The reason you're not getting press is because you haven’t created a story worth telling. The campaign your agency launched isn’t getting picked up by reporters, no matter how many times your PR person bugs them. So what can you do to juice your story to get their attention?
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For every "Halftime in America," there are 40 other ads in each Super Bowl that drop off of the face of the Earth the moment the game ends, never to be discussed again.
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Any successful campaign has to have a great idea, a relatable character, and something worth writing about. You don’t have those things, you don’t have a story.
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What if you made Super Bowl commercials invite-only? What if brands had to pitch their ideas to make it into the game?
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Agency PR pro Jeff Sweat talks about losing his religion on this episode of the 'Ad Block' podcast.
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Brand pokes fun of fit culture with ‘Bike of Shame’
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Both platforms and advertisers are experimenting with new ways of getting our attention. Can they find the format that will let users embrace it? (Ft. Sweat+Co clients.)
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Normally we promote other people's work, but this year we got a chance to make our own. In March, we launched Mayfly Quest, a book-marketing campaign for my postapocalyptic novel Mayfly. Book publishing rarely mounts the kind of campaigns that marketers do for entertainment and brands, focusing on getting books into the hands of people who weren't already fans. The focus of #MayflyQuest was reaching people who didn't know they should be fans.
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Uber’s long-awaited rider safety changes are welcome, but after years of criticism and a disastrous IPO, they may come too late. As we ponder the fate of the company that ushered in the gig economy and changed how you got a ride, it’s worth asking:
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When executives talk about culture, they tend to think of it only in terms of internal health, not external success. That’s a big mistake. Culture is not just internal. Your culture is your brand. Businesses rightfully pay attention to their culture’s effects on talent attraction and retention, or how it reduces costs and risks. But it’s long been a concern for the human resources team,
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Storytelling, the last refuge of ad agency differentiation, is in trouble. The signals are everywhere: Accenture’s acquisition of Droga5, the collapse of Barton F. Graf, even Bain’s purchase of Kantar Media from WPP. The consultant surge may not have killed Graf, but creativity has taken a hit. It’s like the demise of Pan Am in 1991, when the airline industry forever lost its romance.
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Our industry is finally accepting that diversity leads to better creative and greater profitability, but there’s a huge gap between knowing something in theory and putting it into practice. Some agencies say they want to hire diverse talent…
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Jeff Sweat has helped tell lots of interesting marketing stories over the years, in his PR roles at Deutsch, 72andSunny and now his own PR shop, Mister Sweat. But now he's getting a chance to apply what he's learned from creative advertising to build an audience for his own very special product—his first novel, Mayfly.
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From idea to execution, advertising still struggles with how to depict diversity.
When a creative comes up with an idea, whether it’s for TV, video, or a short film, they think of an idea first, not the person in it. Let’s say you’re brainstorming an idea for a general market campaign.
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I've had lots of conversations with people who are starting internal agencies—I had two in one day last week alone. That's how seriously marketers are taking the internal agency trend.
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