Digital communication is a lot like Olympic diving. The value of success depends on the degree of difficulty. If I successfully execute an easy dive I get fewer points than I would for successfully executing a more difficult dive. There are lots of tempting easy dives in the world of …
Integration, by which I mean integrated marketing communications, is not all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed it’s in danger of cracking up. And this crazy little thing called digital is largely to blame. The front end of integrated communication – the carefully orchestrated end result that gets seen by …
Average advertising usually has a beneficial commercial effect. Average content doesn’t. That’s because brands pay to ensure that average advertising gets a decent audience. Content, on the other hand, is not afforded the luxury of guaranteed visibility. Content has to earn its audience. Content has to be shared to be …
At school we were taught to plan stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories had a clearly defined structure. They were linear, finite and proprietary, in that the author exercised complete control. Many advertisers still plan their stories in this structured way. It suits their annual planning …
This is how we want the world to work because it makes our jobs easier. This is Paul Adams talking about influencer theory in his book Grouped. We want the world to work in such a way that our content flows from us via influential hubs to mass audiences (for …
Agency folk, have you ever talked about “educating” clients? Client folk, how do you feel about the idea of being “educated” by an agency? That kind of language always sounds really patronising to me, especially when, in my experience, the average client has a more structured approach to training and …
But soft, what light through yonder taxi window breaks? This, this light through yonder taxi window breaks. The breaking light is coming from an art installation sun commissioned by Tropicana. When I first heard about this I was impressed. I was impressed because it ain’t easy being a packaged goods …
A year ago I wrote about “The method behind the madness that is @Betfairpoker“. The post was based on a telephone interview with Richard Bloch, Betfair’s Head of Global PR. At the time the question on my lips was the question on the lips of most people who were encountering …
Optimise for humans, not for robots. That’s always struck me as good, sound SEO advice. Write good, relevant, useful stuff for human beings and the Google algorithm that is doing its best to direct humans to good, relevant, useful stuff will reward you. Don’t waste your time trying to game …
Three blog posts continually catch my eye for the level of ongoing traffic they pull into this blog via search engines. What Spongebob Squarepants can teach us about modern ideas and capturing the imagination. This post was published on April 28, 2011. The graph above shows daily page views since …
