Quickies

- The consumer is becoming more resistant to marketing, right? Tell that to Apple and Toyota. Here’s what the consumer is becoming more resistant to: generic, undifferentiated products supported by smug, benefit-free advertising. - If I have to read one more quote from one more brain-dead agency boob with the word “engagement” in it, someone’s going to die. The engagement crowd is trying to

Precision Guessing

A close friend of mine is a psychiatrist and former medical director of a large behavioral health organization.In our frequent conversations about psychiatry and the human condition, he often makes the point that human behavior is often unfathomable.It occurred to me recently that his years at Harvard and Johns Hopkins may have been wasted. If he wanted a profound understanding of human behavior

Nailed

It has become an article of faith in the advertising and marketing world that traditional mass-market advertising is on the way out.From the New York Times, December 28, 2004:Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said, “You’re seeing the end of the era of mass marketing.”Well, it’s a few years later, and it seems to me I saw some Bud spots on the Super Bowl. Also, I seem to recall

Aiming Low

Of all the dumb things that advertisers do, one of the dumbest is aiming their message too young.

There seems to be an irresistible need for marketers to target young people despite monumental evidence that older people have far more money, are far easier to reach and all-in-all make better customers.

Of course, there are some products that rely on the youth market for their survival. But for

Puzzles & Mysteries

An article by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in The New Yorker leads me to believe that advertising people can learn something from spies. Not about stealing other peoples’ ideas, but about solving business problems.Gladwell tells us about a national security expert, Gregory Treverton who distinguished between two kinds of problems: puzzles and mysteries. His distinctions have

Wait A Minute

Former Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen once said, “The three most important words in the English language are ‘wait a minute.’ ”Advertising and marketing people would be wise to take heed. There is no doubt that we are in a period of great change in the advertising world. What’s not so certain is how it’s changing or where it’s going. There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bloviating but not

The End of the World

I have good news. We haven’t all died from bird flu. Or from SARS. Or from ebola virus. Oh, and we survived Y2K pretty much intact. And if you can’t sleep nights worrying about global warming, here are a few quotes that might help: In “The Cooling World," April 28, 1975 Newsweek informed us that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that “catastrophic famines might result from…global cooling” On