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

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.

Sequels are a fool’s errand. But you can understand the allure. To the maker, they promise a repeat of the accolades and praise that the first effort elicited. To the public, they offer an experien…

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.

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…

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...

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 …

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 · 12m

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 · 15m

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...

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. …

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…

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

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 …

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

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

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 · January 30, 2025 · 15m

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 …

“[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 · 17m

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 · 14m

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 · 11m

How what happened to Herbie Hancock in Stuttgart decades ago can help you deal with #AI right now.

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…

There are literally thousands of books that will tell you how to manage a brand. And there are at least that many that will tell you how to run a company. Put those together and you might have the num...

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · January 30, 2025 · 12m

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not. Computers were programmed to talk to each other to see if they could generate conversations through machine learning. After many false starts, the…

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

There’s a lot of talk about culture at advertising agencies, why work from home is killing it, and how to save it. Here’s some more.

We have seen the best minds of our generation, destroyed by madness, dragging themselves hysterically through thesauri and rhyming dictionaries to find that one word which will encapsulate for a cl…

Barkley, OKRP, Havas, Uncommon, Dentsu, Tag, Carmichael Lynch, Tierney, and don't get me started on VML Is it time for your agency to jump on board the merger train, or has the merger train jumped the...

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

Ah, 1987. The year we were introduced to Rick Astley and Photoshop, the year Elliot Page was born and Andy Warhol died. And the year that John Sculley, CEO of Apple Computers, published his memoir,…

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

These are early days in AI so here are some early thoughts about it, advertising, humans, LLMs and what they may all mean. Or not. Hard to tell. It's early days...

You may think that the only people who need to read this book, and therefore this review, are writers, but you would be wrong. For, as my father (and many others before him and since) said, “clear …

Charles Dickens was really rich and he was really poor during extremely volatile economic times. Is there anything we can extrapolate from his work to apply to our own era's understanding of class? Pe...

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · January 30, 2025 · 13m

Read enough of these books and trade publications, and attend enough workshops and conferences and seminars, and invariably you will find yourself engaged in arguments around an age old question: I…

Podcast Episode · You're On Mute · January 30, 2025 · 16m

I place AI in the context of the past few decades of advertising and it makes absolutely no one feel better about anything. You’re welcome.

Each fall, our history teachers would begin the schoolyear promising us that when June rolled around, we’d have worked our way through the dusty decades and would be discussing current events in th…