RITSON ON SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
Mark Ritson at WARC/Cannes Lions 2025 assumed credit: Cannes Lions 2025, Getty Images As you may well know, Mark Ritson made a much-talked-about presentation at Cannes 2025. It may seem surprising to some that the organisers of the WARC/Cannes Lions events invited him, since he’s [...]
RESEARCH PROOFING IN THE AGE OF AI
For us, it has always been important to proof, or to use a term more appropriate for today’s political climate, fact check research results. Particularly those used in marketing. One would think that a research proofing strategy proposed 15 years ago—before Gen AI was a [...]
RE: DESIGN FOR THE PEOPLE
The City of Toronto has an annual Doors Open event this time of year. During this year's Doors Open, I finally went inside the amazing RC Harris Filtration Plant, which we posted about seven years ago here: DESIGN FOR THE PEOPLE. Doors Open, 2025, looking [...]
THE AGENCY OF AGENTIC MARKETING
Although the buzz words being thrown about at the intersection of AI development and marketing seem to change at least monthly, this moment’s word seems to be agent. And then all its grammatical derivations and combinations. All the way to agentic marketing. The Agentic Agency [...]
THE CX LETDOWN
sidebar The Airline CX Surprise One might logically assume that the North American airline industry’s pricing policies in the second half of 2024 would result in CX letdown—specifically, the adding to the already-long list of unadvertised costs by charging for carry-on items, etc. But [...]
AS THE GOOGLE COOKIE UN-CRUMBLES
Well, this saga turned out to be a bust. In the final chapter, Chrome’s third-party cookie will remain completely intact, ruining everyone’s favourite graphic and verbal analogy. Yes, the Google cookie un-crumbles. We didn’t bother covering Google’s last two cookie-deprecation delays. Let’s close off this [...]
💀 THE EMOJI, 🙏
Full disclosure: The emotional icon (aka emoji) has been a pet peeve of mine from its beginning. I have quixotically refused to use them (except for this post), even though the majority of my friends and colleagues unabashedly do. Emojis have always seemed silly and [...]
THE REAL BARBIE STORY
1950s Lilli cartoon sample, see note 6 Over her years, Barbie (the doll) [1] has been a massive marketing success story. A bigger success than the very successful Barbie the Movie [2]. But because I did not have a daughter and because my two boys are [...]
SURVEY SAYS: WE’RE MISVALUING MARKETING SKILLS
Marketing Week is one the UK’s top two marketing business magazines. Like many, they do an annual Career & Salary Survey. Over the past week, they’ve been revealing interesting results from their 2024 survey: The most overrated marketing skill: social media [1] The most undervalued marketing [...]
STOK’D CANNABIS CAMPAIGN
Client: Stok'd Cannabis Agency: Angry Butterfly Market: Canada Timing: first appearing late February, 2024 Full Advertising Age article link: here Previous MW blog posts on cannabis marketing: CANNABIS’ INCONVENIENT TRUTH JUST HOW BIG IS THE CANNABIS MARKET? THE CANNABIS CRAZE
A GEN Z COMING-OF-AGE STORY
Every generation or so, we like to revisit the topic of demographics. To be fair, we’ve only done that once previously, here: THOSE PESKY MILLENNIALS BY THE NUMBERS. This previous post was in 2015, so it was far from being a traditional generation ago. It’s [...]
MARKETING COURAGE & CRAFT BEER
Experience has taught us that two of the most difficult things for today’s marketers seem to be: Sticking to a successful brand strategy in the long term. Meaning longer than five years. Returning to a previous successful brand strategy when the current one fails. [...]
LEARNING FROM UNDERWOOD № 5
ramble alert The Back Story I’ve been slowly working away at fixing my grandfather’s typewriter (just like everyone). It’s an Underwood № 5, built in 1914. The same year WWI started. Somewhere around the time of WWII, it was ‘refurbished’ to add a wider carriage, [...]
AI: THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY
First question: Does the world really need another AI blog post? ChatGPT is (strangely) equivocal when asked this question. I guess it hasn’t been coded to have an ego. So here’s our take on where we’re at with AI, the good, the bad and [...]
CRAFT MARKETING – A TALE OF TWO WINES
verbosity alert Throughout human history, winemaking has been a craft industry, ruled by artisans and run by families. In modern times, we believe that categorisation applies even to the big producers in traditional Old World winemaking countries [1]. They got big one of two [...]
WHAT ChatGPT & NUCLEAR FUSION HAVE IN COMMON
The marketing world is currently all aTwitter about ChatGPT, a newly-released AI-driven chatbot technology, and what it will mean for the future of marketing. The wider Western world is all aTwitter about a nuclear fusion experiment in a California-based laboratory that has created a ‘net [...]
WHEN GREAT BRANDS BREAK OUR HEART
It doesn’t happen very often, but every once in a while, a brand you really love will break your heart. VW and Loblaws are brands beloved by consumers for decades of quality products and services. Also beloved by marketers for decades of great marketing [...]
FAIL BETTER
There’s a great phrase often used by entrepreneurs, startup founders and those who consult for them: Fail Better. Like so many phrases in modern business lexicon, it is of curious origin (see sidebar). For the purpose of this discussion, let’s assume it means learn from [...]
THE WORLD’S BEST OLYMPIC STRATEGY
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have certainly been interesting. There were many great individual stories and surprises, but the top 10 medal-winning countries were the usual suspects. Canada came in 11th in total medals. We know who the world’s best decathlete was in Tokyo, Canada's [...]
POST-COVID CREATIVE RENAISSANCE?
We’re starting to see this idea in the marketing industry media and we’re hearing it from some of our peers. The idea that the marketing world will enjoy a post-COVID creative renaissance is a lovely thought. Then came Canada’s record-breaking award haul at Cannes 2021 [1]. [...]