Lately (for the past 6 years) I have been baking a lot of bread. Pretty much a couple of loaves a week. This started because I wanted some bread without preservatives but it has really grown into a baking passion. I can do great French bread, Artisan loaves, English Muffin loaves, and what I like to call Near-Zero-Effort bread.

Over time I have

Welcome to the “new and improved” Bracco HPF web site. This has been an interesting exercise for us. Agencies (like ours) typically make the worst clients so we thought we would try to buck that trend and be a good client. I think we did a pretty good job of it really. Rather than say “oh we know how to do this” and dive in, we stepped back and took

Time Magazine recently did a piece on corporate ethics titled Training Managers to Behave. In it they cite the Thunderbird Graduate School of Global Management’s Oath of Honor as a step towards “rethinking the balance between doing well and doing good.”

As a Thunderbird and a global citizen, I promise: I will strive to act with honesty and integrity, I

Here’s what happens when you take good clear strategic thinking, refine the heck out of it, then release it into the wild. CrazyHotJob.com from Rockfish Interactive.

They truly do some stunning work and have developed some great companies (Fourthbook.com, Filesend.us. Genofish.com) but I love the CrazyHotJob concept. It’s so focused. It’s so Comments

Tags: business development, messaging

The Web Site brief is quite different from the other three creative briefs we have looked at.

Some call it a Site Architecture brief, others a Web Development brief. Irrespective of the name, the purpose of this creative brief is to guide you in your thinking as you approach the structural design of your website. In general, this brief will help you

The graphic design brief is a toughie. It is the bridge between the communication strategy and its visual interpretation.

Take time with this brief and make sure everyone is in agreement with it (We prefer to get everyone to sign and commit to it). If it needs to be revised a couple of times then by all means do so. By agreeing the objectives and

The Campaign Brief (or advertising brief) is the second in a four part series on developing creative briefs . The briefs are designed to work in concert with the Bracco HPF brand development tools, yet are straightforward enough to be used as stand alone guides.

So, why is this called a “campaign brief” rather than an “advertising brief”? So that we think

This is the first in a four part series on the Bracco HPF creative briefs and how to use them. Our basic four briefs are designed to work in concert with our brand development tools, but are straightforward enough to be used as stand alone guides. We am going to start with the Messaging Brief (as we generally do with any properly executed marketing

Don’t you just love bad outdoor advertising? The more bad outdoor I see, the happier I get. An outdoor execution is one of the single most telling pieces of creative.

Today’s blog post is a reprint of an article that I wrote for Gulf Marketing Review in 2001 while working at D’Arcy Worldwide Advertising. It’s still 100% relevant and as the kick-off post