• The Ever-Evolving Tablet
    It's no secret that consumers love their tablets. Retailers know it. Publishers know it. And if the number of YouTube videos of infants playing with iPads is any indication, babies know it, too. So how come marketers have been so slow to jump on the tablet revolution?
  • Can Pins Build Brands?
    Some marketers have vented their frustrations with a seemingly fickle audience constantly chasing its own (long) tail. Fatigue sets in. "It looks like every couple of weeks, some new social media channel tackles the world, and is rewriting history," wrote Danny Devriendt, executive vice president and digital & social media strategist, EMEA at Porter Novelli back in March, before ticking off the exhausting list: "MySpace. Google Wave. Facebook. Twitter. Google+. Foursquare. Gowalla. Quora. Pinterest. Yammer. Path. Heatmap. Instagram. Yelp."
  • Is Gen Y Sick of Tech?
    They are not happy about where the world is going, and they are suspicious of digital technology. More than half of them think everyone should stop sharing personal thoughts and experiences online; they believe society needs to reestablish its privacy boundaries. No, these aren't members of the William Gibson fan club. Nor are they the rumblings of some militia hunkering down in the woods of Idaho.
  • Courting the Digitally Demanding Affluent Market
    There was a time not long ago when exclusive brands were afraid that mass exposure would cheapen their image. Now luxury brands are everywhere -- on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest -- because the consumer is everywhere, and because it's better to be out in the digital world than stuck on a magazine page. They're everywhere because being relevant and visible is worth losing control of your image.
  • Platform-Proof Campaigns
    Suddenly, a familiar-seeming ad appears on your computer. It looks just like a funny poster you saw in the Wall Street subway station this morning -- something about living in New York and making a million dollars but spending less time outside than a prisoner.
  • Menacing Mobile
    In a New York Times column titled "The Twitter Trap," published in May 2011, Bill Keller noted the latest mobile developments before confessing that "my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community ..." More recently, in another essay in the same newspaper, titled "The Flight from Conversation," M.I.T. psychology professor Sherry Turkle similarly asserted that the new technology brings with it some kind of loss, a metaphysical price to be paid. But these concerns about media …
  • Rediscovering Media's Lost Generation
    In most ways, marketers are no different than they were last year, last decade or even last century: They sell stuff. It's the media they rely on to do that selling that is in disarray, reinventing itself faster than the speediest algorithms. Few companies have managed to keep up with the digital explosion, let alone get ahead of it. In a very real way, these companies have lost their audiences, especially digital natives. MEDIA asked Doug Ray, president of Carat USA, for his take on that widening disconnect, and what marketers need to do to rediscover their audiences in an …
  • Brands With White Hats
    In January, the world turned into their pearl-clutching grandmothers when NPR's This American Life ran a story about the conditions of a Chinese factory that manufactured Apple products. The conditions were deplorable, the workers were poisoned, maimed even, and Apple was to blame. The story spread rapidly, and within a few hours, was picked up by every major news outlet and trickled down to Twitter feeds around the world. Then came the retraction two months after the broadcast: "I have difficult news." This American Life host Ira Glass wrote in a press release, "We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about …
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