Holtz Communications + Technology

Every week, I find fascinating items in my various newsfeeds. I’d like to blog about them all, but time is short. The Friday Wrap is a review of some of the most interesting. I select them from my link blog.

So you’re an Australian company and you’ve set up a Facebook page dedicated strictly to customer support. The…

The Pitch, AMC’s reality series that pits two advertising agencies in a pitch for business, isn’t what you’d call a ratings success. In its last outing, the show drew about 340,000 viewers. (Compare that to The History Channel’s Ax Men, which attracted 10 times that number.)

It’s tough to sell advertising for a series few people are watching, but Muse Communications—one of the agencies competing on the…

It had only been a few weeks since my last visit to Sun Valley Mall in Concord, California, but during our trek this weekend, we found that the mall had added two interactive installations that foretell part of the future of advertising.

On entering the mall, we saw a Fox-sponsored “Stop. Scan. Shop.” display driven by both QR codes and proprietary Fox images.…

After October 22 next year, if you want to buy a pack of smokes in the U.S., you’ll have to put up with some pretty distasteful images on the packing. You may, for example, see a smoke-ravaged lung, the corpse of someone who died from smoking, or an image like the one at left. These will be coupled with in-your-face copy…

One of the great benefits of the real-time web—instant feedback—is also one of its hazards. People react oh-so-quickly to anything that tweaks them the wrong way. Circumspection and patience are words that may vanish from the lexicon. On the other hand, we now know what hundreds of thousands of knees jerking simultaneously sounds like.

It happens when companies introduce new logos, start blogging…

Since the advent of public relations, there has been an easy way to explain the profession and differentiate it from marketing and advertising. In fact, I used this method many years ago when I first described what PR to my daughter. My explanation went something like this:

“Advertisers and marketers pay to get their messages to their audiences. In PR, we don’t pay. We…