According to an October 12th AdAge.com article, the 2010 Census is expected to find that 309 million people live in the United States. But one person will be missing: the average American.  There is no more Joe Consumer.  There is no more clear culture lead.  There is, however, a huge opportunity for new media marketing. Read the rest of this entry >>

As a Washington Post experiment Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made stood against a wall in a crowded Washington subway during the morning rush and played for 43 minutes.  1,097 people passed by.  Seven paused to take notice.  Three days earlier Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall where merely pretty good seats went for $100 each.  In the subway he earned $32.  This is the power of context.  What great things are your customers missing about you? Read the rest of this entry >>

Recently NetFlix found a winner to their long standing, million dollar, contest designed to inspire freelance teams toward creating new algorithms which would "…substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their preferences."  The goal was to improve on NetFlix’s existing algorithm by 10%.  Most teams approached this as a math problem.  One guy in a garage, however, saw it as a people problem and made some significant advances. Read the rest of this entry >>

You send emails every day.  You send an email to a friend or colleague, and it goes through.  Occasionally you check the spam folder to see if anything important was missed.  Usually it wasn’t.  Spam filters have gotten pretty good in that way.  But, in this case, the spam filter is on your side.  As marketers, even legitimate ones, this is not the case.  Many people do not realize the real impact of spam filtering on legit marketing campaigns.  Here are just a few things that happen: Read the rest of this entry >>