Each week, Digiday pesters a busy industry executive to explain how he or she uses Twitter and to share his or her Twitter must-follows. Last week, Ogilvy’s Brandon Berger suggested we all follow, among others, Consigliere’s Mike Duda. To keep the chain going, we asked Mike about his must-follows. Follow Mike on Twitter at @MikeDuda. Duda: “How do you use Twitter?” It seems like such an easy question. I’ll write a draft, bust open a thesaurus to unleash a few 30-plus point “Words with Friends” words, send to a couple PR friends who will edit 85 percent of the content and — Yahtzee! — I score a byline that makes me look smartish. But, oh, Twitter, if only I could describe you so easily. You ... Continue reading →
Alex Pareene's annual Hack List is so popular -- and useful -- we thought we should spread it out over the year. This column is a regular feature taking a deeper look at our media's most pernicious hacks, which we'll rank in order at year's end. Tim Russert was not the unalloyed saint of tough journalism that his celebrators describe in posthumous tributes, but he was at least a classic American success story, of the sort that we still enjoy pretending is common: Blue-collar kid from Rust Belt town becomes enormously successful thanks largely to brains and hard work. The story of Luke Russert, alas, is a much more common one in American life: No-account kid of successful person has more success thrust upon him. ... Continue reading →
QR codes are, for lack of a better term, terrible. Or, put more kindly, they’re a good idea usually terribly executed. Publishers often use them as a shortcut to making their static media “interactive.” This also more often than not falls short with a poor consumer experience and low response rates. QR codes were a great way for people to get introduced into the concept of print-to-mobile. Now publishers are taking the concept a step further by using QR-like technology to bridge the physical-digital divide. Sports Illustrated, Lucky Magazine and Brides Magazine each are using some kind of digital watermarking, image recognition or companion app to bolster the mobile-reading experience. Sports Illustrated, for example, sees companion viewing as a positive way to engage its audience ... Continue reading →
Financial crises are a lot like childbirth -- they both involve a lot of pain and end up costing you a lot of money. But, after a while, you forget about all the negatives and are ready to do it again. Of course, with childbirth you at least get something positive out of it. In my own case, I'd forgotten enough about the downside of having a baby to do it again two years later -- without an epidural. (My older daughter just graduated from college this week -- time flies!) This propensity to forget, so useful when it comes to having babies, is incredibly destructive when it comes to our economy. So why do we do it? In 1990, John Kenneth Galbraith tried to ... Continue reading →
Life can be tough in the agency business. Clients consistently expect greater results for smaller fees, which has placed increased pressure on the typical agency business model. As a result, both holding companies and individual agencies themselves are seeking new ways to boost their incomes, not all of which are in line with traditional agency roles. Many holding companies have opted to take financial positions in the vendors they do business with, for example. They charge advertisers once at the agency level, but they also stand to see upside at the vendor-level, too, through their investments. Agencies increasingly find themselves in the position of evaluating vendors for client business when their holding companies have a stake in one of them. Those types of relationships raise ... Continue reading →
