S. Todd Anthony kindly requested a Zoom meeting with me last month. During the meeting, he asked me a lot of great questions about advertising, copywriting, clients, mentoring, and more. The full interview is available on his LinkedIn page, right now. It will also be published on Pinwheel’s blog. For a taste, scroll down to […]
Hunting Has Its Own Virtues, Virtue Signaling Isn’t One of Them
Here I find peace. Here we are free. Here the tradition continues. Here it’s your season. Question. Why make a thinly veiled political advertisement (favoring one side) when the intent is to sell deer hunting equipment to all who hunt deer? Question. Who would be more likely to go deer hunting—Don Trump or Joe Biden? […]
Political Ads Get Properly Skewered By A Major League Baseball Team
Politics is such an ugly sport, unlike baseball. Baseball is life-sized chess with cleats. Baseball is also America’s pastime, and politics is not. Politics is America’s wasteland. And politics in a presidential election year is even worse. All of which leaves the American public hungry for something good, something original, and something fun. Something like […]
I’ll Take ‘Creative Wizardry’ for $800, Alex
Diminish a once-powerful industry and lose all respect inside and outside the agency. What is influencer marketing? What is programmatic? What is artificial intelligence? There is a virulent strain of stupid on the loose in the business world today. The disease leads those infected to strip the soul of creativity from the marketing communications industry. […]
Poets Are Particularly Adept At “Packaging” Big Ideas for Brands
Do copywriters write well in other forms? Does it matter? Yes and yes. For professional writers, there is the literary market, the entertainment market, the journalism market, and the advertising market. When you work in advertising, all of the sister industries are part of the big picture. When you go to bat for a brand, […]
What Is Great Writing, And Where Do Great Design Ideas Come From?
Writing and design—these are the core skills that propel the communications industry forward. Without excellence in writing and design, we would have no great books, films, or architecture, and our advertising would be a complete waste of time and money. Thankfully, there’s a universe of talented writers and designers and many are willing to work […]
Words Matter; Ergo, The Content That Fortifies Dictionary.com Matters
Words. There are so many of them. It’s hard to know them all or to know what they all mean. We used to have a dictionary and thesaurus nearby to look up unknown words. Today, we make a quick visit to Dictionary.com to confirm our hunch, or to get the official version. For instance, here’s […]
Chili’s for Dinner? That’s so ‘Ita
A neologism is a term, word, or phrase in the process of entering common use, but that has not yet been fully accepted into mainstream language. A protologism is a word coined by an individual or small group that has not yet been published somewhere independent from the coiners. A homophone is a word that […]
The Glorification of Personalization in Marcom Is Persistent But Misguided
Since 2014, the Association of National Advertisers has surveyed its mostly client-side members to identify the marketing word of the year. This year the winning nomenclature is “Personalization.” Other top choices in the ANA 2019 Marketing Word of the Year voting: “equality and inclusion,” “data,” and “in-house.” “Personalization is what customers expect,” one participant in […]
What’s Your “Truth Well Told”?
Quick. In a sentence tell me what your agency is all about. Come on, we don’t have all day. Ad People Can’t Seem To Sum Themselves Up Darren Woolley is the founder and global chief executive of TrintityP3, an independent global marketing management consulting company. Q. A what? A. He’s a consultant. Over the past […]
