Simon Mainwaring

We First provides consulting and training to help companies tell the story of their good work in ways that build their business

Posts

 
September 9, 2010

Do ad agencies have a future and, if so, what does it look like?

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Mashable and BBHLabs wrote about the future of ad agencies this week, so I decided to join the fray. As seminars at the Cannes Advertising Festival this year revealed, there is no doubt that the industry recognizes it is under assault from new technology, competitors and tools that threaten their critical relationships with major clients. […]

Mashable and BBHLabs wrote about the future of ad agencies this week, so I decided to join the fray. As seminars at the Cannes Advertising Festival this year revealed, there is no doubt that the industry recognizes it is under assault from new technology, competitors and tools that threaten their critical relationships with major clients. …

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September 7, 2010

Top ten reasons why BP’s advertising is a disaster

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BP’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrates a lack of understanding as to how technology has changed the consumer marketplace. Their PR efforts have effectively pitted traditional media (such as TV and newspaper ads) against social media (such as the Boycott BP page on Facebook that has received close to a million ‘Likes’ or the …

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September 1, 2010

Pure Process: An insider’s guide to the business of advertising thinking

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If there’s one quality that defines Deborah Morrison Phd and W. Glenn Griffin Phd, it’s a passion for creativity. It’s a passion for ideas, how they are generated and how to put them in the service of marketing. So much so they asked a bunch of us to try and explain how we come up with ideas …

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August 30, 2010

Where to start if your brand wants to build an online community

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One of the most common mistakes brands make is the goal they set for themselves once they engage with social media. “How do we reach 1 million followers in 12 months” or “What’s the fastest way to get to 200,000 Facebook fans?” Brands do this for several reasons. They are competitive – as they have to …

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August 27, 2010

How social gaming uses virtual giving to get real results

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One of the most encouraging and exciting applications of social gaming is the ability to leverage its massive popularity to generate contributions to causes and humanitarian crises. We saw this in January this year when Zynga created limited edition items in FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker that were purchased by users from 47 …

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August 25, 2010

“The products are original. It’s the brands that are fake.”

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The title for this post paraphrases a quote from a Chinese salesman featured in a story on counterfeit products in the New York Times magazine last weekend. While the salesman was speaking directly to accusations regarding the legality of selling counterfeit sneakers, he touched on a much larger issue for marketers. Since the birth of …

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