Brands are about intent as well as presence. Underneath it all a brand delivers, or it fails. There can be long discussions about what it delivers, morally, ethically, or as an unintended consequence, as with many of the brands of the chemical industry.    One of the interesting brands of the last decade has been e-bay, which is pseudo -arabic for electronic bid.  E-Bay has changed commerce in America, along with a related company, Amazon. The stories are well known. at different levels.  The... Read Full Story

Currently we are watching the final death of a 500 year old concept–plaster the world with broadsheet and someone will care. As we often tell clients, there are 2 questions, and 2 questions only that someone asks when meeting someone new: Who are you? and Why should i care? Brand is the answer. On the basis of the perceived answer, people respond. In an age of paralysis of choice resulting from information overload, it will become increasingly necessary to find the end customer able to... Read Full Story

how, in light of this video, can we see which elements of community building are being produced by the current SocialAd (tm, by..facebook) paradigm.? Can i embed this video into a facebook page? A while back yes. Now the answer is yes, if i agree to surrender data to facebook and youtube which will allow them to get a better fix on my interests.Can a video give personal data? If i have to vote on it, and if the images are human analysed by key-word–an effort being done elsewhere–and... Read Full Story

According to Adam Bain, of MySpace, of Fox of Murdoch, MySpace has the ability to begin refining the endless puddles and tsunamis of demographic information towards targeted sales. “It’s looking at what they say, what they do and what they say they do. It’s not keyword-based, so they don’t have to mention Tom Cruise for us to know they’re a fan,”Bain told Reuters. “We’re smart enough to understand the movies they list have Tom Cruise in them.”  At least this is as much as what he told... Read Full Story

The invitation, sent to the ad agencies of new york, and the principal corporate advertisers, arrived carved onto a Lucite brick: “You are invited to a discussion with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team as we unveil a new way of advertising online.” Since the days when the great jerry del femina talked about some strategies in “how to sell the world” (does anybody remember that story?) by introducing images of power, safety and security to the begining of a pitch, a certain per... Read Full Story

  There’s been a lot of talk lately about the battle between msft and goog for what is basically “world control”.  Stupidly enough, people take sides in this battle instead of making sure they don;t get trampled. A mammal strategy is to ignore the stock market implications and build effexctive seo that leverages both search paradigms and both ad network paradigms,  into the use of the the survivor of the last epoch of evolution–yahoo. In the background is chaos maker rupert murdoch’s myspace... Read Full Story

there has been, for a decade, talk of the “re-emergence” of apple. in reality apple keeps emering other places, rather than re-emerging as what it was. here’s the real sotry why: once upon a time a lonnng time ago when people made fire by  rubbing zip cord ends (the stuff that goes from the wall pluig to the lamp)   together there was a company called motorola. they made various printed circuit boards (that’s a road map of solder on a painted bit of press board that doesn;t conduct... Read Full Story

A Question about Advertising Week September 27th, 2007 AdAge magazine, which has quoted a couple of my opinions about the art of the brand is running a wonderful series of features online about the importance of advertisding week. One of the thoughts that needds to be considered here is  that adweek is great idea but the name needs to be changed. For years I have used the term “information arts” to describe the totality of tools and methods for bringing a market’s attention to the... Read Full Story

AdAge magazine, which has quoted a couple of my opinions about the art of the brand is running a wonder4 series of featires online about the importance of advertisding week. One of the thoughts that needds to be considered here is  that adweek is great idea but the name needs to be changed. For years I have used the term “information arts” to describe the totality of tools and methods for bringing a market’s attention to the possibility of “value”–another word that needs be retired until... Read Full Story

The highest court in europe has ruled that being Microsoft doesn’t create an entitlement to claim that computer code is different than oil (as it tried to argue in the USA) ,  or computers themselves (as was determined in Sperry Rand vs IBM about 40 years ago) or because it is just Microsoft. A fine of  $689 million dollars (about 1/2 of what the net transaction was before the dollar fell so hard against the euro) will be paid by MSFT as a way of saying, hey, we’re sorry, we didn’t know that... Read Full Story