Looking Through A Forest Fire At The Dawn

These are not easy times. There are no easy answers – for you or I or thousands like us. All I have are a few recommendations that may or may not work.

MarketingKit KieferApril 10, 2020marketing, creativity, survival Comment

Whaddya Say We Name A Stadium?

The neural net did such a great job with baseball nicknames that I turned it loose on baseball stadiums.

SportsKit KieferJanuary 22, 2020Baseball, Artificial IntelligenceComment

Extra! Extra! CX Kills SEO!

Hope your 2020 plans don’t include a lot of spending on SEO.

MarketingKit KieferDecember 20, 2019SEO, search, Google, marketingComment

Shovels, Jazz Hands, and The Man Who Couldn't: A Neural Net Does Baseball Nicknames

Baseball isn’t what it used to be, and neither are baseball nicknames. So I took matters into my own hands.

SportsKit KieferOctober 14, 2019BaseballComment

The Eternal Sunshine Of The Snarky Retort

Media done right works. For all the hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over the future of media and marketing, it comes down to that.

MarketingKit KieferAugust 29, 2019marketing, mediaComment

How Much Is Your Data Worth? More Than You're Being Told

Consumers deserve a piece of the action – their action – and it shouldn’t come cheap just because their name isn’t Amazon or Google.

MarketingKit KieferJuly 3, 2019marketing, data, Amazon, GoogleComment

6 Ways Marketers Can Avoid Shooting Themselves In The Foot With Their Own Gun

The North Face didn’t need to own Wikipedia to be anything more than it already was, to anyone. Now, to many of its most ardent fans, it’s something less.

Marketing, Marketing AgenciesKit KieferJune 4, 2019marketing, North Face, blundersComment

Originality Is Dead. Long Live Originality?

The central conceit of any social network is that once you navigate outside of the hard circle of your close friends, you’re going to be presented with either what’s popular or what fits that channel’s algorithmic impression of you, or both, and that’s nothing if not unoriginal.

MarketingKit KieferMay 21, 2019Marketing, Social media, Instagram, TwitterComment

Content Marketing Is An Abject Failure That Everyone Keeps Doing

Content marketing is awesome, except for one thing: It doesn’t jibe with the way humans actually behave.

MarketingKit KieferMay 8, 2019Content Marketing, Marketing, Blog, SEOComment

The Five Times Paid Search Is A Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea

Search is a fact of our collective marketing existence – but does paid search have to be?

MarketingKit KieferApril 23, 2019Google, Search, SEOComment

The Future Doesn't Need Facebook

Every major marketing development of the last decade, from social-media advertising to paid search to voice-activated ordering, has simply been a more efficient way of making consumers lazier.

Kit KieferApril 9, 2019Comment

Why A Social-Media Professor Quit Facebook – And Why You Should, Too

Facebook needs to go because it’s the worst kind of friend. You tell it everything and it doesn’t keep your secrets. You trust it and it betrays you.

Marketing, Social mediaKit KieferApril 2, 2019Facebook, Marketing, Social mediaComment

These Are Places That Are Gone

If you’re working with a client who thinks that you just throw up a website and start Facebooking and the world will beat a path to your door – and these clients still exist – you need to tell them now this is not how it works.

Marketing, JournalismKit KieferMarch 22, 2019marketing, magazines, startupsComment

Oh Great, Now It’s Link Manipulation

If something is working for you online, you have every right to ask why.

Marketing, Marketing AgenciesKit KieferMarch 8, 2019Marketing, SearchComment

The 7-Step Program To Kick Your Organization's Social-Media Habit

When is enough enough? At what point do you say “thank you, next” to social media and find some alternatives that aren’t so fundamentally reprehensible?

Marketing, CXKit KieferFebruary 28, 2019Social media, Facebook, TwitterComment

On BS – And Influencer Marketing

It’s hard to separate the truth from the BS these days, simply because there’s so much BS and so little truth.

Kit KieferFebruary 21, 2019 Comment

The 5 Things Most Organizations' Style Guides Get Wrong (And How To Fix Them)

Every style guide hits on many of the same points that in the wrong hands can produce writing that is unremittingly dull and soul-crushing – and detrimental to an organization besides.

Kit KieferFebruary 15, 2019Comment

At What Time Does ‘What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?’ End?

Good marketing is not and will never be playing the “What time does the Super Bowl start?” game, or hundreds of related games. This is bad marketing, and if you think this sort of dragon-chasing is good marketing, shame on you.

Kit KieferFebruary 5, 2019marketing, SEOComment

Eight Steps To Creating A Super-Bowl-Worthy White Paper

Most organizations that create white papers think they’ve created the Super Bowl, when in reality they’ve created the Pro Bowl — an unwatchable mess that barely maintains the forms of the genre. Why is that?

Kit KieferJanuary 29, 2019Comment

Five Great Places To Scrounge For CI Data

You learn to scrounge when you’re thrust into a competitive-intelligence role without a shred of CI training.

Kit KieferJanuary 21, 2019Comment

Blog

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