Mapping your Customer Journey is one way to identify how your advertising is contributing to the sale and provides a methodology for allocating resources to each stage.

Here are five questions that every ad should answer for the recipient.

What elements make up a good ad? How can you tell if an ad will be effective or not? What will really get people to buy your product or service?

We sometimes get caught up chasing after trends.

People don’t go in the direction you want them to go merely because you tell them to. They go where they want to go, based on their whims at any given moment.

Millions and millions are spent trying to develop the perfect ad that will reach exactly the right audience at the right time with the right message that will get them to buy a product.

When your business isn’t doing well, many people often think the answer is ADVERTISING! And most agencies would like to perpetuate that belief.

The greatest achievement in advertising or marketing is getting people to think they came up with your idea on their own. Try this exercise to help them connect the final dots on their own, thereby allowing them to own it and make an even more convincing case.

So often we are overcome with the need to compromise. We try to reach the largest audience possible. We avoid including messaging that may be remotely controversial to just a small group of people. We dumb things down to avoid any misunderstanding.

Incredibly insightful, moderately meaningful, an absurd affront or nothing at all.

When I was an Account Coordinator my boss gave me a book that forever shaped how I acted as an Account person.

Post-its (a product I hold very dear to me in my work) was famously developed during the creator’s “15% time,” a program that allows employees to work on projects not directly related to their current responsibilities.  Google has a similar program that gave birth to Gmail and Google Earth to name a few.

I often think about what makes a truly great advertising account person.

If you’re into photography, you know that a camera’s aperture is the opening that lets light in to record the picture.

I’m going to be speaking at an upcoming American Advertising Federation event for college students about getting into the ad industry and it got me thinking: what does it really take to be successful in advertising?

As many of you know, responsive web design is an approach to developing websites that are optimized for various types of viewing formats, such as: desktop browser, tablet, and mobile. 

The purpose of all advertising strategies, tactics, and executions is ultimately to solve one or both of those two problems.  So let’s go into them a bit.