Everyone dreams of hitting the big game-winning home run. You picture it: Cameras are flashing all throughout the stadium. The crowd is ready to burst with excitement. Every player on both teams is fighting to conceal the mounting pressure they are feeling.
You swing, and send the ball deep, deep, deep over the second basemen’s head. You arrive comfortably at first base with a single. The air goes out of the stadium for a second, but then it builds again as the next player comes up to bat.
This isn’t how the …

Ever seen advertising so bad that you want to beat it up but you can’t because it’s advertising and it can’t fight back because it has no fists, no weapons and it’s not really alive so why bother?
I call that Nickelback advertising because every time I hear a song by that band , I want to beat it up. But I can’t because it only a song and it can’t really fight back for all the reasons I just described.
Here’s where I need help. How do I tell people at …

Nothing kills innovation more than someone in a meeting making a “good point.”
Good points are made by people in the meeting who really don’t need to be there. People with vague job titles. Their job is to make these good points whenever someone important is in the room. Someone like a client or a CEO. These good points sound something like this:
“According to our research, humor doesn’t resonate with our target market.”
“Our audience is known for loyalty. This work doesn’t acknowledge that.”
“I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but the work …

How many times have you seen (or heard) an ad and immediately responded to it?
Be honest.
Once? Five times? Maybe 10? If you give me a higher number I will assume you are either a liar or did not understand the question.
Fact is, you almost never immediately respond in any meaningful way to an ad. You might enjoy the ad. You might even have some vaguely positive feelings about the product being advertised. But it’s doubtful you actually do anything about it at that moment.
The impact of most advertising happens over …

I was invited to talk on MTV the other day.
They have a show called Debate MTV, where 6 people share their points of view about controversial subjects with the audience nationwide.
So they invited an ad creative (the one who’s writing), a photographer and an art director of a masculine magazine to talk with a feminist, a psychologist and a guy who runs a blog about anti-advertising or something.
The starting point was a simple question:
“Does the media treat women as objects?”
Curiously, the feminist, the psychologist and the blogger were sure about …

A wise comic-strip beagle once said, “There’s no sense in doing a lot of barking if you don’t really have anything to say.”
Somebody get this puppy a job in advertising. Please.
These are the words we all need to live by, agency and client alike. People think if you shout loud enough or make something clever enough, it will make people think you actually have something worth talking about.
More likely, they will either be annoyed by you or simply forget about you.
Think of the greatest ads or campaigns you’ve ever seen. …

If ten people, who can each pull a rope attached to a strain gauge with 200 pounds of force, were to combine their efforts, they would not be capable of pulling with 2,000 pounds of force.
The group result will be much less than the sum of individual efforts.
This counterintuitive phenomenon was identified by Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, and has come to refer to the concepts of coordination losses and social loafing.
Basically, there are two reasons for this effect. The more people you have, the less likely it becomes …

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.
You’re in a meeting with a client. They are excited about some new offer, product, upgrade, whatever. You listen intently. Then they start talking about the advertising.
And that’s when you feel it coming. You may even cringe a bit in preparation.
That’s when they say they want the advertising to be like Apple’s or Nike’s.
First of all. Why does everyone want their advertising to be like someone else’s? Shouldn’t companies be striving to create their own identity?
Secondly, why do you think you can have …

Bret Michaels freakin’ won Celebrity Apprentice. Know what that means? He has better business skills than Goldberg, Cyndi Lauper and the girl who used to be on 21 Jump Street. Good news—now you can kick just as much business ass as Bret by following these 4 easy rules:

Perfect your people skills: Bret Michaels probably has a PhD in people skills. When he walks into a conference room, he acts like he’s walking on stage. “How you doing, …

Over the years, countless American jobs have been eliminated or dramatically altered due to automation. In an economy that prizes growth and efficiency above all else, this is not surprising.
What’s surprising is that I’ve heard people say that our jobs as creatives could never be turned over to robots or automated in any way.
You can’t write a program to deliver creativity, they say.
Oh really?
I’m pretty sure that program already exists and it’s called the Internet. You know, that place where creatives can visit getty images, archive, youtube and countless other …