Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · February 29, 2024 · 13m

For years we’ve admonished brands that marketing is not about what you want to tell your customer, it’s about what your customer needs to hear. That until you think about what you’re doing for them…

I enlist Peter Drucker to make the point that all businesses - regardless of what industry they're in - have one job to do. And it's not what most of them think it is.

Maya Angelou admonished us that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. But who tells us who we are? Certainly not ourselves, who weave a tangled web to keep outsiders at …

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · February 29, 2024 · 13m

Words matter, of course, but do ALL words matter? Or are some just sounds we make without really thinking about what we're doing? No, those count too. Here's why.

This is a curious book. Andreas Kluth uses the story of the Carthaginian general Hannibal to think about how to give one’s life meaning – a story which he then interprets and illuminates with the t…

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · February 29, 2024 · 12m

Judging awards shows is a terrific opportunity to be inspired by the great work of peers and competitors. So imagine my surprise when i found myself inspired by work that was somewhat "less than great...

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · February 29, 2024 · 12m

It has long been our opinion that people don’t really change. Sure, you can present them with new stimuli or you can drop them into new situations and find they behave in ways they did not before. …

Businesses have made a fetish out of doing more with less and extracting every last ounce of "value" from everything. What if there's a different way?

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · February 29, 2024 · 15m

Whisky is an act of deceit. It starts when distillers deceive the malt by soaking it so it thinks it’s time to germinate, releasing the sugars that the grain would normally use to grow into plants …

I had a boss once who said that the creative process can always be made efficient-er, it just can't be made efficient. And what he meant was, there are always parts of what creatives do that are stupi...

Sometimes a cigar is a metaphor. And sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, as Albert-Lazslo Barabasi explains in Linked, a cigar is a miniature model of how our vaster cigar-shaped uni…

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · February 29, 2024 · 2m

Thanks for clicking on the link. When I was cleaning out some old files i found this this presentation I wrote in 2016. Back then I shared it with a couple of universities, a few agencies and a cli…

Society & Culture Podcast · a series of brief conversations about the big things people don't usually have conversations about.

It’s difficult. On the one hand, our creative impulse rebels against the idea of a universe in which everything is planned. For it leaves little room for anything new. For any innovation. The best …

A sort of rallying cry for creatives where AI is concerned. By way of an apocryphal HenryFord quotation.

It would be easy to mis-read Dr. Heiss’s interesting book as a screed against instincts. And indeed, all of the support for such a rant would appear to be here; our instincts are hardwired into us …

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · January 30, 2025 · 15m

Wunderkind Noah Brier has created BrXnd Collabs to understand what AI is, can do & can’t, by smashing brands like Brooks Brothers, Nike, Lego, Wrangler and others together. I played with it so I could...

For as long as there has been advertising, people have been telling us it is dead. Television is dead. Print is dead. The campaign is dead. One can’t help but think that moments after the first Nea…

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · January 30, 2025 · 17m

“[They are] a generation of coddled infants who developed into demanding tyrants.” I can’t walk into a brainstorm, client meeting, focus group, or marketing conference without hearing people complain...

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · January 30, 2025 · 14m

We used to create campaigns for Miller Brewing Company that existed solely in places where you could buy beer. We called it “the last five feet of the sale”, when you were standing with money in yo…