QR Codes follow-up (haters continue to hate)
A while back I wrote a post about QR codes. It’s not a pet topic of mine, but I do have one on my business card. I have one on a self-inking rubber stamp. And of course there’s one on this site, if you happen to want to continue reading this on your iPhone. But are they worth loving or hating – or even arguing about? (Spoiler: no).
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QR code haters gonna hate QR codes
I’ve managed to trip over the Business Insider article entitled “Death to the QR Code” twice in the past week, mostly as a result of marketing colleagues passing the link around via Twitter or LinkedIn. And if the purpose of that provocative headline was to drag more eyeballs onto the Business Insider site, then I must concede its success.
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This is of course impossible
I wasn’t sure that QR codes would catch on in Canada before they became obsolete, but they seem to have been quite widely adopted here finally. And as I had created mobile versions of this site and my portfolio site, it seemed sensible to incorporate a QR code into my new business card design, which was uploaded to an online print service earlier this week.
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For my friends who work where I used to work
I had a particularly odd day back in July of 2010. I was at a presentation for a pretty high-profile project. The team had been working very hard, and we were quite happy with the result. The creative director was on vacation, and my art director had to beg off for another meeting. It was a busy time.
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Social media: where marketing and PR collide
One thing that the BP and Cooks Source incidents have in common is hubris, though the two cases are separated by several orders of magnitude in scale. It reminds us that the “social” aspect of “social media” doesn’t merely mean that lots of people are logged in to Facebook, but that they are in fact people, with personalities, opinions, and morals.
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The great Canadian creative face-off
Am I one of the 10 most creative people in the Canadian Marketing industry? The suggestion is as flattering as it is unlikely. As we delve into the possible answers to this question, I will first address those of you who already know what I’m talking about. I’ll get to the rest of you shortly.
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What is a relationship without trust?
I’ve been wilfully ignoring the Old Spice hype. That kind of makes me a bad creative guy in advertising/marketing terms, because I’m supposed to be hyper-aware of new media strategies, and (I think) because I’m supposed to cheer on successful creative, even if it wasn’t created by anyone I know, out of solidarity, or perhaps good sportsmanship.
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Make the benefit bigger
I really have to work on my rhetorical style. And by that I mean to say that I don’t think it’s the rhetoric that’s the problem so much as the delivery. I make what I think is – what I know to be a perfect conversation-ender and then turn as if to walk away, and at that instant, someone says “Yeah, it’s like when…”
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Brand differentiation fail
I have often said, of my day gig in advertising, “If this job is ever difficult, it’s because somebody screwed up.” You might think that’s pretty upbeat coming from me until you realize that only one screw-up has to be signed off on to make an entire campaign, or even a brand, difficult.
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5 words I don’t want to hear in 2010
The end of the year is a time for lists, and as I am a writer it only seems natural that my list is about words. And because I am cranky, it is equally natural that my list is about words I don’t like.
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