January, 2006 Archive

New ad agency rules of engagement

MINI Cooper updated the whole search process after Crispin Porter ‘fired’ them to take on VW. Some of what Jim McDowell, head of MINI USA, did to shake things up with the 4 finalists (50 agencies, 8 got questionnaires, 4 got into finals): Weekend boot camp for the four finalists, requiring the agencies to perform [...]

Will you be recommended?

I continue to see articles refracting out of the HRB piece from a few years back on what a company really needs to consider in terms of customer satisfaction: unless a customer ranks you an 8, 9, or 10 out of 10 when asked, “Would you recommend this company or its products to a colleague?” [...]

Web optimization

We heard a good presentation here from Anne Kennedy at Beyond Ink.Some of her points: Search only works when someone knows to look for something. That’s the challenge of visibility: How do you let the search engines in? All web business takes place on an 11″ or 15″ screen, and most of it in search [...]

Go have a midlife crisis

New research suggests that the left (analytical, logical, speech, language, reasoning) and right (creative, less disciplined, face recognition, reading of emotional cues) sides of the brain become better integrated during middle age, making way for greater creativity. As you all know, this is literal as well as figurative, because the two brain hemispheres are real, [...]