Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of presenting Smart Marketing in a Dumb Economy through WOMMA’s wonderful series of webinars. (By the way: if you missed the live event, you can check it out with audio!) As expected, the audience had lots of excellent questions—including “how do you convince a reluctant executive to experiment [...]

Forget everything you think you know about segmentation.
Okay, that might sound a little dramatic but it is time to face the fact: traditional demographic segmentation models may be outdated in today’s economic times. That’s because this recession is not like those of the recent past - the length, depth, and global impact this time around is forcing marketers to [...]

A few weeks ago, a conversation on Facebook about the US unemployment rate sparked this response from a friend:
“While it’s true that 8.5% of the US is unemployed—and that’s the highest we’ve seen in decades—it’s important to note that 91.5% of Americans ARE EMPLOYED. And that’s kinda awesome.”
I’ve been trying, ever since, to share this [...]

So there’s no denying it. We’re in the throes of an economic downturn the likes of which none of us have seen or experienced to date. It’s ugly, and it’s getting uglier. Yet we still need to innovate. We still need to captivate. We still need to build.
So what do we do?

Last week, I was [...]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you’ve been watching the financial markets stumbling about like power-drunk executives, and wondering how on earth this is going to impact your life – and your 2009 marketing budget.

The US ad economy slipped 1.6% in the first half of 2008, and went [...]