Sadly, store closures are nothing new, especially in the malls around here, all too many of which are but a few rogue tumbleweeds and a haunting musical score away from becoming spaghetti western ghost towns. So, with all of this previous experience you would think that our local mall would have had the good sense to know that when this happened ( ( Read more... )

You all (well, LJ friends at least) know my background, my odd little front row vantage during the big mortgage ick, the personal impact the crisis had in my household (possibly even about the ripples it had into both sides of my family) and my tendancy to get ranty on the subject. A good friend and former manager of mine posted the following ( Read more... )

A few years ago Jenny Craig had one of the best weight loss ad campaigns I have ever seen. You might remember it. There is footage of a clothesline with a large pair of reasonably plain women’s full coverage brief panties blowing in the breeze. The voice over says “Want to change your underwear this year?” while the footage pans across the ( Read more... )

When your role is that of company communicator, be it in PR, marketing, communications, media relations or whatever, I really think you have to fall in love with your company a little bit to be effective. Now, I'm not talking about drowning in the corporate Kool-Aid. Blind passion is never effective.

I think you need to have your eyes wide open to ( Read more... )

I’ve been writing. For. Three. Days.  Writing policies that is or, rather, rewriting them for my company’s policies and procedures project all weekend and all day today, after working on them on and off all the previous week, and there is still much, much more to come.

At least I was able to do most of my weekend writing in front of the playoffs. ( Read more... )

I am in the middle of a huge project for work, compiling and editing all of our company’s policies and procedures and putting them in a common format. This would be a lot easier project if we had policies and procedures. What we have instead are a few policies and a lot of memos and emails telling people how they should be doing things now that are ( Read more... )

What's the 1st commandment of marketing boys and girls? Yes, always, always call your phone numbers twice. Take all phone numbers you are printing, posting, tweeting, etc., call them once yourself and then have someone else call the numbers too. Fail to do so and you may find out the hard way that there are limits to P.T. Barnum theories about all ( Read more... )

I realize that most ad campaigns are national ad campaigns and that while we are melting away on the west coast, other parts of the country (like Texas) are experiencing unusually cooler weather. And I realize that sales marketing departments can never be too early with their holiday and seasonal ad campaigns - the Christmas season come closer and ( Read more... )

Scoop away cat litter has a series of magazine ads called the Adventures of Clumpy the Litter Box Clump featuring a plush muppet looking purple lump with eyes and a smile, flashing a thumbs up sign while resting in a cat box scoop. But as litter box worthy as this ad campaign is, even more horribly hilarious for me is picturing how the ad campaign ( Read more... )

Yes, this is semi cross posted from FaceBook, but I have different friends in both places and thought it was funny enough to try and share with everyone :)

At the Freeway Series game yesterday, the Dodgers were having a cross promotional event with the Alvin & the Chipmunks sequel. They had “Alvin and the Chipmunks” there to “help” sing the National ( Read more... )