Nov152009

The myth of the great ad

Top secret
Photo by daliborlev
You can do a great job constructing a badly designed house.  But when you are through, you’ve still got a badly designed house.  Right?  It doesn’t matter how good you are with a hammer if the blueprints themselves are faulty.  Ads are like houses.

It doesn’t matter how good you are with nouns or verbs when the core message is boring.  There is no good way to tell a bad story.  And ultimately, it’s the core message of your campaign that determines the success of your advertising.

Give a powerful core message to an average writer and the little business on the corner can leap from Main Street to Wall Street.  But give an average message to a powerful writer and ….yeah, you get it.

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Nov242008

Do Social Marketing Tools Enhance Journalism?

As an adjunct faculty member of the University of South Carolina’s School of Mass Communication and Information Studies, I am constantly interested in and involved with my students and the way they receive and disseminate information.

Also, being a journalism major myself, I am keenly interested in how social media is being used to report the news. Continue Reading »

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Nov222008

Buy a (real) beer for a Facebook friend

It may be better to give than to receive, but for those on the receiving end, there’s no doubt real-world gifts are better than virtual ones. No surprise, then, that we’re seeing the emergence of more and more ways for online friends to give each other offline presents. The latest? GetThemIn, which allows UK Facebook users to send each other real alcoholic beverages. Continue Reading »

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