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Ad Age reported that there's a plague of Groupon wannabes and I was starting to believe the possibilities- after all CMOs must be look for the next new thing after Facebook, Twitter, iPhone and iPad applications. With all the inflection points seemingly working in favor of a Groupon wannabe...
In a world where billionaires are being created almost daily; there's a huge opportunity for luxury brands to create new value added services to cater to the super-affluent. We've seen Ferrari do it with the FFX ( see the above image) racing program; a race car and crew available for 6 events per...
For the past 5 years, Influx and BSSP have organized an annual conference in San Francisco. We started off small and last year 200 people attended the event in Fort Mason. BSSP is never comfortable with a formula, so we decided to change it up once again and hold an event in the East Coast, New...
In a world where it's hard to know who to trust, a chasm has emerged where Americans appear to lack trust in the critical institutions that they've depended on for decades, government and big business. The erosion of trust in government has been long-term, but has accelerated rapidly in recent...
Levi's new "work" campaign is being brought to life with a series of workshops around the country, the latest being a photography workshop in Wooster Street, New York. The brand has been deliberately elastic with the idea of "work" allowing it to stretch from manual graft to the more creative...
It used to be that only very few areas of business got to sprinkle the creative magic dust- these were the marketing folks and they did cool sales events and if they were really lucky they got to do the big prize, television commercials. For many, this was the chance to bask in the headlights of...
While we are being told by the likes of The Futures Company that American corporations are disconnected and distrusted by consumers, outside of oil companies, banks seem to be the category in the most trouble. The latest foreclosure crisis is a case in point. Something appears really rotten in the...
It's been said that there are only 7 available plots and many have tried to reduce storytelling down to is barest essentials. However, the power of the story knows few boundaries and we become sucked in and seduced by the twists and tales in the narrative as characters reveal themselves and story...
While crowd sourced creative might not be the thing ad agencies want to talk about, there's a large group of folks in marketing services who might not be too excited about the spread of crowd-sourced ideas beyond advertising. Starbucks has been one of the most aggressive users of crowd ideas and...
On December 3rd in New York, Influx will host its Meet the Makers conference. It's designed to showcase makers, making and to inspire others to think about the discipline of craft. One of our speakers will be Thomas Callahan, of Horse Cycles, who left his career in the art world to take up a...
There's been lots of work done in the area of human herd behavior, but recently some research was conducted at Oxford University to examine the behavior around the download of Facebook applications. What the research discovered was fascinating; for herd behavior to "kick in", applications need to...
It was interesting hearing Tony Hsieh of Zappos talk the other day about how consulting is a new revenue opportunity for Zappos. Other companies simply want to know their secrets and Zappos is prepared to share them and charge handsomely for access. Years back, your company's secrets were just...
Take something from one place and put somewhere unexpected and you create some impact. So when the wool producers want to get the attention of the tailors of London's Savile Row, there's one really impactful way to do it, bring the sheep to the street. It's was all part of a campaign to...
For a brief moment in US automotive history, Smart was the car everyone was talking about. Now, according to Fortune magazine, it's about to become just another "me-too"."Faced with
sinking sales of the original Smart two-door, Roger Penske, the car's U.S. distributor, made a deal with Nissan to...
John Dodds makes a great point in a recent post, where he uses the image above to make a point about marketing writing getting out of control with the reality of the experience. It seems tired language is all around us and especially evident when copywriters are searching hard to get attention for...