Online, everyone is now ‘competent’. The conventional approach: ‘We are really good at this’ is no longer enough. Competence is just the starting point. The playing fields are now level, and this is the latest challenge for business. Do you persevere and still struggle to sound ‘better’ ? Or will you grasp the opportunity to Read More
Tag: media
First impressions? Deep communication.
Life IS communications. Especially now, when instant democratic broadcast media is available to anyone with a “device”. Reading this interesting piece in this week’s Marketing Week underlines one effect of this. Snap judgements, made in a microsecond, and crucially, beyond our individual or rational control (that’s another story…) can brutally harm your intended message and Read More
Get to the point!
Just back from a trip to Melbourne, Australia. My hometown. While there, I was reminded of the Aussie idiom, their distinctive knack for slang and shortening words. Barbie, not barbecue. Garbos, not refuse collectors. And so on… Also their brevity and directness with the written word. You may have seen the Meat Marketing Board poster Read More
Function or Style. What’s best for slogans?
I’m grappling with a problem. A recurring problem… I’m working with a long-standing client of mine, who runs a growing and ambitious digital consultancy. He wants to refresh the brand to reflect changes in both the market place, and the services that they offer. His preference is to devise a slogan that is descriptive, accurate Read More
SEEKS: Brave client, must have great S.O.H.
Do you recall this poster campaign? It ran a couple of years ago, and is always worth looking at for a number of important reasons… Firstly, it is an honest ad. The writer at M&C Saatchi should be applauded for suggesting this approach to the client. And the suit who sold it clearly deserves Read More
Is there a “me” in empathy?
Well there is, but of course it’s reversed… And that’s kind of the point. Too many writers that I meet are still obsessed with what they “want to say”, rather than what their audience may want to hear. They also overlook the fact that writers have to earn their readers’ attention before they can deliver the main Read More
Understanding your reader
One of the great things about digital content is how much writers can learn from stats. You can find out things that have always been guesswork in the past – where readers come from, what they read and how long they stick with an article. But many of the writers I speak to at larger Read More
The words flow like water…
I was captivated as a child by the idea that the planet is an entirely closed system. I hadn’t yet encountered the brilliant James Lovelock or his elegant, totally sensible Gaia theory, but could see that something very clever was going on. If literally nothing escaped our atmosphere – ever – then water, for example, was a Read More
Why is my [media] diet failing?
Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent the last decade or so steadily cutting back on my media consumption. After all, I’ve had to find time for surfing the web, playing video games, loading – and listening to – my iPod, and of course, to spend hours seeing “what else is on” while scanning the EPG on Read More
Is he really a Wiked Witch?
Everyone in the media is closely following the current travails of Julian Assange and the ramifications of the Wikileaks news torrent. Whatever your political leanings, or opinion of the legal issues confronting Mr Assange (and I talk here of the civil suits threatened by the US among others, not the Swedish prosecutor’s charges), it is impossible to ignore the Read More