The World Cup’s Marketing Winners and Losers

While we wait impatiently for Holland versus Brazil, let me bring you a few of the latest World Cup marketing scores. Castrol 0, Visa 1. If a sponsor’s checkbook opens on Sepp Blatter’s desk and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Castrol is not the only marketer to pony […]

What Viacom Should Learn from YouTube’s Copyright Win

There was never much doubt that Viacom’s $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube would fail. Most legal and media observers predicted a result not unlike the one handed down today by a federal judge who granted summary judgment for the Google-owned video-sharing site. Basically the judge said copyright-protected clips uploaded by YouTube users are protected […]

McKinsey Gets Social. Maybe Now CEOs Will Start Listening

I was initially unmoved by the news earlier this week that McKinsey is doing a joint venture with Nielsen leading the management consultancy to take over BuzzMetrics, one of the many firms out there that analyze what people are saying about companies online. There’s been so much acquisition action in that monitoring space over the […]

Some Suggested Taglines for MySpace’s New Ad Campaign

Ad Age has the scoop that MySpace is poking — hahahaha- wrong network — around for an ad agency to do a branding blitz in support of it oh-so-hotly anticipated relaunch. The News Corp.-owned property has been getting pounded by Facebook, even with its big-time PR screw-ups. Global users, according to Ad Age, has dropped […]

Nike Reminds Us that Brand Ads Can Be Worth the Investment

Nike’s “Write the Future” ad reminded me of something the vivacious magazine publisher Felix Dennis said in the mid-nineties about the then ad-bloated issues of the revenue-producing beast InStyle magazine. He called it the last roar of the T-Rex before the dinosaurs became extinct. I’m not saying that either magazines or video ads are going […]

Public Relations Needs a Metric That Makes Sense. Ad Equivalents Isn’t It

This week one of our site editors received an email from a junior PR person asking for the site’s ad rate. The reason for the email dawned on me only after a while: this publicist was determining the ad value equivalent of a recent PR campaign, one component of which was a successfully pitched story […]

The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far […]

Why Microsoft’s Bing Is Sponsoring My Dogwalker

My dog walker has become the latest weapon in the escalating search engine marketing wars. Since I first met Rodney Dorival, owner of Big Paws Little Claws, I’ve thought he could just be the next Cesar Milan. He’s amazing with dogs, erudite, unfailingly charming, drives an immaculate, celeb-ready ’68 Buick Skylark that he restored himself, […]

Media Companies Need to Kick Their Ad Dependency

I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do […]