Free iPhones In China?

Apple & Burberry teamed to promote iPhone 5S (Photo: Burberry) Do you know anyone who absolutely must get their hands on a plastic cell phone? Here we are a week after another breathless Apple new product press conference, and the question remains unanswered.Not unexpectedly, the news event consumed myriad column inches and airtime minutes in the…… Continue reading Free iPhones In China?

The Optics of Marissa Mayer

I recently wrote about Yahoo! and specifically its CEO’s efforts to revitalize the laggard Internet brand, a brand that started life alongside Altavista, another once-dominant Web brand whose fate Yahoo! hopes not to share (in spite of acquiring it).The take-away of the earlier post was to draw attention to all the media attention Marissa Mayer was drawing to…… Continue reading The Optics of Marissa Mayer

Content is King, Distribution is Queen

The hype surrounding native advertising, sponsored content and/or promoted content is deafening. Online publishers, faced with diminished digital ad dollars and un-engaging ad creative, have turned to marketing-driven content that natively mimics editorial to invigorate reader engagement and revenue. Suddenly, a cottage industry has risen to help commercial entities come off as, well, less commercial.The…… Continue reading Content is King, Distribution is Queen

Media Walls Crumble: Brands Benefit

Staples Center Star Turn (Photo: Harry How/Getty Images)Nowhere was the wall between editorial and ad sales as high nor as impenetrable than at mainstream news organizations. Who can forget the maelstrom that erupted in 1999 when one esteemed journalistic enterprise the Los Angeles Times blurred those lines by publishing a 168-page special Sunday magazine issue…… Continue reading Media Walls Crumble: Brands Benefit

The Reading Room

Most industry upheavals arrive with countless experts creating voluminous amounts of prose (and infographics) that seek to provide greater clarity. They come in the form of blog posts, newspaper and magazine articles, white papers, video sizzler reels, animated tutorials, Tweets, industry panels, and of course, longer-form books.This last category is the subject of today’s post,…… Continue reading The Reading Room

The World According to Meerman Scott

I had a chance to catch yesterday morning’s keynote session featuring David Meerman Scott at the Search Engine Strategies New York conference, which continues today and tomorrow. He is one helluva a speaker who made a cogent case for the “new rules of marketing & PR” by asking the audience five very simple questions: In…… Continue reading The World According to Meerman Scott

Christian Constituents and The Blind Side

The Daily Beast today reports on the remarkable box office success of the Sandra Bullock-starrer “The Blind Side.” The film to date has grossed more that $200 million on a paltry budget (by Hollywood’s standards) of $29 million. It usurped “Twilight: New Moon” in its third week atop the weekly rankings.Could it be that Ms.…… Continue reading Christian Constituents and The Blind Side

Tweet-Ups, etc.

Has there ever been a time when we’ve seen so many media and marketing industry confabs? They range from six-person tweet-ups to the much buzzed-about annual gathering pictured here ——->The organizers of these events sure know how to entice attendees with all the right buzzwords, e.g., “new media,” “social media,” “PR 2.0,” “Web 3.0,” “community,”…… Continue reading Tweet-Ups, etc.

Notable 2009 Predictions

Some days this blogger feels like pontificating, while others, he’s prone to aggregating. Today is an aggregation day.Below you will find a smattering of notable end-of-the-year lists and 2009 predictions that should appeal to the media, marketing and social media set.By no means is it complete. If you know of others, please share.Peter Kim “(14…… Continue reading Notable 2009 Predictions

Metrics Buzz

Doesn’t the discipline of reputation management fall squarely in the domain of the PR professional? Apparently no longer in today’s land grab of blurred marketing functions.Nielsen Buzzmetrics’s Pete Blackshaw, no stranger to the word-of-mouth marketing measurement scene, now sees gold in the execution of online reputation management programs.In a ClickZ piece today, penned by Doug…… Continue reading Metrics Buzz