Google and several of its fellow Internet conglomerates announced recently that third-party cookies are going away. Privacy advocates cheered. Ad sales reps fretted. But most people were left confused.

What the heck is a cookie? And why should I care if they’re going away?

Cookies are little pieces of data left behind when you visit a website. For those of you with kids, think of your fourth grader hanging out in the living room all day with a box of Oreos. Read More

As covered in a slew of other blog posts covering SXSW, there was one tech trend that climbed above the others this year, the geo-location meetup. Think of it as using your mobile phone location for connecting rather than just broadcasting.

One of the more interesting panels I addend at SXSW was titled FutureShop – Virtual QR Stores NFC Receipts and more. The focus of the panel discussion was obviously mobile and how consumers have changed their behaviors. Read More

I ran across this post today and really like it. Sometimes in the day-to-day stress of the job we need a little reminder.
Treat clients like friends:

Understand they have bad days, good days, days they need you and days they need to be left alone
Give them a second chance if they make a mistake
Give them a hand when you can
They have different levels of knowledge (sometimes you have to walk them through things)
Show them something new, Read More

We’ve worked with College World Series of Omaha, Inc for many years. In fact, our involvement goes way back to the beginning when one of our founders and a group of Omaha businessmen convinced the NCAA to bring the tournament to Omaha. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a labor of love for everyone involved. And every year is special. However, this year is extra special, new and exciting. New place, new traffic patterns, Read More

Now that the financial crisis is no longer a crisis, but rather a healing wound – perhaps one that’s slow to heal – the sales and promotion of LUX items from high-end companies is once again turning heads. Although luxury companies still produced and sold items in the past few years, be it in more limited numbers, promotions were dormant during the monetary meltdown.
Borsheims Jewelry and Gifts, for example, followed a similar business method in recent years. Read More

Technology research firm Gartner recently released their list of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011. Gartner defines ‘strategic technologies’ as those that have just matured or are still emerging.
I was struck by the fact that at least six of the technologies have already, or will, impact brand strategy and communications planning. Many of these are already being employed at some level.
Listed below are the six technologies with a brief explanation taken from the Gartner press release. Read More

Most people use three different sentence formats when they write. With only these three variations your writing can get monotonous. If you expand your repertoire to include six additional sentence formats your writing will automatically seem more sophisticated and be more appealing to the reader. Don’t let the “grammar” scare you, once you read the examples it all starts to make sense. Here are the different formats that can transform your writing and they’re very simple to master if you use these guidelines:
Main clause: subject + verb + completers

Jeremiah walked home. Read More

Send your cover letter and resume with clear direction as to which department you are interested in joining. When letters come in saying the writer wants a job “anywhere” in an ad agency it is clear that they don’t know the business well enough to know where they fit in. Read More

Feeling data rich and insight poor? We’re inundated with data. It’s everywhere. We have performance data from our marketing efforts. We can slice and dice it every which way. Drill down into minuet detail. Yet, the sheer volume can sometimes be more confusing than helpful. Making it easy to overlook the obvious.
I was talking to a marketer today who was struggling to glean some insights from a mass of campaign data. He had an impressive amount of data on every imaginable part of the campaign, Read More