creativity

Fighting Words: Marketing Lessons From the UFC

marketing lessons from the ufc

Your organization can learn a lot from the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Yes, I’m serious. No, I don’t mean you can learn flying knees or triangle chokes, although those might come in handy when meetings get heated.

This Blog Post is Brought to You by Paper…Mostly

crumbled paper

This blog post was written mostly on a blank piece of paper. Yes, actual paper, with ruled lines and everything. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and scribbled away until I figured out what on earth I was writing about.

How to Starve Ideas to Death

tragedy of the commons

We’ve all had these meetings: Big ideas are being discussed. The future of the company is being diagrammed on a whiteboard. The word “should” is being used a lot. The greatest thing since sliced bread is being articulated with passion. Everyone is smiling. People are enthusiastic and everyone pats each other (and themselves) on the [...]

How to Kill Creativity With One Simple Phrase: They Already Have That

they already have transportation

Every day, this four-word phrase murders innocent ideas before they had a chance to grow up. It suffocates its victims with a blanket of negativity. It is the leading killer of creativity. It runs rampant in the offices and minds of people in those offices. And it needs to be put behind bars, never to [...]

4 Tips to Develop Engaging Story Ideas

story ideas for editors

“That’s a story idea,” I would often think as a general assignment newspaper reporter and editor. So many of my friends’ and family’s stories about lively debates at their jobs, old friends they ran into or the TV shows they were obsessed with would often lead to an article idea relevant and interesting to our [...]

5 Ways to Break Creative Block

breaking creative block

The blank Word document taunts me without saying a word. Writer’s block has set in, even though my imagination is working just fine. I close my eyes and picture hurling my computer out the window. I can see the cables, mouse and keyboard trailing behind it for eight stories, then catching up after multiple thwacks [...]

The Tao of Quality (Or, What I learned from Auto-Tune)

tao of quality

If you’ve heard any pop music at all over the past several years, you’ve probably heard Auto-Tune, seasoning and sometimes overwhelming the performances of the gifted and mediocre alike. It forces sounds to conform to a particular musical key, eliminating the hundreds of deviant microtones that distinguish the human vocal instrument—which may be why digitally [...]

Lead and I Will Follow: On Writing Good Leads

lead and i will follow

You’re making me nervous. You clicked on this link expecting to learn something or to perhaps be entertained. I could boldly hope that you may even retweet or bookmark this article. But a lot of that depends on my lead. Here’s hoping it worked.

Rebecca Black and the Art of Being Bad

rebecca black bad is the new good

It’s official: Bad is the new good. For the moment, anyway. While music tastes and styles have always been subjective, there’s no disputing that the buzz that built overnight around “Friday,” fledgling teen “singer” Rebecca Black’s ode to the weekend, is a sign that you don’t necessarily need to be good at what you do [...]

Lessons In Social Capitalism

social capitalism

By now you may have heard about Kickstarter.com, the web site where entrepreneurs with compelling ideas but empty pockets can go to crowdsource the financing they need to make their crazy dreams a reality. The site calls itself “a new way to fund and follow creativity,” and it functions as a platform for “patrons,” or [...]

Want a Viral Video? Just Add Humanity

ted williams

Despite the Internet’s reputation for being mean-spirited, cruel and heartless, it turns out that most people who surf the web love a fairytale happy ending. How else can you explain the “viral video” phenomenon that was formerly-homeless Ted Williams’ rise to superstardom?

What Making Sandwiches Taught Me About Marketing

sandwiches and marketing thumbnail

I’m about to break an unwritten rule of social media. I’m going to talk about what I had for lunch. But I’m not going to bore you with a Twitpic and a quip about the chili con carne I brought in Tupperware from last night’s dinner (though it was delicious). I’ll save that for a [...]

Big Red Things? Priceless Marketing

red shoe marketing outdoor mastercard

Last week I was rushing through Union Station’s marble halls to the Metro when I was stopped in my tracks by a very enormous red high-heel shoe (and a peep-toe one, no less). Other people were hovering around also marveling at the monstrosity, which seemed to have absolutely no explanation for its existence.

Fall into the Gap? More Like Piling On …

Thumbnail image for Fall into the Gap? More Like Piling On …

Unless you’ve spent the last week under a rock (or in an Old Navy or Banana Republic), you’ve probably heard the backlash over Gap changing their logo to a “new” logo. It was announced. Then it was denounced. A lot. And now it’s a footnote in the history of “how not to handle your brand’s [...]

“When life gives you volcanoes, make magazines.”

stranded magazine

Remember that pesky Icelandic ash cloud? You know, the one that grounded thousands of European flights for weeks? Backpackers and businesspeople were all stuck in a collective volcation, stranded and left to bum couch space and beg for hotel rooms. So what do you do if you suddenly have a few weeks to spare? If [...]

Herding Cats, Shepherding Brand Awareness

ikea herding cats

You don’t even have to be a cat lover to be sucked into this week’s viral video. One hundred untrained housecats were let loose in a British IKEA store (overnight; no customers; and they vacuumed after, don’t worry). The curious creatures explored, climbed, and chased each other around the familiar furniture. With all the right [...]

Video: Design of the Times

design of the times

It has only been 10 years, but magazine design has come of age in the digital world. It’s gone from page turning to page swiping, scrolling, and tapping. Suddenly your art director is bombarded by visual inspiration and influences. You can collaborate and get feedback at the speed of light. All of this is made [...]

It Takes a Village to Save a Newspaper

how to save newspapers

I have a fantastical dream of returning to Indiana and buying my hometown weekly newspaper. Nevermind that I don’t have the cash, it’s not for sale and that I’m firmly rooted in the DC area. I started in newspapers and continue to believe in them. Am I a dinosaur?

Head(line) of the Class

skywalker headline

I still remember one of my favorite headlines with a chuckle: “Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo.” I was enticed to click the head after spotting it while browsing a news website. The headline is so clever that it actually seems like a no-brainer to use. But remember, the editor was only crafting a headline [...]

Creativity: The Cure-All

box thumbnail

It could have just been another task on a lengthy to-do list: Figure out how to maximize space in the office building of a company that, well, attaches sentimental value to inanimate objects (read: we hold on to a lot of our work). Being a custom media company – one that produces magazines, marketing collateral, [...]

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