Category: Contentions
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Sales vs. marketing
My friend Kinan included this ad in the latest issue of his newsletter, MBRK: The different element is the story, of course. The best story will win. A few days ago, I wrote about another great advertisement from Chiat/Day and how the agency flipped the loss of their biggest client into a story. This format…
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Dealing with failure
What do you do when you’re helming a blossoming ad agency and you lose an account that’s half your billings and three-quarters of your income? You keep advertising. Chiat/Day partner and co-founder Guy Day wrote this one. His son Cameron Day writes, “It was uncharacteristic of my father to revert to low-brow language. That was…
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On businesses publishing books
If you’re a business targeting the small group of people who still read—maybe 2% of the American population (a number from Seth Godin (17:00))—you are deciding to target one of the oldest fandoms in the world. For example, you may be inherently selecting people who are interested in intellectual matters. Or, they’re ambitious enough to…
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Brain Age
Nintendo has sold over 35 million copies of Brain Age. (All of these people also had to play the game on a console.) Brain Age was based on the bestselling books, No wo Kitaeru Otona no Keisan Doriru and No wo Kitaeru Otona no Onyomi Doriru, which sold over 2 million copies and were authored…
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Contentions: Put a price on your marketing
There’s a reason to make people pay for your work. While profitability would be nice, it’s not the main goal. People being willing to pay for your work suggests brand engagement; you’ve made something people want. It also encourages them to actually use the thing. Consider the Michelin Guide, one of the original pieces of…
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Create a lot of value, extract a small part of it
Ryan Holiday writes in his lessons from writing The Daily Stoic for seven years: Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we’ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in…
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The little poster that Steve Jobs made famous
Millions of people—including me—found out about the Whole Earth Catalog when Steve Jobs closed off his Stanford commencement speech with it. A new archive of it just went online, along with this ad that Steve quotes: Making memorable things. Share it with people. It’ll all be worth it somehow.
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Contentions: Do something nobody else can
When I first entered the marketing profession, there was a popular saying, “Every company is a media company.” The saying was punchy and catchy, and fascinating because media companies themselves were in the midst of drastic change and adaptation. For example, as a business, The New York Times looks very different today than it did…
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Gohar World
Entrepreneurs and artists Laila and Nadia Gohar built a world for their tableware products. Laila tells me that she and Nadia kind of imagine Gohar World, the Cairo-born sisters’ nine-month-old line of cheeky and exquisite host- and tableware, as a planet. Laila is standing in a voluminous white Simone Rocha skirt and snub-nosed Gucci slides…
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A meme can be a spine for your creative work
When you get to know your creative idea better, you need to preserve the core of it to help you focus. That’s what its spine is for. One interesting prompt is to see if you can express your idea through a meme. Kind of like this: Choosing the meme, naming the characters—all of this encourages…