As marketing professionals with years of experience, we’ve all learned to trust, to some degree, that little voice inside our heads that tells us when we may have stumbled across an idea that could be genius. Intuition. Inspiration. The gap in time and space where the magic happens. Creatives in our industry thrive on honing their intuition to drive new ideas and break new creative ground. But in today’s highly fragmented and diverse customer universe, many brands find out the hard way that real insight must guide intuition. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll noodle some cautionary instances where a well-written research and insight development plan could have saved brands a lot of money and heartache on controversial ads and promotions.

Influencer marketing has become a digital monster. Are you doing it? Are you doing it wrong? Should you be doing it at all? If so, how and under what circumstances? In this edition of the Plain Talk series, we’ll take some of the mystery out of influencer marketing and dispel a few myths along the way. First, let’s talk about the money.

If you’ve been advertising online for any amount of time, you’re probably already pretty familiar with a couple of the most common ways to run ads on the web. In this installment of Plain Talk, we’ll break down dynamic search ads vs responsive search ads and what they can do for you.

In today’s Plain Talk newsletter, we’re talking about corporate social responsibility initiatives. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ trust in the federal government to handle both international and domestic matters is at the lowest point it has been in more than twenty years. Only 35 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the U.S. government’s ability to handle domestic issues. Meanwhile, trust in the government to handle international issues ranks only six points higher at a mere 41 percent.

In this edition of Plain Talk, we’ll discuss B2B trade show trends. We hope you’ll gain valuable insights that you can apply to your B2B marketing regimen.

In this first installment of our Plain Talk Healthcare Marketing series, we’ll prescribe some practical advice about some of the most difficult marketing that healthcare groups have to do—recruitment marketing—and how to smooth the path to filling open healthcare positions using best practices in healthcare recruitment marketing.

Welcome to summer! Remember when summer meant vacations with the family, sunny days lounging by the pool or even just sleeping in? Yeah, we remember that too. However, in today’s fast-moving world of digital marketing, summer also means planning time.

For years, you’ve had your website on a partner’s proprietary content management system. Why is now the time for a change? In this installment of our Plain Talk digital series, we’ll explain open source vs proprietary CMS (and why it’s time to switch to open source).

If you haven’t been following the latest trends and best practices for mobile web design, you may be leaving money on the table. So, how do you design a better, more effective mobile website experience for your customers? In this installment of our Plain Talk digital marketing series, we’ll discuss five trends driving best practices in mobile web design trends.

So deeply has the web penetrated how we navigate the world, that today your website could land you in court for a pretty unexpected reason. Let’s take a look at understanding ADA accessibility for websites.