This Week's Cartoon

sustainability marketing

EcoVeritas CEO David Harding-Brown recently observed: “Sustainability as an umbrella term is becoming meaningless; a series of macro statements that consumers can no longer relate to or engage with.” A consumer protection group called ICPEN recently found that 42% of sustainability claims made by brands online were “exaggerated, false, or deceptive.” In 1983, an undergrad named Jay Westerveld coined the…

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status quo and resistance to change

If the only constant is change, a close second is the resistance to that change. Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine, once stumbled across an obscure article written by a Product Manager in 1959 entitled “50 Reasons Why We Cannot Change.” The Product Manager, E.F. Borisch, compiled this list while working for the Milwaukee Gear Company, and many of…

building resilience

There is renewed emphasis on resilience this last year, which PwC defines as “an organization’s capacity to anticipate and react to change, not only to survive, but also to evolve.” The byword in this definition is change, and much of the focus has been on how to build a culture of agility. As literal Groundhog Day passed this last…

playing it safe

Rob Schwartz, CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day, recently said: “Every client conversation I’ve had these days is about who is going to be offended by this ad. There’s a lot of discussion about risk mitigation. What that tends to do is that it makes things very bland and not effective.” It’s a tricky time to work in any form of communications. Marketers…

pop-ups and user experience

The web has turned into an obstacle course of pop-ups upon pop-ups. No one likes pop-ups and yet there’s plenty of conversion data that designers can point at to justify them. That’s the pop-up conundrum. There’s data to show people find them annoying and there’s data to show they work. Pop-ups have become standard design practice, and yet I…

culture of new ideas

I was struck by this recent observation from Timothy Clark in his HBR article on cultivating “Intellectual Bravery”: “Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy…

marketing beyond cookies

Marketers are bracing for the “Cookiepocalypse” — when Google Chrome follows up on its promise to cut support for the third-party cookie by 2022. As Andrew Tu, APAC MD of OpenX, recently put it: “The upcoming death of the cookie is set up to be the defining issue of digital advertising over the next 12 months.” The writing has…