This is a song about Alice …
Yes, but what’s your point?
In the wide, wide world of marketing, there’re all kinds of opinions being tossed around. And everyone is an expert. I’ve noticed that the folks with the least to say consistently spend the most time saying it. Beyond the point of mere pontification, they can go on at endless lengths to prove their point. Unfortunately, by the time they arrive at their great epiphany, no one’s...
They say, right?
Sometimes I wonder if I read too much stuff. Quite often I’ll hear something cool, but it’s gone 5 minutes later. And instead I end up saying things like “I read somewhere that … ” or “They say … ” Honestly, I despise they say. As a marketing mind, I construct actions derived from statistics and trends. “They say…” is competely...
Happy Veterans Day from Phil Ochs
“I’ll do for you now, for you nice people here, a protest song. A protest song is defined as something, as a song you don’t hear on the radio. And they’ll say you don’t hear it on the radio ‘cuz the guy can’t sing, or cuz the words are no good, ‘cuz they play the shit that they play these days…” –Phil Ochs
Writing a Blog the West Elm Way…
Last night I took a loft tour. Everyone living in a lovely loft community opened their doors to show off what they’ve done with their space. It was a lot of brick, a bit of granite, and way too much West Elm. For those who haven’t been introduced, chapters 3-17 of the “How to Live in a Loft” handbook seem to require purchasing large amounts of hip, modern design from the...
Can You Survive on $311.9 million per Quarter?
Odds are you didn’t read a newspaper this morning. In fact, newspaper readership is down roughly 20% this year alone. Daily circulation of American newspapers peaked in 1984 and dropped 13% to 55.2 million copies by 2003, according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the same time, advertising revenue (with adjustments for inflation) hasn’t budged either. [i] In essence...
Marketing Triage
A confession: I like random words. Somehow, as we take our daily conversation down to 140 character tweets and colorful abbreviations (wtf!) we lose track of the power and majesty of choosing the exact, right word. That word for today is triage. Most commonly associated with emergency rooms and battlefield hospitals, triage is a process for sorting the sick or injured based upon their need or...
Oh Bob ….
Like many music industry types, I read the Lefsetz Letter. And again, like many, I often think old Bob is just a cranky, washed-up, old-school record label type guy. Case in point: he recently shredded a performance by Mika. His complaint was that under all the lights and staging, the entire show was played off a hard drive: Bob writes: We’re fucked. I was standing in the back of the...
Picture of the Day: The Rat
Gone for nearly a decade, The Rat(hskellar) in Kenmore Square (Boston) was the dingy, local launchpad for all kinds of bands. A couple of note: The Police, The Talking Heads, and the Ramones. Take a little walk down memory lane, and remember the feeling of your lungs collapsing from the thick smoke while your feet stuck to the floor…
The Worth of Music – Part II
The inner-office debate over the value and potential cost of music continues to rage on. But in the course of discussion, one particular point seems to hold the key to the argument: when is a product a product? The argument was made that music, as a non-physical product, has no inherent expense therefore it should merit no cost. Similarly, as the distribution is instantaneous and repeatable...