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July 09, 2007 | Greg Ness: What Is the Value of A CMO? Take Your Pick.

Two stories in this week’s Advertising Age appear to deliver deeply divergent viewpoints on the value of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). This first AdAge story highlights a soon-to-be-published study in the Journal of Marketing that demonstrates CMOs don’t have any effect on a company’s financial performance. No wonder boards of directors and business leaders are clamoring for increased evidence of ROI in advertising and marketing spending. The study accessed information from 167 public companies with revenues north of $250 million, and included some of the biggest, most active marketing organizations.

June 11, 2007 | Dean Froslie: Communicators: Who Do You Resemble?

Do you – or the communicators you know – resemble Larry King, Barney Fife, Dr. Phil, Winston Churchill or Julie from the “Love Boat”? As follow-up to his recent keynote at a Ragan conference, the hilarious and perceptive Steve Crescenzo has outlined five categories of communicators he has met over the years.

May 24, 2007 | Dean Froslie: The Future According To Gates

Bill Gates never stops predicting. Just last week, he forecasted a rocky transition for traditional media as they shift to a more online-focused model. Bill’s perspectives are always attention-worthy, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has examined his predictions over the years.

May 04, 2007 | Greg Ness: You Can Now Access TED Talks

The annual TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference in Monterey, California is one of those seminal events I’ve wanted to attend ever since I heard about it. Unfortunately, it is $6000, by invitation only, and they restrict participants to 1000 people from around the world. Currently, the participant list appears filled until 2009. It features a distinguished list of attendees and speakers who exchange ideas on science, culture, business, entertainment, art and much more.

Before this year, it was difficult for non-attendees to get information on the topics discussed, but this year TED has made a number of the talks available on their website (see link above). As you might imagine there are some interesting and provocative discussions that may be of interest to many of you. They even have their own YouTube channel.

March 23, 2007 | Greg Ness: CNET Lauches BNET For Those In Management

CNET is using the experience and knowledge it has gained from its own site to officially launch BNET, a resource aimed directly at people in mid- to high-level management. The site focuses on strategy, operations, insight, and business practices. There is a significant amount of “hands-on” content that includes how-to guides, white papers, Webcasts, and an extensive business library. It also includes Web 2.0 features such as blogs, RSS alerts, and other social networking features that allow it to be utilized as a lead-generation tool.

March 20, 2007 | Greg Ness: Apple COO Tim Cook Provides Compelling Glimpse Of Apple Thinking

It becomes clear to see why Apple is such an innovative, successful company when you read the comments made by Apple COO, Tim Cook, recently posted on the Fast Company blog.

He provides compelling, insightful answers to three questions:

1) How does Apple keep innovating?
2) How do they visualize the market for the iPhone?
3) How does Apple handle the loss of a senior exec?

His answers certainly help demonstrate that Apple’s 1990s branding slogan, “Think Different,” was apropos internally as well as externally. Like most good branding slogans, this one closely aligned with their corporate DNA.

March 09, 2007 | Greg Ness: How Much Do Silos Cost? About A Trillion.

All companies make mistakes, but rarely do they have trillion dollar consequences. However, it appears that is the price tag Airbus will pay for siloed engineering teams that failed to communicate resulting in monumental problems on their new supersized 555-seat A380 airplane.

The details are here, but the gist of the story is that unlike the centralized, highly integrated workflow process that exists at aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing, Airbus, as supported by the European Union, uses teams in many countries. Spreading the wealth I suppose would be the concept. Unfortunately, during the development phase, the different Airbus engineering teams were using incompatible version of the CATIA design software. The result was a huge mess with the planes wiring system (300 miles of wire in one plane) that cost delays of two years and billions in canceled orders.

February 28, 2007 | Ron Lee: Turning Data Into Action

What’s the number one challenge for marketers in this digital age? The answer, according to Michael Fassnacht, who writes for CMO Strategy in Advertising Age, is turning consumer data into actionable marketing insights up and down the organization, something he refers to as the “democratization of data.”

February 09, 2007 | Dean Froslie: Defining Internal Communication

We must think bigger about internal communications, and Australian blogger Lee Hopkins has posted an excellent overview about what it is, why it’s important, and how to structure effective efforts.

January 22, 2007 | Ron Lee: Wanted: Growth Champion

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) President/CEO Bob Liodice predicts that the stature of Chief Marketing Officers will rise to be that of true C-suite players, so much so that they will now become known as “growth champions.” So what’s in a name?

January 02, 2007 | Greg Ness: 2007: The Year of The Super-CMO

Marketing is a tough way to climb to the top rung of the corporate ladder. Several studies have confirmed (see Wharton story, free sign-up required) that through the 1970s, most CEOs came up through the marketing ranks. However, starting in the 1980s, the finance department started edging out marketing as the way to the top job(s) in corporations. Today that is even truer. Why?

October 23, 2006 | Greg Ness: iPod: It Seems So Simple

There is an interesting story in Wired about how the iPod came to be. However, it is more than story; it is a short primer on creativity and innovation.

It started with a simple question from Steve Jobs: What can we do to make more people buy Macs?”