• Discovery's Digital Vision Comes Into Focus
    When you look beyond the headlines, you may think Discovery CEO David Zaslav has the clearest vision of how historic media properties can evolve and reinvent themselves in the new digital world. Yes, this is about the company's $14.6 billion-dollar acquisition of Scripps -- but it's so much more than that.
  • Storytellers, Content Factories And The Diminishing Role Of Influencers
    You know that something has become "a thing" when that something finds its way into marketing speak and marketing titles. The city of Detroit has recently appointed Aaron Foley as chief storyteller for the city. Antonio Lucio, CMO of HP, calls himself a mix of chief brand officer, chief marketing people officer, chief alignment officer and chief storyteller.
  • Let's Make Marketing Simple(r)
    Marketing at its most atomic level is very simple - but we tend to overlook the simplicity and create complication that bogs us down. I understand why we do this, but I wish we could find a way NOT to do it.
  • Curmudgeon, Chicken Little Or Cognoscenti?
    My previous column about the potential shallowness encouraged by social media drew a few comments that indicated I was just being a grumpy old man.The comments seemed to telling me, "Relax. You just don't understand because you're too old. Everything will be great." And, if that's true, I'd be okay with that. I'm more than willing to be proven a doddering old fool if it means technology is ushering us into a new era of human greatness. But what if this time is different? Maybe civilization as we know it will be over. The important part of this is "as …
  • Apple's Next Act
    The iPhone8 will come out this fall. Rumors of drama, delays, hardware and manufacturing issues notwithstanding, there's a sparkling new iPhone in our future. It's also likely to be the first mass-market moment for what has been -- until now -- a "geeks-only" festival of hopes and dreams. Apple will launch the world into the augmented reality era. AR arrives with the iPhone8.
  • Immortality Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
    The immortalists believe we can and should live forever -- that death is a technical problem, and that it therefore has a technical solution. The New Yorker, covering the topic a few months ago, quoted Dr. Joon Yun: "I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it's encoded... If something is encoded, you can crack the code... If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!"
  • Do You Know Your Andres?
    There's a grocery store a few miles from my house. It's small and older -- at least 30 years in its current location. Usually, the shelves are poorly stocked with a limited selection compared to the newer stores surrounding it. Despite these facts, the store manages to stay in business, which is somewhat hard to comprehend given the cutthroat, low-margin nature of the industry. But the store survives because it has a secret weapon. His name is Andres. He's a cashier and has been at the store for 20-plus years.
  • Is Programmatic Ruining Advertising?
    Programmatic has been the trend over the last five years or so, but is it possible that we may see a backlash against it in the next two years? Programmatic is certainly not going away, but I do think marketers are starting to smell it for what it really is. It's a cost-saving strategy, which attempts to create the same ROI for a fraction of the cost when compared to more "traditional" forms of advertising.
  • Live From Inside Gale Of Creative Destruction
    Talk about cognitive dissonance. First, Mediapost's Jack Loechner writes about a Forrester Report, "The End of Advertising as We Know It," which was published earlier this year. Seeing as last week I started to ring the death knell for advertising agencies, I though I should check the report out. But i encountered some problems.
  • Video Is Oxygen
    Every day I get asked a version of the same question -- from clients, friends, job seekers and headhunters: "How should I use video?" It used to be a hard question, but now the answer is crystal-clear. Video is like oxygen. Period. So, how do you use oxygen? You use it all the time, everywhere -- while you sleep, while you travel, while you're at work. While you're with your family. Video is the connective tissue that makes the web ubiquitous, it crosses boundaries, time zones, languages, and knowledge level.
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