Today was my day to write a social blog post, which is something I truly enjoy and typically look forward to. And Jennifer Mabes, our newest employee, has been prodding me for several days to get my act in gear.
Jim Taylor, Arby's CMO is pretty proud of himself these days, stating that consumers are either "with us (eating meat) or against us (not eating meat)" in a sort of battle between meat and vegetable eaters. But there are serious flaws in his strategy.
Three years ago, Gasco – the gas industry’s leading supplier of precision calibration gas mixtures – tasked us (Sweeney) to rebrand its ecosmart™ product. Gasco is a niche player in the gas industry with a serious reputation for big ideas.
The Consumer Electronics Show – now in full swing – is arguably the largest global platform for new product launches. The parade of fresh, innovative and exciting is virtually endless. But for most, it will not end well. It is critically important to acknowledge that on any given day, anything can and likely will happen, sometimes to your advantage and sometimes not.
If you believe everything you read (and hear), it appears the agency industry is on its last leg.
With all due respect to Uber, there is a time and a place to change or update or refresh a brand. In particular, new logos have a potentially important and valuable purpose. But sometimes, poop by any other name (or emblem) still stinks, to paraphrase Shakespeare.
To know me is to know that I rarely take time to boast about our agency’s past or our present, but instead am typically consumed with what comes next. This is the exception to that rule. For more than three decades, Sweeney has forged a unique and consistent identity in the agency world.
Yes, the world is changing (shocking revelation #1). New technologies – particularly social media – are changing the ways news is served up and consumed (shocking revelation #2). And “influencers” like Donald Trump and Facebook are popularizing the idea that news is “fake” (shocking revelation #3).
In 1995, Steve Jobs told Computerworld that he always felt death is the greatest invention of life. "I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young.
Thirty-five years ago, Ellen McConnell (Blakeman) was – for lack of a better description – my boss. I respected and revered her… and occasionally even feared her. She was the toughest and smartest woman I had met since my own mother, another classic Irishwoman whose intelligence and ferocity defied her gender (and size), which today may not seem like a big deal, but three decades ago was huge.
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