Tag: communication

An act of kindness

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Forgiveness is something you owe yourself.

It’s an act of kindness towards your well-being more than a courtesy to others. Because of course, others will be relieved by the fact you are forgiving them, they will be happy and feel like they can continue with their lives with one less burden.

But you. You will be so much lighter if you make of forgiving a consistent practice. You will be freed of damaging thoughts, anxiety, bad feelings, toxic memories that drain your energy. Even when it’s seem that it’s not a big deal, that you barely think about the whole fact, not forgiving is a black hole that sucks you in. It’s unrelenting. It’s negative.

Give yourself the space to achieve what matters. Genuinely forgive, and move on.

Never a good idea

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It’s never a good idea to decide what’s better for the customer, for example by defaulting your new application to “launch on start”.

Even if that would supposedly improve their experience.

Particularly if you are in the business of making their digital life safer and more controlled.

The emperor has no clothes

Fabrizio1 Comment

A good portion of traffic on the internet is made up.

Voice search optimization is not as important as we thought it was.

The importance of videos for marketing has been inflated.

In the first three months of 2019, Facebook has removed nearly as many fake accounts as there are real ones (2.2 billion to be precise).

The story of cheap and easy, of “anybody can do it”, of the death of traditional marketing, of of infinite reach and segmentation is cracking on multiple sides.

We have been fed an illusion, an utopia, and we believed it because it was a shortcut.

It’s beyond time to point the finger and wake the masses of marketers up by simply stating the obvious. The emperor has no clothes.

Only if you kill it

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A couple of examples of how to make advertisement in the shape of content, or content in the shape of advertisement.

Anticipated. Personal. Relevant.

Both are from the last episode of the podcast Pivot, with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.

First, around minute 19:10, during the break for commercials, Kara interviews Gavin Belson, the fictional CEO of the fictional company Hooli from the HBO series Silicon Valley. The interview is fictitious and funny, perfectly in line both with the tone of the podcast people are listening to and with the irony of the series. A perfect match.

Then, right after the break, at about 22:10, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, host of the podcast Reset (that shares the same producer with Pivot) jumps on the show to ask a thoughtful question to Kara and Scott about sharenting (parents that share the life of their kids on social media), that’s of course the topic of the last episode of her show.

There is a whole lot of space to be creative, original, interesting and entertaining with promoting products and services in today’s content-driven landscape. As marketers, we should just make the effort to understand: the channel and the audience, first of all, and the irreparable damage that gets done when instead we feed commercials wrapped in plastic to an indistinct mass of people, violently interrupting whatever they are doing.

Advertising is dead only if you kill it.

About helping

FabrizioLeave a comment

Helping others is not always easy, but it’s always the right thing to do.

Of course, “others” does not mean everybody. You have limits, boundaries and restrictions, and being aware of those is very important for your support to be effective. Similarly, “helping” takes different shapes in different situations, and you will find that what you did to help somebody might simply not work to help another.

Start with yourself, get a solid grasp on your own life, and then relentlessly open up to the others and be present. This might sound like a long way, but it might be the only alternative to “let me know if you need anything”.