I just returned from a vacation to Mauritius — AKA Paradise — and South Africa. In Mauritius, I don’t think I opened my laptop and barely accessed my mobile phone. The connection was too slow anyway and the nearest Starbucks was around 4 000 miles away — too far to walk! South Africa was a […] Read more
I recently had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at the Canadian Marketing Association’s President’s Dinner. Sadly for me, it was also Memorial Day in the US, and as Murphy would have it, it was a tormenting 81 degrees when I left for the airport on Monday. That said, I couldn’t have been happier […] Read more
Have you ever heard of CONANDA? For those of you who answered that it was America’s neighbour to the North, you’re an idiot. CONANDA is actually The Brazilian Ministry of Human Rights’ Council of Rights of Children and Teenagers, which earlier this month issued a resolution effectively banning all advertising to children under age 12 […] Read more
Super Bowl time is always an interesting time for me. The night before, I typically break out in hives out of fear that this year – finally — the industry will get it right and knock it out the park, taking full advantage of their once-a-year (if not a lifetime for some brands) opportunity to […] Read more
I had the pleasure of beginning my marketing career pre-internet. Well, I think floppy disks and four-colour VGA monitors existed back in South Africa circa-1992/1993 (we were a little behind the rest of the world), but for the most part ‘you’ve got mail’ was still a phrase reserved for the one job that surely would […] Read more
Let me start off the bat with a mea culpa as it relates to the four buzzwords or clichés that are anywhere on the continuum of painful to putrid: big data, native advertising, transmedia, and ecosystem. Now that I’ve got that out there, let me concede along the spirit of “if you can’t beat ‘em, […] Read more