Like lots of people in the world, I’ve spent some quality family time roaming my neighborhood trying to capture little cartoon monsters on my cell phone. For many of us, Pok?mon Go was our first experience of augmented reality. It was lots of fun. In fact, a lot of the money behind AR/VR comes from… ..
Tag : Voice
As a global agency CEO for the last 15 years and former chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the evolving client-agency paradigm is always top of mind for me. There’s been extensive talk in the news recently about how brands are redefining their agency relationships. From P&G announcing that they are building one… ..
For virtually every kind of communication, there’s exclusive language. In mobile messaging, emojis convey emotions. For composers, sheet music indicates the measures and melodies. Even baseball has its own system, with a sequence of unique signs shared between coaches and players. For marketers in the C-suite, the common communication is the shorthand of strategy briefs,… ..
Without wishing to sound like the director’s cut of a Demi Moore movie, let’s start with full disclosure: I’m involved in an awards show. The Epica Awards, to be exact, which as far as I know is still the only international competition judged not by creative folk from agencies, but by journalists who write about… ..
On June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, leading to the creation of America’s Interstate Highway System. Finished 35 years later, one-quarter of all vehicle miles driven in the United States use the interstate system. As would be expected, the most direct effect of the interstate was on other… ..
Giveaways are dime a dozen across social media. Effective, legal, responsible and on-brand competitions, however–not so much. Cluttering up your newsfeed, thanks to shares and tagging, and popping up as adverts and organically from the pages you like, they range from products you’re actually likely to buy to that old chestnut, the “Win an RV”… ..
The Google Assistant might finally jump ahead of Amazon’s Alexa in the race for user-friendly (if not potentially creepy) artificial intelligence. .@Google's new AI assistant sounds exactly like human https://t.co/VPhJAreDaE pic.twitter.com/C7YrJfFIiw — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) May 11, 2018 At its annual developer conference this week in California, Google announced the latest update to Assistant, including… ..
We all know that spokespeople and endorsers can be erratic. Wild antics can generate negative PR and damage brands. What if you could eliminate the threat of a spokesperson going rogue while still tapping into the massive influencer audiences? Although swapping the Kardashians for virtual influencers might sound like a dream come true, the reality… ..
The age of impermanence is here. As the North American head of a small creative agency, I’m seeing several trends that tell me this is so. First of all, the brand and agency models are shifting; lengthy retainers are being replaced by flexible, project-based relationships. That, coupled with the workforce becoming ever-more fluid. There’s been… ..
I don’t think Tim Mapes, chief marketing officer at Delta Air Lines, woke up on Jan. 1 this year with the idea that the new personification of the Delta brand in 2018 would be an unabashedly left-wing progressive. I also don’t think he had a standing meeting each week in 2017 scrutinizing each of the… ..
