Love clicks, in the true spirit of the season....

Happy holidays, everyone, and many thanks to my client companies ATTIK, a52, Elastic, Nonfiction Unlimited, Orbit Digital, Petrol, PostWorks, Rock Paper Scissors, Shilo, Stardust and Tool of North America for helping to impact the following organizations over the past several years.

The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (www.ChristopherReeve.org) is dedicated to curing spinal cord injury – and improving the quality of the lives of people living with paralysis.

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (www.pedaids.org) is currently waging an aggressive campaign to accelerate the response of the United States to children living with AIDS around the world.

With their mission of ending hunger and poverty, and caring for the earth, over the past 60 years, Heifer International (www.heifer.org) has transformed the lives of millions of families by providing gifts of cows, goats and other livestock. Along with the animals, families receive extensive training in animal care and learn environmentally friendly agricultural practices. Each gift of livestock starts a chain reaction of self-reliance that spreads throughout the communities, as each family who receives an animal agrees to "pass on the gift" by sharing their animal’s offspring with others in need.

The Hole in the Wall Gang Fund (www.holeinthewallgang.org) was established by Paul Newman in 1988 as a nonprofit residential summer camp and year-round center designed to serve children and families coping with cancer and other serious illnesses and conditions. Each summer, more than 1,000 children between the ages of 7 and 15 from the U.S. and abroad attend The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp free of charge. Programs are also offered in the off-season for campers, their families, and healthcare professionals… and in support of associated camps throughout the world.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation (www.LiveStrong.org) unites people to fight cancer, providing the resources survivors need to live life on their own terms.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Coalition (www.lahsc.org) and the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition (www.sfhsc.org) have raised millions of dollars to support shelters across California, specifically benefiting homeless women, children, and families. Along with linking residents and their resources with area shelters needing donations, these groups also educate their communities about the causes of homelessness to raise awareness and understanding, and to enlist them in aiding homeless individuals in need.

The mission of the National Coalition for the Homeless (www.nationalhomeless.org) is to end homelessness in the United States. Among many other noteworthy initiatives over the past several years, NCH launched the Bringing America Home Act, taking to Congress the belief that people need affordable housing, livable incomes, health care, protection of civil rights and access to education.

In New York City, the Partnership for the Homeless (www.partnershipforthehomeless.org), which began in 1982 with a single emergency shelter for men in the basement of a Greenwich Village church, has developed numerous programs to meet the changing needs of homeless people who live on the streets or in the city's public spaces and shelters, families with children, the frail and elderly, those living with HIV/AIDS, veterans, victims of domestic violence, older unemployed workers, and unskilled workers who cannot afford housing outside the city's shelter system. The Partnership strives to provide decent and affordable housing, community-based social services, stabilizing aftercare, and effective job training that translates into self-sufficiency and independence.

The V Foundation (www.JimmyV.org) is dedicated to saving lives by helping to find a cure for cancer.

World Hunger Year (www.worldhungeryear.org) is a non-profit that fosters numerous programs and activities to effectively advance long-term solutions to hunger and poverty by supporting community-based organizations that empower individuals and build self-reliance.

2008 ode to the magazine....

You only need to look as far as last week's post to realize that I am a fan of the magazine, but if you've been here before, you may also have me pegged as one of those 'digital influencer' types. A new article from Michael Bush for AdAge entitled "'Digital Influencers' Get Info from Magazines, TV First," confirms that my normal mode of discovering things of interest through traditional media (magazines, newspapers, TV, radio) is pretty widespread among us passionistas. So with the magazine industry in enough of a spiral descent to provide writer, singer, entertainer and 'cinemasoloist' Bill Dyszel with dozens of newly dead major titles to humorously pine-for in his very creative American Society of Journalists and Authors presentation below, I wanted to share some encouraging words on the future of magazine publishing.


Thanks to Ann Marie Kerwin for the heads-up on this in her 12/16 AdAge Adages item, and for letting us know, though Mr. Dyszel's performance seems to indicate otherwise, happily, Harper's is still kicking.

According to MediaFinder.com, over the past three years, an average of 384 new magazines have launched. Matthew Flamm of Crain's New York Business wrote on this subject today, reporting that the numbers are down for 2008 by 13%, that the trend is toward focused, niche titles, and citing these words from Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications and owner of MediaFinder: "You still get bigger ad dollars from print than from online. If publishers can find subjects that truly interest people, then they can find the advertising." That's what I wanted to share. For more inspiration, check out Business Week's ongoing series profiling fresh entrepreneurial startups from across the country. And remember, as marketing industry pundit Jack Myers has pointed out, "The Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters: one for danger and the other for opportunity."

Tribute to the late, great Henry Wolf...

Legendary photographer/art director Henry Wolf, who redefined editorial design through his collaborations with top photographers like Richard Avedon and Melvin Sokolosky, passed away in October. This is a great, image-laden tribute courtesy of The Fashion Spot featuring the wonderful 2007 Communication Arts story lovingly written by Jean Coyne.

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Have a story to tell...?

Today I participated in a webcast sponsored by GoToMeeting.com and moderated by BNET's James Hilliard, featuring one of my all-time favorite marketing gurus, Seth Godin. The title of the presentation was "The Future of Marketing: Being Remarkable and the Meatball Sundae," and it drew from Seth's book entitled Meatball Sundae, which builds a case on how marketing activities need to match the products they are supporting. In his opening comments today, Seth described the changing marketplace much as another brilliant industry pundit, Jack Myers, did in his article published today under the title of "Evangelism, Word-of-Mouth and Passion is the Next Evolution of Advertising Research." Jack began his piece with these words: "A couple weeks ago, I introduced to readers the idea that there is an irreversible progression of advertising messaging away from the 100-year tradition of mass reach and building awareness and toward an emphasis on achieving and maintaining consumer trust and passion." Seth made the same point today, saying that this new marketplace exists due to power shifting away from marketers and into the hands of consumers, and telling us that for businesses and professionals seeking to succeed, we must leverage this fundamental shift in our operations, strategies and tactics. Below, I am presenting some of the best ideas I've bookmarked from these venerable gentleman and other key sources for getting meaningful attention and building success in the consumer-driven marketplace.


1. Source: Seth Godin. Ensure that marketing is aligned with all facets of your company's operations and management.

2. Source: Seth Godin. Package and tell your story, consistently and authentically, by focusing-in on delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to your target audience (see Permission Marketing).

3. Source: HP's SVP and CMO Mike Mendenhall, via Karl Greenberg of MediaPost's MarketingDaily. Monitor blogs and news sites constantly, and pursue opportunities to "build your own forums to engage customers and critics who are one and the same."

4. Source: Jack Myers. Bear in mind: "The next generation of communications will focus on passion -- defined by word-of-mouth, blogs, evangelism, conversational marketing, and other forms of advocacy."

5. Source: Esther Dyson, founder of EDventure, via eMarketer. Experiment and try new things where you see opportunities and feel you can succeed -- and be prepared to quickly, honestly correct any missteps as you go.