We are working in a golden age of metrics.  But the explosion in available data and metrics can give us KPI tunnel vision.  It can blind businesses to what’s really most important. Sky found that it was tracking more that 2,000 KPIs across their business…

Marketers love chasing the shiny new thing. It seems like every week, we learn about a new technology, social network, or media platform that promises to be the next big idea in marketing. We sometimes get so enamored by the shiny new thing that we forget…

A few weeks ago, a publicly traded beverage company called Long Island Iced Tea Corp changed it’s name to Long Blockchain and announced that it was focusing on blockchain technology. Their stock surged 200% on the news. Last week, Chanticleer Holdings, which…

Organizations can spot the risks of a new idea a mile away. But there’s a curious blind spot when it comes to the risks of not taking those risks. The path of least resistance is to play it safe and keep the idea as close to the tried-and-true as possible.…

There’s a funny saying circulating with marketers right now on the current state of Big Data: “Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are…

Marketoonist Cartoon

“We value your privacy” is one of those meaningless marketing phrases, like “your call is very important to us” or

I find few things as silly in the world of marketing as the classic Brand Onion.  The Brand Onion goes by many names — Brand DNA, Brand Architecture, Brand Wheel, Brand Key, etc. — but it’s basically a one-page synopsis of a brand, collectively word-smithed…

Last week, Facebook released a free beta for a new virtual reality meeting experience called Horizon Workrooms.  Using their Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets, Facebook re-imagines the future of meetings where we’ll all show up as cartoon avatars that will mimic…

When I worked on the method brand from 2006-2010, we often talked about about trying to stand out in a “sea of sameness.”  Like many aisles in the grocery story, household cleaning was dominated by brands that looked and sounded alike — same stock bottle…

Media spend is rebounding in 2021 with a continued spending shift from traditional to digital channels.  Zenith reported this week that digital ads will make up 58% of total ad spend in 2021, up from 48% in 2019 and 54% in 2020. A few years ago, Mark Ritson…

Consumers expect personalized experiences.  Yet they also grate at attempts by marketers to collect personal data about them to deliver these personalized experiences.  That’s a paradox that marketers increasingly have to navigate. There’s a fine line between…