PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

All kinds of articles this year have stood up to be counted on the topic of measurement. Executives, especially CFOs, want marketing to be more and more accountable. A good recent piece on CMOs in strategy + business ranks accountability second only to putting the consumer at the heart of marketing.

At PJA, our clients are following and (we hope) driving this trend toward measuring campaign effectiveness. At the end of this week I had a conversation with a client for a campaign that is not even approved yet, and we discussed the following metrics for the first six months of the program: (more…)

”Our stock in trade seems to be going away.”

Is this a) a print media-based marketing agency or b) a geophysicist lamenting the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean? (more…)

Adbusters is a curious experience, if you’ve never picked up this ‘culturejammer’ journal at your local Whole Paycheck. Presented in a magazine format, it contains no ads whatsoever, though if you visit their Vancouver-based Web site you can pick up a nice anti-sweatshop, cruelty-free, pro-grassroots travel mug for your plug-in hybrid. The stories, such as they are, are more like editorials or rants, usually over doctored photographs of capitalist porn (i.e., advertising). I can’t help thinking after a dozen pages, ‘Where have you gone, Tom Frank and The Baffler?’

That said, the most current Adbusters interested me because they actually interviewed an advertising person, Bob Garfield. (more…)