to talk about the rise of the direct brand economy and what traditional advertisers can do to compete. Many of you may know LUMA Partners for its LUMAscapes visualizations of various ecosystems – here’s the one they created for ad […]
A few years ago, I started noticing several former colleagues taking jobs at direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, including pet food provider Ollie and Bombfell, a seller of men’s clothing. At first, I thought of these companies as experiments in a new business model, one that bypassed traditional retail and forged relationships directly with the end consumer. […]
Like so many other innovations that have come before it, advanced TV has become a crowded, noisy field. It can mean very different things, depending on who you ask. There is one aspect of advanced TV that is consistent, however: using richer data than a blunt age-gender demographic to define and plan to reach an […]
Having a data strategy is as important to the modern enterprise as a product road map and a sales plan. In this article in MKTGInsights, I explain why marketing’s shift from “Madmen” to “Mathmen” mandates a proactive approach to acquiring, synthesizing, reporting, monetizing and protecting customer data. To read the full article, click here.
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