Have a Heart
This is the first in a series of 10 posts about different aspects of CEO branding. “If Acme Widgets Corporation were a person, what sort of person would it be? How would you describe the looks, the personality and the style of that person?” Anyone who has attended consumer focus groups has probably heard variations [...]
Pinning Your Personal Brand on Self-Curation
Looking to boost your PBI (personal brand index) and secure that dream job or snag some new clients? Now that we’ve entered an age in which a solid personal brand strategy is as important as a lack of typos on your résumé, the name of the game is no longer self-promotion but self-curation. We live [...]
Is Mark Zuckerberg Today’s Country Joe?
Originally posted on Euro RSCG Worldwide’s Prosumer Report microsite. In recent months, Euro RSCG has commented on how the revolution is not just being televised, but tweeted about, updated on Facebook, and uploaded to YouTube. In our trends preview for 2011, I touched on the new face of anger and how most of us are [...]
Millennials #Makeachange
With almost 9 million followers on Twitter at last count, Justin Bieber has quite the commanding social media presence. But, as the mantra goes, with great power comes great responsibility—a concept that Justin, or maybe his PR team, seems to know well. Using his power for good on his 17th birthday, Justin sent out a [...]
Breaking the E-Love Code
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. This is the third in a series of four. See Euro RSCG Worldwide PR’s latest white paper, “Love (and Sex) in the Age of Social Media,” for more analysis about how Americans think about online romance. Around Valentine’s Day 2011, our thoughts immediately turn to…social media. Well, why not? [...]
Prosumers in E-Love
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. This is the second in a series of four. See Euro RSCG Worldwide PR’s latest white paper, “Love (and Sex) in the Age of Social Media,” for more analysis about how Americans think about online romance. There’s a certain set of consumers who don’t just passively consume goods and [...]
Love in the Time of Connectivity
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. This is the first in a series of four. See Euro RSCG Worldwide PR’s latest white paper, “Love (and Sex) in the Age of Social Media,” for more analysis about how Americans think about online romance. It’s Valentine’s Day once again, when lonely hearts turn to thoughts of love, [...]
Back to School
Earlier this week, I went back to school and back to a CBI—the ultimate distinction at Euro RSCG Worldwide and ERWW PR. That’s our shorthand for Creative Business Ideas, those big leaps that rewrite a brand’s potential and give it new probabilities. Back in the early days of aspiring to CBIs, we defined them as [...]
The Icing on the Cake
Getting “iced”…It sounds illicit, slightly illegal and definitely uncomfortable. Actually, it is the most recent viral interactive phenomenon sweeping the nation’s post-grads. The New York Times recently explained the concept of being iced: “The premise of the game is simple: hand a friend a sugary Smirnoff Ice malt beverage and he (most participants have been men) [...]
Rising Interest Rates
Forget about the Hiltons (Paris and Perez, that is). Americans don’t have time anymore. They’re too busy looking closely and critically at public issues that affect them. A new study from Euro RSCG Worldwide reveals that people are losing interest in celebrities and paying more attention to serious matters such as the economy and health [...]
Social Media Emerges as Community Glue
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. The inaugural One Young World summit that concluded on Wednesday in London wasn’t just a gathering of hundreds of tomorrow’s world leaders. Don’t get me wrong: The energy of the more than 600 delegates from 100-plus countries, the passion of their debates and the progress that their resolutions made toward [...]
Ten Trends of 20-Somethings
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. With the inaugural One Young World summit kicking off this week in London (my company, Euro RSCG Worldwide, organized it), my thoughts have been focused on the biggest trends among 20-somethings, an increasingly powerful group. In one of my earlier posts, I explained why adults born after 1980 are the [...]
The Power of One Young World
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Every generation assumes it has been handed the world’s problems because the one that preceded it didn’t quite master the agenda. In the rebellious 1960s, the baby boomers demonstrated noisily against established powers and ideas. But in the case of today’s energetic and engaged twentysomethings—the Real-Time Generation—I think assuming [...]
Generation Real-Time
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. A few years ago I was publicly fretting over the arrival of millennials—young people in the generation after X—in the workplace. I described how these new adults would bring with them a sense of entitlement, a need for constant praise, a habit of multitasking to the point of distraction [...]
Bash, Bash and More Bash
I’ve been watching the trend of mobmedia for some time now—it’s one of my top 10 trends for 2010—but it really hit home for me last week. I got a vicious, hateful (hate being the operative word) phone call, possibly from someone I know. I’ve done a number of TV appearances in the past month, and it [...]
Alone for the Holidays
It’s that time of year again. We’re all supposed to be nothing but joyful, yet magazines, newspapers and blogs are all offering their annual “survival tactics” for coping with holiday angst. This supposedly most wonderful time of the year has somehow become something that must be endured. There’s a great disconnect between the expectations—the fantasy [...]
Small Is Beautiful
In August, M.E. Sprengelmeyer, an out-of-work journalist who’d been a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the now defunct Rocky Mountain News, moved to Santa Rosa, N.M., and bought The Guadalupe County Communicator (circulation 2,000), according to a recent New York Times article. In the article, Sprengelmeyer calls small-town newspapers a hidden opportunity and hints at the [...]
How Should Marketers Use Social Media Now?
I wrote in my last post about the changing social media landscape and what the future might hold. The results of MicroDialogue’s survey for Euro RSCG of 1,228 social media users and analysis of thousands of conversations in online communities, along with a number of recent news articles, point to a major shift in user [...]
Social Media: Are They Making Us Less Social?
The numbers are impressive: Facebook added its 300 millionth member in September, and the site accounted for 58.6 percent of all U.S. visits to social networking sites in September, an increase of 194 percent over the year before. Twitter is taking off even more dramatically: That site has 20.8 million members and received 1.8 percent [...]
State of the Cyberhood
As I was pulling together a white paper about social media I came across an article that Adweek published about me in 1996, when my role as head of TBWA’s Department of the Future took me to Amsterdam. Having already been central in setting up the agency’s efforts to use new media tools for market [...]
More Time to ReMIND
In my last post, I wrote about this week’s Stand Up for Heroes benefit for the Bob Woodruff Foundation and ReMIND.org. I also want to write about the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital Home Base Program, which is working in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide care for veterans [...]
When Is Local Too Local?
creativecommons.org/by unhindered by talentEarlier this week I read an article in The Advocate of Stamford, Conn., about a mayoral candidate describing his plans to bolster funding for the police force. He said he wants to develop SWAT teams and hostage negotiators, then referred to several major corporate offices in Stamford and said, “I think we’re [...]
30 Days in 23 Tweets
It’s been a little over a month now since I started in my new role as president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America. In this time, we were graded by PRWeek for its Global Agency Report Card, pulled together some preliminary creds and helped with the launch of the Home Base Program at Fenway [...]
Euro RSCG Proud
There’s a reason people are calling Euro RSCG Worldwide the world’s hottest creative agency. In 2009 alone, we won the most hotly contested account of the year—some $110 million worth of business for Heineken USA’s flagship lager brands. We were praised by Cannes Lions CEO Philip Thomas as the creative highlight of the Cannes Lions [...]
