In this season of awards – no wait! … awards always seem to be in season. Doesn’t having so many awards for so many different things dilute the value of any award? We are just getting through Nobel Season. Soon it will be time for Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Emmies, Grammies, Junos, ESPys and on… Read More »
The first year I was at school in Philadelphia, in the 1970s, a friend in my dorm told me that he had a motorcycle that he had left in North Carolina. He was going to ship it up to Philadelphia but it was expensive to ship it. I had only recently come to the East… Read More »
Every place, person and thing has a name, mostly applied locally and then eventually agreed upon my everyone else. When the US thought of appropriating and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, it was trying to change a centuries old agreed upon name. It didn’t work. It got me thinking about how we call places and… Read More »
I have worked in both the US and Canada one thing I have found curious is that the markets have approached Diversity and Inclusion in two different ways. First the US: When I worked there twenty five years ago, there were quotas for “minorities” to appear in commercials. Clients required these quotas to be met… Read More »
There has been some recent controversy about whether the Canadian government got their money’s worth when they spent an estimated $56,000 to have Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stamp the final Canadian penny produced for circulation. It was staged as a publicity stunt in May at the Royal Canadian mint in Winnipeg with accompanying press conference.… Read More »
Toronto should offer thanks, maybe a statue, to the one man who has made this city into the world class city it has become. When I was a kid, Toronto was a weak number two city in Canada. Montreal was the most important city with Vancouver a distant number three. Head offices were in Montreal. Everyone… Read More »
Have you noticed how everyone is crabby and crotchety these days? It is the Baby Boomers’ fault. The Boomers have always transformed the texture of society ever since they arrived en masse after WWII. They transformed popular music, fashion styles and redefined society as they reached adulthood. They added the energy and enthusiasm of youth… Read More »
Our brains really don’t understand math all that well. And I am not talking about the average person’s ability to solve quadratic equations. As mentioned in earlier blogs, our brains can be easily fooled. And advertising is there to make our clients look good, sometimes with shifty logic. As advertisers, for example, we can take… Read More »
Be careful with translations. Relying on Google or any other digital translation can bring you problems, Not just small mistakes; but mistakes where the meaning is jumbled up and confusing. Effectively using a language that you to communicate with customers requires understanding the cultural context that it comes in. The title of this blog is… Read More »
A freelance assignment in Hungary came up in 1989. The country was just breaking free from Russian domination and communism, literally at that very moment. A bank in Budapest, called DunaBank, wanted to use their new entrepreneurial freedom to launch a credit card. We did this and after a couple weeks returned home. After I… Read More »