We can’t stop. We have to keep going. He have to keep going. Don’t we?
Watch this. Right now. Then bookmark it, because I want you to come back and watch it at least once a week until you have it memorized. Also, I’d be grateful if you’d drop me a line every so often reminding me that I need to watch it again, too.
More great insight from John Cavanaugh at The Tap Tap Tap:
I hate limbo. And that’s what I’m seeing a lot of in marketing right now. Don’t accept it. Maybe some of us have gotten past the “Rage against the dying of the light” phase. But now the light is frustratingly flickering and just not coming on. Give it some more juice! Marketing and communications is a powerful force for business change. Use it!
Read all about it. Pass it on. Then act on it.
If I were an angel investor I’d probably have written four or five checks yesterday.
Well, I should probably qualify that. I’m not a finance guy, and I haven’t had a chance to vet the leadership teams and have my team review the science behind some of the green tech proposals. And hey, I thought the University of Colorado made a great decision when it hired Rick Neuheisel, so my judgment is far from infallible. Continue reading
Great first day at the Angel Capital Summit at DU. As promised, here’s a PDF of my presentation from this afternoon. If you have questions, drop me a line.
I have been invited to speak at the Angel Capital Summit, which will be taking place at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business this coming Monday and Tuesday, December 6-7.
The ACS provides entrepreneurs with access to a variety of tools to help them in the process of securing early round funding for their ventures and an intensive coaching process that focuses on “identifying key risk and return factors that investors look for and answering those questions during the pitch.” Continue reading
File under B for “bigger and better”: How do you like the site’s brand new look? I wanted something a little lighter and cleaner and I think I found it. Also, I finally made the time to port over a number of posts that had only lived at another business blog I used to write for.If you track through the archives, a lot of this content can be found throughout 2008 and 2009.
Finally, in the menu above you’ll see a brand new page: Wisdom. This is sort of a greatest hits page – I hope that everything on the site is of some value, but this resource catalogs the very best of Black Dog. If you’re investigating my work for the first time, start here – if I can help you, this page will make the case.
If nothing here works for you, feel free to drop me a line, anyway, because I’m fortunate to have a network of gifted colleagues out there. Maybe one of them is the answer you’re looking for.
As many of you know I’ve been gainfully employed on the “client side” since August of 2008, and during this period of time I think it’s safe to say that I did some of the best work of my career. (When I was hired, the expectation was that I probably wouldn’t be there for more than six months – get in, do some critical things, get out, etc.) But sometimes things change and you wind up staying longer than you expected.
Anyway, I am no longer with that employer and am looking forward to hopefully broadening my horizons a bit. I learned an ungodly amount about the financial services industry that I never knew before and have benefitted tremendously from the experience, but I was also cognizant of interesting developments in other industries, and also of compelling new practices and techniques that my position really had no need for.
So, onward and upward. Meanwhile, I have updated the Portfolio page to account for some of my recent work. Have a look if you get a chance.
A few years back I was retained to develop an ad campaign for a very large sports outlet (magazine, Web site), which was seeking to grow its fantasy football product. The hook they wanted to build around was tradition – they felt that emphasizing a more authentic, “smash-mouth” image would help them better compete against the high-tech gloss of their major competitor.
I developed several concepts. If you ask any ad pro they’ll tell that all too often, the client winds up liking anything and everything except the best option, and this was no exception. I think the one they ran with was certainly good, but the one they should have fallen in love with is now posted to the Portfolio page. Click here to see the mock-up.
(BTW, the design we presented to the client was better than this. Since the designer owns the IP on that, I developed the alternate visual you see here. Dammit, Jim, I’m a writer, not an artist.)
Ad guru Greg Stene has some comments on how new Google tech is influencing site design. Yep, yep, yep. Have a look at Mindthwack.
A Gallup poll released in August indicated that the advertising and PR industries aren’t viewed very favorably by the American public.
One-third of respondents voiced a positive view of the advertising/pr industry (6 percent “very,” 27 percent “somewhat”). Twenty-seven percent were “neutral.” Twenty-five percent expressed a “somewhat negative view,” while 11 percent were “very negative.” (The rest didn’t venture an opinion.)
You might argue that, on balance, the numbers are only slightly negative – total positives were 33% while total negatives were 36% – and the AdWeek story cited here certainly goes out of their way to put a chirpy spin on the results (no real surprise there, I suppose). Continue reading
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 