I was reading Martin Lindstrom’s new book, Brandwashed, and this quote really struck me as being relevant to digital advertising: We’re sick and tired of picture-perfect babies and flawless models. Why do we love YouTube videos so much? Because they’re imperfect, amateurish, and the people in them remind us of us. This is why, in places like Whole Foods, we’re [...]

Expensive clothing is just a bad deal.  Inevitably the clothing gets stained, shrunk, or lost before it’s high-quality extended use-life.  With that said, stylish and expensive are not one in the same.  I’ve recently discovered Uniqlo and Joe Fresh. Both of these chain clothing store just opened up all across Manhattan ,offering cheap and stylish clothing.  I bought $9.90 jeans [...]

When I was on Wall Street, we paid for access to a database called “Big Dough” that listed hedge fund managers, their sectors, and stock holdings.  Equity salespeople used this database to identify prospects for research subscriptions and services.  Today at BuzzFeed, we subscribe to Ad Data Express, which provides roughly the same data on agency and brand planners.  (There [...]

    If you sell digital advertising, you need to join SellerCrowd immediately.  It’s a community that lets digital ad sellers communicate about RFPs, brand contacts, agency contacts, etc.  It operates right now as a simple Q&A platform, but I imagine they’ll be rolling out reputation and answer scoring at some point.  I’ve been reading about the verticalization of professional communities, and SellerCrowd [...]

Last night, I attended an event honoring Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, Chief of the Department of Anesthesiology at the Hospital for Joint Disease.  He talked the importance of teaching fellow anesthesiologists to fish rather than giving them fish – the old proverb.  Specifically, he mentioned a case of a doctor coming up to him at a conference, explaining that she had [...]