• Free Agent: The Customer's Always Right
    Here's a phrase you don't often hear: "I had the best customer-service experience the other day." But I really did, and it made me think about how rarely marketing communications actually serve consumers' needs in a valuable way.
  • The Consumer: Behaving Like Pigs
    About five or six years ago, we did a billboard for the History Channel to promote a show called The Barbarians. It read, "The barbarians are coming" and was peppered with 1,400 real arrows. It was one of the most successful pieces of advertising we ever did for the network. Their average rating at the time was a 0.9, and this show achieved a 2.8. But interestingly, we only produced two billboards, one in L.A. and one in New York.
  • Media 100 - No. 88 Howard Gardner: A Satisfied Mind
    Ever meet a cognition rock star? Well, you're about to. This is Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a Guggenheim fellow, recipient of honorary degrees from more than 20 universities in at least five countries, and one of the Top 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world, according to Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in 2005. Nobel winners quote him.
  • Media 100 - No. 80 Nate Silver: What are the Odds?
    Nate Silver, self-described data-miner and numbers geek, has beat the odds by leveraging his upstart election-year hit FiveThirtyEight.com (which correctly and precisely predicted primary results and the outcome of the presidential election) into a new congressional policy voting tracker, a book deal and the right to remain fiercely independent of investors clamoring to back his entrepreneurial approach to crystal ball gazing.
  • Media 100 - No. 55 Tim Hanlon: Light Lunch
    Tim Hanlon joined the leadership team of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi Ventures in October, where he oversees the unit's investment activity, with a particular focus on new-media game changers. Besides Hanlon's more than 15 years of industry experience, most recently as executive vice president of Denuo, he's also a self-professed guru of '70s and '80s pop music trivia ("Give me a few bars of a song, and I'm probably going to know it," he boasts.)
  • Media 100 - No. 18 Michael Bloomberg: Office Space
    I once had lunch with Michael Bloomberg - sort of. It was in the sprawling Bloomberg news bullpen on Park Avenue, long before he became Hizoner, when he was still just a simple media titan.
  • Media 100 - No. 12 Don Draper: Liquid Lunch
    Who wouldn't jump at the chance at lunch with Don Draper - Sterling Cooper's charismatic creative director? The socially adept, emotionally challenged enigma at the center of Matthew Weiner's rich early '60s era advertising yarn Mad Men has tapped into something ineffable about the industry and captured our imaginations. Just picture the swanky restaurant he'd select - and the menu. They weren't bothered by cholesterol counts or tricky food pyramids back in '62. These boys invented the three-martini lunch - followed by the hair of the dog and whatnot back in the office. No doubt we'd toss back a few …
  • Media 100 - No. 8 Rishad Tobaccowala: Lit Lunch
    With over 25 hectic and groundbreaking years of marketing and strategy experience across a wide breadth of clients and companies behind him, Tobaccowala is busier than ever these days. Indeed, he simultaneously serves as both CEO of Denuo - a futures "think-do" company that helps clients like Hewlett-Packard and DuPont get to the future first - as well as Chief Innovation Officer of Publicis Groupe Media - a management board that oversees two major media networks: Starcom MediaVest Group and Zenith Optimedia. He does, however, have a spare 12 hours a week - spent mostly in airports and planes - …
  • Media 100: A Seat at the Table
    We're no fans of lists. That's mainly because there already are way too many of them out there. But when we began formulating one of our own we asked a simple question: who'd we most want to have lunch with? These had to be people whose audience we valued for one or more reasons. It was so difficult when we attempted this three years ago, we immediately abandoned the notion of repeating it annually. And yet, here it is again. Because we love anguish so much, this time we decided to rank them. Ultimately, it all came down to some …
  • Fast Forward: 150 Years, Or So
    Anyone familiar with this column probably knows that I think of most things in terms of media, and that I also believe virtually everything is media. Including U.S. presidents. That's right. U.S. presidents play a lot of roles. They are the chief executives of our federal government. They are the commander-in-chiefs of our armed forces. And they are - or should be - our nation's chief cheerleaders. They do this by conveying messages. And that, of course, is where the media thing comes in. Don't worry; I'm not going to revisit the messages of past presidents - especially a soon-to-depart …
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