Can We Please Just Kill The “Conversation”?

There’s no doubt in my mind that Advertising Week’s biggest, most abused cliché was “conversation.” With all due respect to the Cluetrain, advertisers’ excessive, ambiguous and disingenuous insertion of the word between every other breath became downright difficult to stomach.Read the rest

Our Inability To Think Rationally

A recent episode of NPR’s On the Media posited a dour explanation of how people process messages, rooted in truth, myth or lies. In an interview with Bob Garfield, Shankar Vedantam, columnist at the Washington Post, explained:

The mind relies on a number of rules of thumb, and one of the rules of thumb that it uses is that things that are more easily recalled are true even if the context in which they originally heard the statement was that the statement is false.

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Blog Sentiment Visualization Reveals Skepticism Toward Advertising

My colleague Pete Blackshaw and I thought it would be interesting to probe online consumer sentiment around advertising, and then visualize it using Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Brand Association Map (BAM) technology. We’re going to use this map below as context for a Webcast we’re leading with Ominicom/PhD’s Erik Rabasca on Friday, called “Nielsen BuzzMetric’s Guide to Advertising Week.”… Read the rest

Advertising And PR’s Image Is Not As Low As The Federal Government, But Still…

Constantin Basturea pointed me (via Twitter) to Gallup’s latest annual rating of the images of 25 business and industry sectors:

Americans have rated most business and industry sectors more negatively over time, particularly since 2003.

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The “User” Is Dead, But What About The Consumer?

Below is my MediaPost column this week, on death of the word “user.” Jim Johnson asks in the comments on the MediaPost blog: “Heck, in 10 years will the term ‘friend’ jump the shark??” My guess is that the term friend already has jumped the shark.… Read the rest