When Will They Ever Learn?

Matt Creamer points to this NYTimes story about a start-up called Ad-Air, which claims to have created the “first global aerial advertising network — giant, billboardlike ads that will be visible from the air as planes approach runways.” Please note: I work in the marketing industry and I support advertising.… Read the rest

Can We Please Just Kill The “Conversation”?

There’s no doubt in my mind that Advertising Week’s biggest, most abused cliché was “conversation.” With all due respect to the Cluetrain, advertisers’ excessive, ambiguous and disingenuous insertion of the word between every other breath became downright difficult to stomach.Read the rest

Knight Rider Returns: A Historic Revival

Knight Rider

Yesterday was the best day I had all week. I learned that NBC is bringing back Knight Rider, the television series based on the the super-cool 1982 Trans Am, named KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), originally driven by crime-fighter Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff).… Read the rest

Our Inability To Think Rationally

A recent episode of NPR’s On the Media posited a dour explanation of how people process messages, rooted in truth, myth or lies. In an interview with Bob Garfield, Shankar Vedantam, columnist at the Washington Post, explained:

The mind relies on a number of rules of thumb, and one of the rules of thumb that it uses is that things that are more easily recalled are true even if the context in which they originally heard the statement was that the statement is false.

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My New Mission Statement

Check out the awesome Corporate Mission Statement Generator:

companymissionstatementgenerator

And here’s my new mission statement:

companymissionstatement

“We are committed to focusing mediocre personal gain from education in personal goals overcoming all obstalces.” Brilliant. The sad fact is that the mission statements that churn out of this little gizmo are indistinguishable from so many real-life ones.… Read the rest