Brandless was actually a brand – just a bad one
My new column is out in The Drum: In the 1992 Gen X twentysomething movie Singles, a guy flirts with a girl in a club and says he does not “have an act”. Her cutting response? “Not having an act is your act.” Well, not having a brand was...The blurring boundaries between native ads and editorial
In my new column in The Drum today, I show how Google Ads’ new SERP design seemingly violates the Federal Trade Commission’s specific guidelines for search engines: Today, everyone wants to pretend that ads are not ads. So-called “native advertising” is...Your company is ‘harder to get into than Harvard’? So is Walmart
For my new The Drum column today, come for my exposé of a business PR cliche and stay to learn some of my favorite publicity tactics: It’s a common publicity tactic: brag that your hiring rate is lower than Harvard University’s acceptance rate. The obvious goal is to...Personalisation will be 2020’s most overhyped marketing practice
My first column of 2020 is live in The Drum: Personalisation was the US Association of National Advertisers’ 2019 marketing word of the year, but the idea’s popularity has been largely the result of martech companies successfully promoting their own personalisation...My Top 5 Columns of 2019 in The Drum
Every two weeks, I write The Promotion Fix column for The Drum, a global marketing and media trade publication. Here were my most popular essays this year. 5. If there’s a recession in 2019, here’s what marketers should do. I reviewed studies from the...
I Speak
“Someday, I’ll get to see Samuel Scott speak live. For now, the transcript and slides will do. Great material as always.”
— Blaise D’Sylva, VP Media at Dr Pepper Snapple Group