The Juno Awards was an annual private music industry awards ceremony for insiders, wearing tuxedos and gowns, until 1995. The organization that put it on was the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS). They had this crazy idea that they should be making money from it rather than losing or at best breaking even. Enter Jacques… Read More »
Often we hear arguments that ring sort of true when they otherwise should not. Some of these I call The Yao Ming Argument. It is when you take an exception and make it seem like the normal, the average. For example, as the US struggles with its messed up healthcare system, people continually point out to… Read More »
Have you ever felt like some company was buzzing around you, becoming so irritating and you couldn’t seem to bat them away. All they wanted was a little bit of your blood. Take the banks and cell phone companies. Somebody, please… take them… They are constantly sucking just a little bit of blood out of… Read More »
We had launched a cereal with Wayne Gretzky on the box in 1984. It was a front page success in Canada. This was unusual because cereals are rarely launched in Canada alone. Usually we relaunched cereals that already had been successes in the United States, our huge test market to the south. Things had gone smoothly… Read More »
We started our little company in the early 90s and used computers as the core of our infrastructure. This was a quite unusual at the time; but, it paid off over the years. Slowly we added people. First there was an Art Director who had recently arrived from India. She had worked for a multinational… Read More »
The leaves don’t turn; the snow doesn’t fall. It doesn’t get colder or in the spring thaw. There are some seasonal changes, more or less rain, hurricanes. But no gradual progression of the seasons. So how do people mark the changing of the Florida seasons? The secret for residents is the flow of commercial holidays… Read More »
There were many times when we presented commercials to clients who we felt wanted to make changes to make sure their input was included in the commercial. The one who pays the piper wants to call the tune and be recognized. So here is how we would describe a typical commercial: two women are discussing… Read More »
Watching retailers do their own commercials on TV often makes me cringe. Particularly car retailers. They start their commercials by yelling and keep it up. Their theory may be that all their energy makes the viewer think that something exciting is going on. But is just yelling enough? The result is a constant yelling throughout… Read More »