Creative Director | Digital Marketer.

We all know ad spending is down in all markets. From newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, overall budgets are shrinking. In an Epsilon survey of CMOs conducted in September 2008 79% strongly or somewhat agreed that “During an Economic Downturn the Marketing Budget is the First Thing to Get Cut:” I assume they answered this to mean they agreed with it as a fact of life not an effective business tactic. The increased budget tightening will most certainly force the emphasis on finding media that is more efficient and easily... Read The Rest →

Back in April The McKinsey Quarterly did an interview with animation director Brad Bird who was brought into Pixar in 2000 to direct the Academy Award winning The Incredibles.   One comment that struck me to be very interesting is the value Mr. Bird places on “black sheep”— what he calls, “restless contributors with unconventional ideas.” Often as a Creative on a business team I will find myself “blessed” with this very role. Bird believes strongly in pushing his teams beyond their comfort zones, and even encourages dissent. When Bird took... Read The Rest →

I’m in the process of developing a new site with my biz-partner, Tino Chiaviello, we’re developing a proof of concept site using WordPress MU. It’s called GuruStarter and its intent is to offer free wordpress blogs and resources for content creation. Not exactly a ground breaking exercise, I understand – but the intent is to build a branded, small-scale wordpress MU blog community – with the hopes to use the knowledge to scale up for a few other ideas I have for other larger projects. After refining a working logo... Read The Rest →

“Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.” - Jesse Jackson I started Scrappy Upstarts for like-minded entrepreneurs starting up in a down time. Tom Maduri posted that quote on his blog, and I had to post it on one of mine. 2009 is two days old and the majority of tweets and posts I am seeing are the middle band looking to push through the noise and find out how its really done. Its great to aspire to the likes of a Guy Kawasaki or the other... Read The Rest →

I started out in this business as a designer – but over the years I learned that to be a better designer I needed to be a proficient writer. Only when you can optimize a message through design and language are you really marketing effectively. And only when you’re building on this marriage daily are you creative directing.   Consumers are bombarded with hundreds of images and messages every day, which means reaching them and moving them to action is harder than ever. That’s why it is also more important than... Read The Rest →