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
Most communicators have little or no background in visual storytelling. Areas such as graphic design, videography and typography just don’t show up in a typical mass comms college curriculum. While hiring talent from the design side is one way to accelerate expertise in visual storytelling – and we’ve done this – it’s important that all …more
It’s not easy to do. And it’s tougher to accomplish in business communications. Teasing out company stories that cause the left ventricle to quicken are few and far between. Still, business communicators can learn from the experts – screenwriters – on how to build the front end of a story. They deal with pressure to …more
