By Steve Lawson With all due respect, Gil Scott Heron wasn’t quite right. The Revolution IS being televised. But he wasn’t exactly wrong either, because the way it’s being televised is quite different than he envisioned when he released the song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” back in 1988. The lyric, “there will be [...]

What do you do if you’re an emerging manufacturing business with investment dollars at hand and a world of opportunity ahead? Most are comfortable investing in developing technology, getting patents, hiring management, creating sales organizations. And starving their marketing programs.  Case in point: A manufacturing firm that has developed several patents and processes for a [...]

That’s the aim of the MARKETING Awards—to recognize the best work across the full spectrum of marketing communications annually, with some very different twists.We’re seeking to identify and honor  the best TV spot, PR project, print ad, photograph—and much, much more—created the previous calendar year in Washington State. The first biggest difference is that the [...]

By Steve Lawson May I suggest a New Year’s resolution? If you and your company haven’t yet embraced “social” as a valid media channel, 2012 is the year you need to dive in. That’s not the resolution I’m suggesting, however. I’m proposing that you throw away your old “this is how we do it” book [...]

When I came to Seattle in 1981 to join the ranks of budding advertising agency Sharp Hartwig & Vladimir, the landscape was filled with very creative shops. Among them: Wells Rich and Greene, Livingston and Co., Elgin Syferd and Kirkland, John Brown and  Partners, Kraft Smith, Asher Kamuso and Gibbs,Mogelgaard and Associates and—largest of all— [...]

Each year—for the past 20—I’ve had the unique opportunity to take the pulse of our marcomm community, re-establish personal contacts and gather information on a scale not often experienced by my peers. It’s all part of the project to enlist participation in that year’s annual MARKETING ATLAS, involving nearly 300 listings and display ads. The [...]

In the last couple weeks, global events have hit very close to home here in Seattle, with a special connection to the violence in Egypt and the arrival at Sea-Tac of Amanda Knox, newly freed from an Italian jail after four years of incarceration on her just-overturned murder conviction. Daughter Melissa has taken two trips [...]

Since his passing, much has been written about Steve Jobs and the legacy he left. Enough has been written about this remarkable man. So for this column, I tuned to YouTube so I could pay tribute to Mr. Jobs with his own words. (To see the following video clips in their entirety, visit www.friendlyvoice.com/stevejobs). Opportunity: [...]

The last thing we all need is further loss of consumer confidence and the business malaise that follows. Creative enterprises that weathered the storm since 2008 have been looking forward to business growth and relief from worry. But with our economic woes and political mess in Washington, D.C., tomorrow is anything but clear. This lack [...]

An editorial in Advertising Age recently caught my eye. Steve Blamer, former CEO of Foote, Cone and Belding, recommended that, in light of its loss of the massive S.C. Johnson advertising account that Draft FCB simply drop  the FCB from its name. His point was that little remains of what once made FCB the largest [...]