My grandmother would be about 125 years old today. She was born in a country that didn’t exist when she was born. Now it is called Belarus. English was her third or fourth language. I don’t know if she spoke any of them well, but she got her message across. She died before smartphones were invented,… Read More »
In the mid-1970s, my parents arranged for a condo in Florida when I was living in New York. We had a family summer vacation, joined by my brother-in-law and sister and their small two girls, aged 5 and 6. One day we were going to go to dinner with some people and had an hour… Read More »
When we were kids and wanted to play baseball, more than often we had too few players to play a full game with two teams. There were two options: scrub and ping-pong. For scrubs, when the bell rang for lunch or the end of the school day, the boys would make a run for the… Read More »
Everyone who has ever managed people should aim to be a “Geppetto Manager.” In the famous Italian story, retold by Disney, Geppetto was the old woodcarver who made a wooden marionette named Pinocchio. Pinocchio, the puppet, dreams of becoming a real boy. The story is about how Pinocchio learns to have a conscience and then,… Read More »
A freelance assignment in Hungary came up in 1989. The country was just breaking free from Russian domination and communism. A bank in Budapest, called DunaBank, wanted to launch a credit card. I was hired based on my marketing work with Texaco’s credit card operation, and the fact that Canada was less scary and more… Read More »
The Creative strategy for Camay bar soap in Venezuela was that it was gentle, leaving skin feeling soft because Camay contained cold cream. Softness was the end benefit of using the product, being caressable was the end-end benefit. The commercials were designed to empower the female Camay user. The lead character was always a young… 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 »
We were pleased a few years ago when our Media Director advised us that she had negotiated a free promotion activation from the CBC. She got a promotional tie-in with Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) for our Subway client and, even better, it was to run during the highly rated Stanley Cup Playoffs. All… Read More »
We posted this blog in 2010 as a commentary on the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Not much has changed in the dozen years since and the question still remains. Much has been said this year about the “Chinese” athletes from North America, and the Canadian bobsledder who won gold for the U.S. and many others.The blog… Read More »
When I attended the University of British Columbia, I helped organize a protest against the US testing of nuclear weapons in Amchitka, a tectonically unstable Alaskan island in the Pacific Ocean close enough to the fault lines to be of concern. Our fear was an earthquake and then a tsunami could be created by the… Read More »