Holtz Communications + Technology

Twitter’s 140-character limit makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion. Brevity is great, but not for everything.

I was having one of these discussions with Rob Frankel—@brandingexpert—about whether Burger King got any value out of its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign. This wasn’t a disagreement, just an interesting conversation. Conducting the exchange over Twitter lacked something, though. Hence, this post.

The conversation-starter was Dave Fleet‘s live tweet from something…

The vast majority of the complaints about PR, marketing, and advertising boil down to a single communication failure: The message is not relevant to the recipient.

The late Ed Robertson, who ran employee communications at FedEx (reporting directly to CEO Fred Smith), developed a model for communication based on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s model, primitive requirements must be…

A few years back, James Carville told a group of communicators during a conference keynote that Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential campaign rested largely on staying on message. The Democratic party strategist noted that candidate Clinton always returned the focus of conversations to the fact that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore had no such focus, and few voters could…

Note: This post is about Microsoft’s marketing shortcomings, not whether a Mac is better than a PC. Please, please, please…no pro-Mac/anti-Windows screeds; they’re beside the point.

A discussion on a recent episode of “This Week in Tech” struck a chord with me; I’ve been wondering the same thing myself for some time. the TWiT guys didn’t couch it in these terms, but this sums it up:

Why is Microsoft…

While working on a proposal for a consulting project, I’ve had an opportunity to give a lot of thought to some of the most dearly held notions of organizational communication in the era of social computing: There are no more audiences and there is no market for your message.

As with any popular belief, there are grains of truth to these, but by…

According to a report from Online Media Daily, the student team from Ohio University has won the National Student Advertising Competition. I wrote recently about Emerson College’s proposal, which I thought was damn fine. As I noted in my post, victory by a competing team (there were 17) means there are a lot of millenials studying communications who intuitively understand the…