In their 2021 book Brandsplaining, Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts dig into how advertisers traditionally have viewed and judged women from a male perspective (and still do) as vessels to be filled. The authors state near the end: “To succeed in this new context, brands need – to put it bluntly – to get down […]
As a full-service agency with more than 80 clients, we often get asked our opinions on which CRM solution is best for a given client’s situation or if a certain CRM software is any good. While we have our favorites and can often provide insights on which is best for a client’s needs, the answer […]
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations, legally establishing what is referred to as corporate personhood. While this decision was based strictly on legal reasons, nowhere does the personhood of a corporation ring truer than in its brand. In previous articles like […]
Does Gen Z spend their tax refunds differently than older taxpayers? The simple answer is, yes! Is now the time to talk about how tax refund season can fit into your marketing plans? Also, yes! After all, you know the old saying “in this world nothing is certain, except death and taxes.” So in this […]
YouTube has more than 2.68 billion active users as of 2023. Baby Shark Dance alone has been viewed on YouTube 12.3 billion times. Yet despite having 2022 revenues of $29.24 billion, YouTube’s revenues have dropped for three quarters in a row! So, while they didn’t ask, we’re offering a suggestion that might help – bring […]
The doofus dad stereotype, which was a negative and inadvertent byproduct of the explosion in social change in the late 20th century, saw dads in not just ads but all media slide from their status as head of the household to the bumbling dads in popular TV series and commercials beginning in the mid-50s with […]
When you think of Gen Z (age group 11-26) and media, a litany of words come to mind: social media, influencer, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, video games, Netflix, podcast, livestream, etc. But as far back as early 2017, research by Kantar Millward Brown found that 55% of Generation Z respondents view out-of-home (OOH) positively. This is […]
Since its beginning in 1997, the goal of SEO has been to prioritize keyword rank position, but should that continue to be the standard as Google continues to weigh personal factors and individualized results? In this edition of Plain Talk, we’ll discuss if keyword ranking is still the best way to measure your SEO and […]
Practicing online reputation management and using reputation management software is nothing new. Millions of service-oriented companies like medical and dental offices, law firms, restaurants, retailers, roofers, and more have benefited from improved reviews and ratings by surveying customers and clients after each touchpoint and enabling them to quickly and privately address complaints as well as […]
Have you ever been to a webpage that wasn’t optimized for your phone properly, and the ads blocked the content? Have you had the page collapse on your article, then the banner ads block the scrollable part of the article? How about waiting so long for an ad to disappear that you clicked on the […]
During the two years that were the pandemic, we were forced to stay home and not travel. Business was anything but “business as usual.” The B2B world overnight had to grow new synapses to remotely reach, educate, and sell to new and existing clients. While the phone and Zoom calls picked up much of the […]
Community is a multifaceted word. There are hundreds of touchpoints where your firm can connect with and do good for your local communities. Every day the phone rings or something arrives in the mail with a new suggestion on how your firm can help and give back to your community. In today’s Plain Talk article, […]
Protecting Your Brand in an Age of Increased Exposure Your brand is the aggregate of what you say it is and what regular people on the street, or probably more correctly, the internet, say it is. In fact, there has never been a time when consumers had more power over what a brand “means” than […]
In a September 2014 interview with Fast Company, Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu went on the record to state that in five years he anticipated 50% of searches on Chinese search engine, Baidu, would be image or voice searches. This prediction was concentrated into an article, which implied that “in five years, at least […]
According to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, there were roughly 9,400 business-to-business trade shows in the U.S. in 2019. These trade shows by some estimates represented a $15 billion industry that was forecast to exceed $17 billion in 2021. More importantly, these shows routinely represent critical sales opportunities for businesses of all sizes. Then […]
When I was a kid, my near-scratch golfer dad spent a lot of time trying to teach me his passion. There were many steps on how to approach the ball. And there were corrective instructions for most practice swings, but when it came to the actual swing, there were only two things I was told […]
Just 25 years ago, email users would get home and excitedly log in to their AOL email accounts, and after the horrible nails-on-a-chalkboard sound of their modem connecting to the internet, wait with anticipation to hear, “You’ve Got Mail!” Back then, electronic mail was new, rare and definitely under commercialized. A lot has changed since […]
If you are working at home with your children or your dog right now, you don’t need me to remind you that COVID-19 has changed the way we live and work. In the B2B industries, the changes have been tougher than just working from home. We’ve seen critical tradeshows, events and travel mostly cancelled. Reductions […]