• ONLINE SPIN
    Being Busy Versus Being Productive
    The world is not short on ideas. However, walking the talk and playing your role in facilitating the execution of ideas and helping to move a project or a business from point A to point B is harder to do. Those who understand the logistical realities of what it takes to execute strategies make the best strategists. Those who drive innovation not out of an indiscriminate desire to innovate, but ultimately as a creative and practical solution to meet an objective, become the best project leaders. These individuals get the job done and inspire others around them. Does your agency …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Crowds, Communities, And The Power Of A Service Philosophy
    This past Saturday, we ran a TEDx event in my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, focused on the future of the city post-quake. Seventeen speakers, ranging from local urban planners to Art Agnos, the former Mayor of San Francisco during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, gathered before a sell-out crowd of 700 to share their visions for Christchurch, to explore the possibilities before us, and to inspire us to emerge from the disaster better, stronger, safer, and more beautiful than before.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    e-G8 to G8: Do No Harm
    "Do no harm." That was blogger Jeff Jarvis's challenge to French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the e-G8 in Paris this week. Borrowing from the Hippocratic Oath and cautioning against Internet regulation, Jeff's exchange with the president helped set the stage for two days of robust, frank, sometimes heated, but always civil discussions on what the G8 leaders should do -- or not do -- relative to the Internet Revolution.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Solution-Oriented Selling: Listen First, Speak Second
    There are many kinds of salespeople in marketing. Some are more successful than others, but in my mind the most successful ones are what many refer to as the "solution sellers." Solution selling is an art and a science that revolves around a simple practice: listen first and sell second.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Here An Algorithm, There An Algorithm
    Unless you have been living under a rock, you are well aware of the growing skew towards math and science in the digital media industry. We are operating in the age of the algorithm. So let's put digital marketing technology algorithms into context.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    The Cost Of A Complicated Industry
    The digital media arena -- the environment in which we sell, plan, buy, measure, optimize and account for media -- is bloody complicated right now. Yes, it's dynamic. New entities are in play. New currencies are flowing. Data drives. The economics are in flux. Talent is retooling itself (or being retooled). Companies are transforming themselves to participate in all the hoopla of an increasingly automated media landscape -- a la bidded media. But, never before in our industry has the "buy/sell" meant so much and had to carry so much water.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    What Lollapalooza Can Teach Us About Marketing
    One-to-one marketing doesn't work, and we should probably stop pretending that it does. The fallacy of one-to-one marketing is that a brand can speak directly to a consumer in a targeted, efficient manner, and be successful. The fact is, you can't. You cannot be efficient talking to a target of one. What is true is that community marketing works, and leveraging your community to evangelize your brand is an effective, efficient model, which has been proven in this age of social media.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Top Three Ways Clients Can Fix Agency Relationships
    Last week we discussed the top three ways that agencies can improve the client/agency relationship. Of course there are two parties to every relationship, and this week we delve into what clients can do to improve relationships with their agencies.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Do We Care About Commoditization?
    >On article pages, in classrooms and on stages everywhere, you can find plenty of marketing guidance tied to a single letter of the alphabet. Pick your letter. The four Ps; the five Ps; the four or five Cs: pricing, product, place, participation, content, community, consumer, creative and on and on. These lists are constantly reconfigured, renumbered and ordered for emphasis. I'd like to focus on just two. These two are on the list called: "Things We Say We Care About."
  • ONLINE SPIN
    What Do Skype And Drug Dealers Have In Common?
    Won't you join me in raising a glass in congratulations to Tony Bates, Skype's CEO, along with Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake, the newly bought company's two major shareholders? While we're at it, I think Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, the original Estonian developers, deserve a hand, as do Niklas Zennstr"m and Janus Friis, who founded Skype as a company in 2003. I am not being facetious or sarcastic. Skype already earned their props back in 2005, when they sold to eBay, and closing a deal the size of the one they've just done with Microsoft is …
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