by Mark O'Brien | Jul 22, 2016
One of the reasons we love what we do is that we get to hear every conceivable rationalization for subjectivity, arbitrariness, and disregard for the target audience. Case in point: We recently created a new corporate identity and corresponding collateral materials...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 29, 2016
Read this. Then read it again: This has spawned a plague of traffic brokers who specialize in traffic laundering at an almost unbelievable scale … “real” traffic is undervalued or, some would say, indistinguishable from fraudulent traffic … everyone is...
by Mark O'Brien | May 9, 2016
An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. (Kenneth Burke, 1897-1993, from Language as...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 7, 2016
The blind squirrel found an acorn. It was bound to happen. After stumbling around in an amaurotic crepuscule, falling out of a few trees, and living in a virtually opaque stupor, the scansorial rodent finally discovered what empiricists working with even modestly...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 11, 2016
Attention brand managers: In case you haven’t yet gotten the memo, you now work for your social-media person. That’s right. According to the social-media person who authored this gem — “Branding isn’t dead, but it’s no longer in your...