It’s no secret that my favorite president is Ronald Reagan. One of his best quotes, in my opinion, contains a bit of inspiration that I try to live by each day: “It’s surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit.”
Unless a client is looking to bailout newspapers, I have never been much of a proponent of newspaper ads, especially the full-page variety. Too many lawyerly words, and weird pictures.
You have to hand it to President Obama for understanding how to control the message in a 24/7 media world. Giving his first televised TV interview to an Arab network is bold enough. Then, to top it off, he delivers a line that easily finds itself as the prevailing sound bite from the interview – “All too often the United States starts by dictating…” Politics aside, the new administration gets the media gig far better than their predecessors.
I came across an amazing example of viral marketing/brand promotion recently. It comes from Disney. This Disney campaign is very clever. It places the viewer inside of its theme park and personalizes the experience by inserting the person’s name on attractions and all kinds of signs. It’s the kind of subtle, engage-the-user, brand promotion campaign you would expect from Disney.
Anyone wondering about the perils of an always-on, know-everything digital world can look no further than the premature publication of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ obituary by venerable newswire, Bloomberg. Whoops!
I’m in Berlin right now, a city that for most of my lifetime has personified all things cutting edge, particularly regarding architecture and design. I came to here to speak at a conference on political communications and the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, hosted by a leading German think tank. I also had the opportunity to tour the Reichstag–the seat of German parliamentary government–and meet several high-level female members of parliament to discuss involving more German women in the political process.
It seems the world is back on hunger. Wasn’t it back in the early 1980’s when this was the issue du jour? Now, for very different reasons, the price of food is soaring and many in poor countries may starve again.
My friend, Jim Pinkerton, passed along a NYT article last week about a Chinese student at Duke who got mixed up in a life-threatening Internet frenzy. A freshman confounded by the pro-Tibet/pro-China demonstrations on her campus, she decided to play George Mitchell and broker an accord between the two sides.
