by Mark O'Brien | Mar 20, 2015
Brands, like websites, are most effective when they’re not allowed to be static. Brands — and their graphic marks, in particular — shouldn’t be as dynamic as websites, of course; that is, unlike the constantly evolving content of websites, graphic marks...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 19, 2015
On LinkedIn alone there are so many apparent obituaries being written for the CMO, I pulled my black suit out of mothballs for the funeral. But when it occurred to me that none of the pieces I’d been reading had given a cause of death, I decided to do a little...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 16, 2015
I frequently receive unsolicited spam. But I repeat myself. Among the most frequent spammers is something calling itself the Reverse Logistics Association (RLA). Until I went on its website to find out what it was and what it did, my only recourse was to guess at what...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 12, 2015
Empiricism is a dying art. We’ve lost faith in our senses, in the evidence — any evidence — before us. We’ve lost the conviction that what looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck must be a duck. We’ve jettisoned the...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 10, 2015
Two things have me thinking about interpretation. The first is the set of responses I continue to get to Martin the Marlin, about which I wrote here. The second is the experience we recently had selecting an image for an email marketing piece. Let’s start with...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 6, 2015
As he got older, Grandpa O’Brien was increasingly bemused by things he couldn’t understand. Whether those things were familial, commercial, cultural, or political, they’d elicit the same reaction: a wry smile, a shake of the head both mystified and...
