Brand Narrative

I love the great ads, the mind-blowing creative genius that goes into ads that make me laugh or moist up a bit. I’ll look for those ads and maybe even share them and tell people how great they are and I’ll feel good whenever I see that company’s products. Read more

Every now and again someone will say something along the lines of, “I don’t want to be friends with my soap bar,”. It’s a catchall argument against brands, social media and content marketing. Read more

“Would you rather do the best possible job engaging with a small but focused audience? Or would you rather spend your marginal hour reaching a large audience on a superficial level? There are lot of situations where the latter is a reasonable choice—like if I’m selling something, or announcing an event…” Read more

I recently watched a great documentary about Hollywood screenwriters. There was a quote from one of the writers who pointed out that, for the exec receiving a movie pitch, saying  ‘no’ is always way easier than saying ‘yes’. Read more

Here’s a short film that attempts to match classic Hollywood character archetypes with big brands. You may take the view that some of our matches are wrong-headed. Is James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington a Regular Guy or a Catalyst? Read more

Here’s a link to Jonathan’s Op-Ed in the current issue of BrandWeek, in which he talks about common errors in brand content production, and how to get the most out of content people. Read more

So we recently pitched to a bunch of companies and received lots of requests for the decks. But the decks are kinda visual and don’t make a lot of sense on their own so instead of sending those out we put together a short list of the points we thought were most useful for companies looking at creating content as a marketing strategy. Here are our 20 points. Read more

Companies talk the talk of open dialog and conversational marketing. But most are still passing 1970s-style memos to their employees and even to their customers. Read more

What do brands really want from social media and content marketing? Here’s a short film that attempts to answer that question. Read more