• The Aaarrrticle: Gadgets Overboard
    Click here if ye dare.
  • Media Metrics: A Day in the Media Life
    Media has become the fabric of our lives. Once upon a time, our family and other social relations were the fabric of our lives, or at least that's the way the story goes. But in our postmodern era, nothing is real until it's on one of the major networks, cable news, the Internet, or another media feed. Proximity is nothing; connectivity is everything. We all know this to be true. Just look at that group of friends walking down the street "together": each one is on a cell phone with someone else. Or look at that individual walking alone, tethered …
  • Column: Perspective
    Advertising. the very word summons up a different time, in the second half of the last century, when things were much simpler. The Western economies, led by America, built a new world on the promise of plenty. Back then, things were easier for marketers. People in the postwar world were enthralled with a new technology: television. Soon there was a glowing orb in every living room, delivering the promise of a better world, a better life -- or at least a life full of wonderful new products. Advertising was at the heart of this phenomenon. Television delivered mass …
  • Column: Productivity
    If advertising is dead, we'll just have to resurrect it, because consumers certainly don't want to live without it. But when we breathe new life into it, let's not revive the Frankenstein monster of today that the villagers of the global marketplace are pretty much beating to death right now. Yankelovich data is unequivocal -- consumers do not want an end to advertising; they want better advertising. Advertising has become anathema because marketers have turned it into something that is lifestyle- threatening rather than lifestyle-enhancing. The imperative facing marketers is to reignite the spark that restores life and spirit …
  • Column: Gestalt
    As advertisers often ask me "what's coming next," you'd think I'd have a pretty good answer for this column. The truth is, with so much happening and so much opportunity squandered today in the name of defending what once was, the question leaves me at a loss. I mean, look at the proportion of audiences going online and skipping television ads, and compare this figure to the dollars spent online as a percent of total traditional ad dollars.There is movement, but the pace of adoption could knock the wind out of even the most ambitious futurist. And yet, …
  • Column: Dishing
    Riddle question: how is a TiVo like a microwave oven? Answer: Both were predicted to nuke an industry, but doomsday never happened, and never will. One of my first account assignments back in the Advertising B.cC. days (Before Cable, Before Consolidation, Before Context Planning) was on a microwave-oven account. Microwaves were all the latest rage, and the kitchen-appliance industry was aghast that the microwave would spell the death of ovens, toasters, and cooktops (back then, prosaically known as "stoves") as consumers worldwide were expected to soon prepare all foods requiring heat -- literally everything -- in their microwaves.
  • Column: Connection
    The question "is there life after death in advertising?" comes from the same intellectual depths as those plumbed by Cher when she posed the far more fundamental query, "Do you believe in life after love?" This fatuous comparison merely allows us to say, "of course," and then get over it. Love, relationships, and marketing communications occupy a spectrum from the indifferent to the spectacular; they always have and always will. It's still advertising, but not as we know it. So the real questions are about form rather than existence, about the means of transmission, the space/time continuum, and the …
  • Column: Branded
    Okay, so the end of advertising is upon us (once again). Well, this time we've got 10 predictions for the end. The first one is easy. If advertising ends, the last adman standing will be Donny Deutsch. You've seen his show, "The Big Idea," on CNBC. It's successful. We watch it.Donny represents the final straw of advertising. He is an adman who has transformed himself into an entertainer. He's not a Charlie Rose, Dick Cavett, or even a Barbara Walters. Donny's ammo doesn't puncture the heart like Charlie and Babs on a roll. Instead, he goes for bear with …
  • Column: The Department
    They say the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and yet expect a different result. Based on that statement, I'd have to call the advertising industry insane. Why? Because here we go again, hell-bent to predict what's next for our business even though our track record for prognosticating the developments of advertising is lousy, to put it kindly. (Am I the only one who remembers the fervent forecasts of a fully online media marketplace, with everything from Cosmo spreads to Super Bowl spots auctioned off in real time, made as recently as the …
  • Column: The Consumer
    In preparation for this forecast issue of media, the editors asked me to ponder the question "If advertising is dead, what comes next?" Which made me think of atoms. Atoms, of course, are the ubiquitous little devils that constitute everything we are and everything we see. We are made entirely of atoms, as are the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the cars we drive, and the houses we sleep in. They're everywhere. But what's interesting about atoms is that they last a lot longer than the things they form. When I shuffle off …
« Previous Entries