A recent experience taught me a valuable lesson worth sharing. On a walk with the family along a popular beachside spot, we stumbled upon a tiny isolated cafe which was bustling. The place was essentially a large hole in the wall with enough space for a...
Huge budget, magnetic leading man, visionary director, action a plenty and seamless special effects. All the makings of a brilliant action movie. So why is the latest Jason Bourne movie so brain numbingly dull? If you haven’t seen the movie, it basically starts with an action...
To thrive in today’s high pressure, high expectations marketing world, you need to be more than a high performance “corporate athlete”. You need to bring another dimension. You need to bring your A-game. That is, your “Art-game”. So what is the A-game and how do we bring...
I don’t know about you but I love it when someone challenges my thinking, inspires me to greater heights and makes me do better work. In today’s busy world, it might not happen very often but I think you have to make it happen. You...
The days of hyper-aggressive competition between brands are being mollified as progressive businesses put aside competitive inclinations in favour of collaboration. Sure, healthy competition can drive people and businesses to innovate and improve. But aggressive competition, the type that blindingly seeks to destroy the enemy and...
Hopefully you took the time to read this image carefully? I would read it again now anyway. This hairdresser is a ‘specialist’. It specialises in short hair, it specialises in long hair, it specialises in beard trims AND (wait for it), it also styles hair! You might think...
It’s a provocative and fundamental question, one that is often neglected while we place our focus and attention on technology, social, content or whatever the latest marketing trend is. It is easy to confuse a brand with marketing. The 5, 6 or however many “P’s”...
Local Area Marketing Manager was for decades the “Traffic Cop” of marketing careers; you either started there or got sent there because you couldn’t handle proper marketing. Well, guess what? The language and tenets of local area marketing are remarkably similar to those recently espoused by...
In last week's post, ‘How to get some agency love back’, we highlighted the importance of honesty in regards to removing the systemic deception and underhand money-making practices pervading the agency landscape. Having a frank, open and respectful dialogue between client and agency will go...
You could be forgiven for thinking the marketer-agency relationship was broken beyond repair. In the last few years we have lived through a world where ex-CEOs of large media groups admit to widespread ‘stealing’ of their client’s money via publisher kick-backs, where creative agencies continue...