How the scoring rubric gets built eleven months before you see it, and what one published page could have done about it Two Words Beat Every Pitch in the Room In 1984, NBC entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff scribbled a brainstorming note that read, in its entirety, “MTV cops.” Anthony Yerkovich turned it into a pilot.…
Seven marketing lessons from Harry Crane, the least likable visionary in advertising history – and what he tells us about the AI lead who just started running your company. He Opened the Wrong Paycheck Every great career pivot has an origin story, and Harry Crane’s is petty. In the third episode of Mad Men’s second…
Why the most defensible position in American business may be a market everybody else is quietly leaving. 1. Every Positioning Book Assumes the Room Is Filling Up Open any marketing text and the same assumption sits underneath the advice: your category is getting bigger, and your job is to grab more of it. Land grab.…
Five expensive lessons from Mad Men’s most useful failure – and what his second act says about executive recruiting, then and now The Man Who Was Right About Almost Everything and Still Lost Everybody who watches Mad Men wants to be Don Draper. Nobody wants to be Duck Phillips. Which is exactly why Duck is…
The one-question audit that takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and predicts your market position better than the deck you paid an agency to build. Send one email to every person on payroll. No warning. No preamble. No agenda item, no calendar invite, no courtesy heads-up to the department heads. One question: In one sentence, what…
Six Marketing Lessons from the Most Underrated Man at Sterling Cooper – and What They Reveal About Freelancing Then vs. Now Everybody quotes Don Draper. Nobody quotes Freddy Rumsen. That is a mistake, and if you sell creative work for a living, it is an expensive one. Freddy is the guy who gets carried out…
Every trade vertical is littered with dead assets that still hold real attention. Nobody bids on them, because they are not businesses, so no broker lists them and no banker calls. This is audience acquisition as ordinary M&A, with a much smaller decimal point. 1. The Whole Industry Is Buying Scratch Tickets Received wisdom says…