Often in marketing we dance around the dotted line between what’s acceptable and edgy and what may be deemed offensive. Not only is the line dotted, but it shifts depending on culture and general mood.

There are many ads that are lauded for their humor, originality, and willingness to take a risk. For example, Fiat, Toyota, Kmart, and Orbit Chewing Gum manage to deliver their messages with equal parts humor and efficacy without being swallowed up in a sea of retractions and apologies for bad judgment and grossly inappropriate content. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite Ted Talks episodes is a speech by Amanda Palmer, a musician well-known for giving her music away for free by asking her fans to help support her financially through crowdsourcing.  She asked for $100,000 via Kickstarter to fund the creation of her latest album. Her fans gave her $1.2 million.

From Amanda’s speech:

“I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ‘How do we make people pay for music?’ What if we started asking, ‘How do we LET people pay for music?’” Read the rest of this entry »

With the world of marketing communications accelerating at the speed of a social media share, are you as current in your jargon as you should be? Take this unscientific and somewhat tongue-in-cheek quiz to find out.

True or false: Word of mouth marketing has its own acronym and trade organization. Read the rest of this entry »

In early 2012, Apple launched the iBooks App for iPad, which lets you organize and read digital books in several formats, including a proprietary “iBooks” format. Initially aimed at textbooks, the iBooks format supports several common multimedia components— including video, image galleries, 3D objects, and quizzes, to name a few. As you may already know, these various kinds of content, along with the iPad experience itself, can be great for education, but also can make for highly engaging marketing and brand communications.

If you want to get your branded content on an iPad, whether it’s a sales aid or a consumer-facing piece, you probably have considered building an iPad app. Native apps are great, and allow you to take advantage of just about every feature and function the iPad hardware and software have to offer. Apps, however, can be complex to design, build, and update; and for applications that are primarily showcasing content, the cost and time requirements can be prohibitive, often pushing the investment out of balance with expected return. Read the rest of this entry »