Since Businessweek retooled its “look and feel” under Richard Turley, visual storytelling has gained greater prominence. It’s revealing to revisit a comment Turley made to BusinessInsider a couple years ago: “One of the things I wanted to do was to have a magazine which you could graze.” Before going further, it’s worth stepping back to …more
My personal soapbox is fast becoming visual storytelling. This can be a tough one for PR professionals where words have always ruled. Yet, visuals can serve as shortcuts to the emotional touch points of a story. Which explains why 500 million photos are shared on social platforms each day, a number expected to double next …more
Deciphering the inner meaning of Beatles lyrics goes back to playing the White Album backward and the “Paul is dead” hoopla, a technique that obviously proved to be flawed. I believe a more hand-crafted approach to sifting through Beatles lyrics paves the way to storytelling gold. My crack researcher Grace Hoffman – who says nepotism …more
Native advertising is all the rage in the publishing world. I read a statistic last week that most publications are at least experimenting with the concept. For those of you not familiar with native advertising, it refers to a publication serving up paid stories and editorial content the same way. You’ll hear this technique also …more
The past weekend brought us M&A fireworks as Publicis and Omnicom tied the knot creating the largest marketing services company known to mankind. First, the clever part – In what might be an industry first, a Vine video showed the respective chiefs signing on the dotted line. I guess two tokes on a peace pipe …more
Gaining followers on Twitter has become a national obsession. Plug [how to get Twitter followers] into Google, and 529,000,000 listings surface. For context, a similar exercise with [how to lose weight] doesn’t even hit half that number. Now, there’s a Huffington Post headline in the making: “More people care about increasing their Twitter followers than …more
Many brands jumped into the real-time marketing fray with the Royals’ latest addition to the family on Monday. This effort wasn’t as effective as what took place during the Super Bowl blackout for a reason I’ll get into in a minute. Still, I don’t think the Mashable headline, “Brands, Try, Fail to Capitalize on Royal …more
Huawei’s PR quest to be perceived as “just another telecom equipment maker doing its part to connect the world” took another hit when ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden said Huawei spied for the Chinese government. In an interview with The Australian Financial Review (AFR) published last Friday, Hayden also mentioned that Huawei tried to recruit him …more
The grab bag returns. Three quick takes coming at you. Journalists Showing Off PR Acuity I don’t mean to pick on David Carr, noted chronicler of the world of journalism for The New York Times. I just find it amusing that Mr. Carr assumes his deep knowledge of journalism also makes him an expert in …more
