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Branding | X |  |
There was once a time late in the last century, when brands didn’t really have to think about their societal impact. If the brand’s owner was lucky enough to have a Corporate Social Responsibility program, the company’s brand would use it as a “halo” and that would be it. In 2014,...
Much has been written in the past week about Apple’s purchase of Beats and the ability of Mr. Iovine, so I am going to add to the collection. Iovine is a man with a direct line to the people who have their fingers on the pulse of culture. He managed to create a brand powerful enough to supplant...
The XX are currently perfoming in one of America’s largest (55,000 sqft) and unobstructed venues, New York’s Park Avenue Armory, but they are doing it very differently. Instead of doing the bleeding obvious and peforming to multiple thousands, they are doing the inverse; in each of their...
It doesn’t seem that long ago that foresight was the sole domain of crystal ball gazers, futurists and other assorted fortune tellers. It was interesting to a point, but kind of hokey and only a few, very disciplined multinational organizations, like Shell managed to use it successfully. Today,...
The best ad agencies belong to a group of cultural storytellers that includes those who create great dramatic TV shows and movies. We all know these folks create stories, but the importantly they understand endings, because endings are the things we viewers remember. Danel Kahneman’s 2010 TED...
The Economist’s The Big ReThink marketing conference provided a reminder, as if we needed one that things are changing radically in the marketing world. Technology occupied 90% of all conversations in its various guises; as a disruptive force and the creator of new social, mobile and digital...
Heather Havrilesky over at the New York Times clearly has nothing but admiration for the new Lego movie for its branding artistry. “In this way, “The Lego Movie” graduates to a new skill level in the game of branding, an approach that’s at once more grandiose and more pernicious than...
Featured image via Pentagram James Surowiecki’s “Twilight of the Brands” article in the New Yorker earlier this week certainly got me thinking about just how important brands are these days. Surowiecki’s line of argument is that the Internet has opened up a sea of information that’s...
Given the increasingly complex nature of the marketing environment, we thought it might be useful to provide marketers with a checklist of questions they could be asking themselves and their teams as they head into the New Year. Some of these are fundamental questions that need to be constants,...
When a retail brand faces up to the reality that the Holiday season is its biggest sales period of the year, it’s very hard to challenge the power of tradition and sentimentality, in the UK, this seems to be all the rage, with every single retailer pulling some type of emotional heart string....
People work in a communication agency because they want to be part of something magical, they want to be a part of a place that can take a blank sheet of paper and bring it to life. A place that can takes an opportunity no one else has seen before and turns it into something. Clients want our...
This year’s Influx Conference examined what it takes to get to great ideas by looking at creativity from a number of different perspectives; Executives at Mondelez and Coca-Cola charged with inspiring, nurturing and protecting great ideas App developers (Paper and Dead Yourself) who were...
Tuning into GroupM’s Next Conference today, it was great to see just how far video conferencing had come and it was now possible to beam Sir Martin Sorrell anywhere in the world, without any audio or visual delay. This is clearly a disarming thought for anyone pitching against a WPP shop. Sorrell...
This year’s Influx Creativity Conference, held on October 15th in NYC, explores the journey to great creative ideas from a variety of different perspectives; including app developers, senior executives from Coca-Cola and Mondelez, a Broadway composer and others. Consumers are now closer to brands...
We are delighted to announce Arwa Mahdawi as one of our speakers for the Influx Creativity Conference being held in NYC on October 15th. Contagious provides us with the vital benchmarks that demonstrate the best of the current state of creative communication and helps companies to understand, not...