I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. Yes, it was intentional. And yes, it was one hell of an experiment (possible post coming) trying to avoid watching anything related to it on Sunday. So, as the result of skipping the big game, I didn’t see the halftime act. I heard it was [yawn] as great as ever. On Saturday night, my wife and I saw Jimmy Eat World at Amos’ South End. Yes, we stood on the floor for two hours chest-to-back…
Unless you were living under a rock on Thursday, you saw this: Twitter blew up minutes later. Everyone was on Kenneth Cole. And for good reason – it was a really bad tweet. But if you listened to some of the people berating him, you’d think the Kenneth Cole empire was going to come crumbling down because of this. What? Look, I don’t buy Kenneth Cole products. I have no loyalty to him or his brand. I could care less…
I came across this banner ad tonight. I know it’s not as sexy to talk about advertising concepts as it is to talk about the technology that advances these concepts, but I’m a copywriter and this stuff is in my blood. So what’s wrong with this ad? The second I saw it, I targeted the writer as a Junior. It’s not the art direction, as that’s actually a pretty strong visual and I happen to like classic layout. And it’s…
Influence. It’s something that all advertising since the beginning of time has aspired to do. So should brands target influencers in social media? Not just yes, but hell yes. The data available to (the highest bidder) brands today directly identifies audiences in ways that Don Draper could only dream of. If they had the information we have back in the 60s, they’d’ve sent cartons of cigarettes to people who they believed could influence others to smoke a certain brand. Despite…
January 28, 1986 I woke up with a mean hangover from a party that ended just a few hours before. In other words, it was a normal morning. I was stationed on a remote US Air Force base near the DMZ in South Korea. There were maybe 1,000 US airmen on this sprawling base filled with indigenous foreigners. I was 20. The Challenger explosion occurred in the middle of the night where I was. When I saw the news on the…
I saw Black Swan last night. No, I’m not going to ruin it for you – and yet, I hope that this mini review is not so vague that it’s confusing. But first I want to say that I’m not a hype guy. Because of the hype swirling around Black Swan, I expected to leave the theater shaking my head and cursing the critics. Boy was I wrong. Black Swan is the story of Nina (Natalie Portman), a dancer in…
