Tuesday’s American Public Media Marketplace story confirmed the progression of the business of managing the brand experience: my LG washer dryer’s ditty was not only catchy, but an integral part of the brand.This is not just an advertising hook, but an extension of the overall brand experience.

For decades, Read the rest of this entry »

AP Style is gradually succumbing to the scuzziness of spoken English. The powers that be recently added a new rule about the word “hopefully” to the Stylebook and I, for one, embrace it.

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We spent Friday afternoon at dd|a taking a look back at the Super Bowl commercials with five days of fresh perspective (and renewed appetites for junk food and beer). Long story short: we weren’t overwhelmingly impressed with 2012’s commercials.

But do I ever keep a long story short? Nah, not really.

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A series of bizarre email troubles recently have got me thinking: Why is there not a word – at least a catchy phrase that someone has thrown against the wall – for email-induced confusion? One hardly goes a week without some incidence of screwy lag time between sending and receipt (at least, supposedly), or mistaken tone of voice, or any number of things. Am I right?

The wheels keep turning. … What other words are we missing? Read the rest of this entry »

I just saw the movie Contraband. I absolutely love fast-paced films about intelligent, illicit activity. Plus, Mark Wahlberg is pretty convincing in criminal protagonist roles, so I have no complaints.

But there always seem to be elements of movies like this one that have gaps. You know what I’m talking about: parts of the storyline that simply seemed to be overlooked; jumps from one thing to another that don’t quite add up. I tend to leave the theater and start to get all riled up as I try to put the pieces together and recognize that a handful of them are missing.

I figure that I can write these ‘gaps’ off in one of two ways: 1) The writers and producers don’t have a clue, which is unlikely. Or 2) A number of scenes were cut out deliberately because the movie would run seven hours if all of the connections were forged, and people wouldn’t stay to the end anyway. (Sure, there’s the third option that I simply missed the connectors, but since I’m always right, that can’t possible be the case and I’m justified in overlooking it. Please sense the facetiousness here, and roll with me for the sake of argument.)

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