Category: Contentions
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Future fables
Aesop partnered with Literary Hub to release the second season of a podcast entitled Future Fables, where each episode is a bedtime story for adults in the form of the fable. There’s a lot to like about this, from the creative premise (“What sort of fables might its namesake—Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist—write [today]?”), to…
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Anna Wintour on audiences
The relationship between creator and audience is one of leading and following. If you’re a creator, you may find that you’re best off making things that you wanted to see yourself; that your audience will follow you because they want the same thing. For me, I’m glad I caved into my instinct and found the…
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Contentions: A good brand enables profit margins and product expansion
It’s obvious that it takes money (or time) to nurture a brand. What’s much less obvious is that a brand also pays off in the long run in more money, in the form of profit margins. Jon Lax writes: The only purpose of a brand is pricing power. The stronger a brand, the more pricing…
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Contentions: The best content marketing example is Marginal Revolution
Marginal Revolution should be how every person or company measures success with its content marketing efforts. Let’s evaluate it from a marketing perspective: It has made authors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok undeniable leading thinkers (i.e., thought leaders) It has become an incredibly effective launchpad for their projects (like Emergent Ventures, or acquiring PhD students…
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To promote your work on social media, ask friends to like or share, and send them a calendar invite
Because there’s so much noise on the internet, it takes an extremely loud one to stand out. In marketing, there’s a heuristic known as effective frequency, also less formally as the Rule of 7; in order for a person to commit to trying your product, they need to hear it at least 7 times. Given…
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Contentions: Same campaign, fresh hook
While many marketers, journalists, and writers gather up their year-end round ups and campaigns—each largely only differing in the assortment of inventory—a decade ago, the Bloomberg Businessweek team found a moment of truth within the structure: the jealousy list. It describes the premise as, “All the stories we wish we wrote this year.” It’s a…
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Writing, in the Office of the CEO
Over a year ago, GitLab put a job post out for a Senior Executive Content Communications Manager (CEO), which involved ownership of the current CEO content program (including elements of publicity, guest posts, speaking topics and decks, social media, category creation, etc.) and developing and executing a content plan for the next three years. Similarly,…
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Contentions: Bringing creativity, brand, and distribution together
As an expertise, marketing has an even wider set of specialties and experiences than many other lines of work. Even in the world of organic internet marketing, it’s easy to experience overwhelm considering the many channels; TikTok, SEO, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, Threads, Reddit, etc. While marketing can be extremely fun to work on (and equal…
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Your art doesn’t need more time, your time needs more art
I’ve occasionally written about the experience of writing within small amounts of time. In Big Ideas, Small Papers, I write: One of the most painful things about writing in small amounts of time is the lack of time for re-working. It feels like writing on a scrap of paper that’s way too small. I would…
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Same word, different meaning
A curious thing I learned today, via the marginalia (delightful, as always), in The Shared Language of Props: False cognates are words that look similar but have different meanings; heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Even expanding beyond the technical environment, I couldn’t agree more; words are incredibly contextual,…