Article originally appeared on August 6th, 2010 on the PSFK web site

Advertising And Design Agencies To Adopt Villages

Encourage every ad/design agency in the Western World to adopt a village in need. The agency would simply provide design and printing of posters and print outs that convey healthcare information, dosage information, numbers that can be texted for information, locations of CHW’s, reminders to register births and more. The process will be managed via UNICEF and they will deliver the packages of posters/print outs on a regular basis throughout villages.

Participating agencies receive a mark that they can show on their website acknowledging that they have adopted a village for UNICEF. This would be a very low cost contribution for agencies. The work they are do will be shown on a communal website with information about the villages.

Some posters could be in the Burma Shave style to illustrate messages in an easy to understand manner.

From posters in town/village centers, to hand outs, flyers and much more, ad/design agencies can use their skills and equipment to easy produce these materials and help UNICEF to spread much needed information.

Agencies would simply bundle up the artwork and hand over to UNICEF who can then utilize their distribution network and ensure they all get to where they need to go and are distributed.

UNICEF’s regional centers could also be outfitted with simple print on demand technology for when additional posters/print outs are needed.

Agencies can also go one step further and sponsor some additional GSM cell phones for their villages to ensure communications are kept between CHW’s, village leaders and UNICEF.

PSFK’s Future of Health Report shines a light on innovation occurring within the health and wellness space around the world. This document brings together both literal and lateral inspiration to provide a framework within which businesses can begin to contemplate the issues facing UNICEF and community health workers. These issues include limited resources, technological constraints, lack of health education, and limited access to timely and relevant health and wellness information.

In an effort to start this exciting conversation, PSFK challenged advertising and design agencies from around the world to react to the Future of Health report. They were tasked with developing concepts in the form of products, services or communications that addressed one or more of the needs set forth by UNICEF. The end result of this initial phase of ideation is more than 40 innovative concepts.

The following ideas are from Story Worldwide. The agency has responded with eight ideas; one concept, three products and four services. The full response is available for download on request here.

Article originally appears in the August 4th, 2010 online edition of Advertising Age

by Simon Dumenco

For this latest edition of Dumenco’s Media People — an ongoing series of conversations with media grandees — I interviewed longtime print guy Keith Blanchard, most famous for being the founding editor in chief of the U.S. edition of Maxim.

Blanchard was hired by puckish publishing legend Felix Dennis, whose original Maxim in the U.K. had already rocked the glossy world by popularizing the cheeky “lad mag” sensibility. Today Blanchard is North American executive creative director at Story Worldwide. I spoke to him about leaving a career in edit for life on the agency side. The interview took place at Story headquarters in Midtown Manhattan and was continued over lunch and supplemented by e-mail. What follows is a condensed version of a much longer conversation.

Dumenco: First, remind me how long were you at Dennis Publishing.

Blanchard: I was there for eight years, all told. Fall of ’96 was when we started working on the launch issue of Maxim, which came out on April Fool’s Day of ’97. I left in fall of ’04.

Dumenco: As a longtime company guy, there from basically the start of the U.S. operations, has it been surreal for you to see the rapid decline of Dennis? [Three of Dennis Publishing's U.S. titles -- men's magazines Maxim and Stuff, and music magazine Blender -- were sold to Alpha Media in 2007. Stuff was shut down later that year, Blender in March 2009. Dennis held on to the original British edition of Maxim, but shuttered its print edition last year, converting it to a web-only title.]

Blanchard: It is surreal, and kind of sad. In some ways maybe the company just burned too much wick too fast. Suddenly we were 300 employees instead of 50, and hundreds of millions of dollars instead of 10 million dollars, and we were all a little bit unprepared. Back in the day, Maxim was as big as Cosmopolitan — the same book size and same circulation. It was a very, very parallel type magazine; we were doing projects together, like this great sex survey, and [Cosmo Editor in Chief] Kate White and I became friends. Today, Cosmo is still a massive brand — and Maxim is not.

Dumenco: And Stuff and Blender are dead and buried.

Blanchard: What I would have done — if it had been me advising the purchasers — is make Blender online-only and fold Stuff back into Maxim. Stuff was launched specifically to fend off FHM, and it did that. Mission accomplished.

Dumenco: Yeah, I remember FHM seemed to be doing well in the U.K., and word got out that a U.S. edition was launching. Dennis was put on the offensive and launched its second U.S. lad magazine, Stuff. What did FHM stand for again? I can never remember.

Blanchard: Nobody could. It was really a terrible brand.

Dumenco: Seriously, what was it?

Blanchard: For Him Magazine. It’s always a good idea to name your magazine after a demographic sampling. [laughing] Remember Swing, for the “swing generation”? And in England they were launching a post-Maxim, a magazine you would graduate into after you got too old for Maxim, which was called, like, After or Over — literally, it was something like that, that made sense only to the ad-sales department. Just insane.

Dumenco: MFS — Maxim for Seniors.

Blanchard: Exactly. [laughing] Oh, I remember: It was called Later. That’s it. You know … for your later years.

Dumenco: That’s heartbreaking. [laughing] Resignation Magazine. For when you’ve all but given up!

Blanchard: Right, right, right. [laughing] One Foot in the Grave Magazine. OFITG.

Dumenco: You’re going to make me cry. [laughing] OK, well, let’s move on. I know that after Dennis you did projects and consulting for Hearst Magazines and for Bauer, among other companies, but let’s fast-forward past your adventures and misadventures in the magazine world to Story. What’s the story of Story?

Blanchard: Story’s sort of an amalgam of a few different companies. It’s about five years old, but some of the parts are 20. There’s a traditional custom-publishing company and there’s a digital agency in the U.K. and a digital agency in Connecticut and they all came together to become Story. Story was founded by five gentlemen: Simon Kelly, Kirk Cheyfitz, Oscar Mraz, Jon King and Jim Small. So it’s like, the ad guy, the finance guy, the operations guy, etc., combined forces to form this company. The founding philosophy of it is the interesting part — it’s what attracted me to this company — because it’s all about what happens next after the broadcast age.

The idea is, we can see the evidence piling up all around us that traditional advertising is ineffective today: People aren’t watching TV ads, people are not clicking on banner ads, nobody wants ads anymore. Advertisers have gotten more “in your face” — with pop-ups and other unavoidable ads, like pre-roll before you can watch your video, but everybody hates that even more. So this is a company that’s founded on the idea of engaging audiences, instead of just “reaching” them, with good content they actually want.

Dumenco: So, content as marketing — that’s the idea behind the ‘Story’ name?

Blanchard: Yes. We tell stories for advertisers. There’s academic research that shows stories really resonate with people — they’re what people remember. There’s a lot of information flowing over you all the time, but the things you recall tend to be those that we broadly think of as a “story.”

Dumenco: A narrative.

Blanchard: Exactly. So, for marketers, it’s about asking, “What are the stories that you have the authority, the credibility, to tell?” And “What do people want to hear, that they’ll accept from you and that they kind of can’t get from anywhere else?” Because these days there are just so many options for audiences to get information that if you are not operating at that core interest level, you’re just going to be dismissed or not seen at all.

Dumenco: The custom publishing part of this business, how long was that around?

Blanchard: Twenty years, right from the start.

Dumenco: Well, custom publishing as one of the DNA strands of the company that eventually became Story makes sense, because narrative-as-marketing was always the idea behind custom magazines.

Blanchard: Totally right. Simon Kelly, one of our founders, is also a founder of the Custom Publishing Council, and they gave him a lifetime achievement award. Story does custom publishing for the likes of RCI, the world’s largest timeshare vacation exchange network. We do their print magazine, which comes out four times a year, and we also do e-zines that come between the print issues. For Lexus we do a series of print magazines, a website, iPhone and iPad content, events. We recently signed with Holland America to do a new print title for them. We do maybe 10 titles in total around the world, and there’s usually something beyond print for each.

Dumenco: Your job at Story — was the position created for you?

Blanchard: Right. There was no North American creative director before I got here.

Dumenco: I’m sorry you don’t have South America, too.

Blanchard: Some day. [laughing] We have three U.S. offices: New York, Connecticut and Seattle, and a couple of satellite offices around the world.

Dumenco: So a potential client comes to Story, intrigued by the fact that there’s a veteran mass-consumer-media guy on board. What’s happens next? What are you selling them? What are you saying they should do? “Tell stories”?

Blanchard: The basic philosophy is, first listen to your consumers and find out what they really want. I think it does make a difference having experience on the consumer-facing side, where you do live or die based on audience — how well are your cover lines being received, your stories, your videos, your shows, whatever it is that you produce. There seems to be a lot of advertising work that pleases clients and gets commissioned and wins awards and nobody ever asks, “But did it work?” There’s that famous quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “Corporate marketing represents the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.”

What editorially-minded folks like myself can maybe bring to the table is that sensibility of starting with what people want to hear instead of just starting with what we want to say, which I think is the classic marketing pose. And constantly asking, “Did this move the needle? Let’s check.”

Dumenco: Tell me a story about a major client.

Blanchard: OK, Chrysler engaged us on the social-media front to relaunch their Dodge blog, Red Letter Dodge. Soon that became also launching a Ram blog, opening up Twitter feeds and Facebook and Flickr channels, and doing active response for issues that would come up — basically funneling questions and concerns to exactly the right person on the client side, for fast answers.

The brands were changing and management was changing, and everything had to move at top speed. One week the head of Dodge was going to go and test the next Viper, the 2010 Viper, on a test track at Laguna Seca, and they thought they might break a record. We got a call on a Tuesday — the next Monday was the test drive — and they asked, basically, “What can you do for this effort in social media?” So we invented this kind of social-media hub where reporters and bloggers could tweet in their questions and we would take them to Chrysler executives on the scene at the test track and get replies. We were uploading video updates all day long, and the Twitter stream updated every five minutes. So that was a very complex, real-time kind of engagement. Fun, high-wire stuff.

Dumenco: They broke the record, right?

Blanchard: They did break the record, which helped. Traffic on Red Letter Dodge went up sixfold, and there was all sorts of pick-up from auto blogs.

I think essentially it’s about rolling up your sleeves and saying, “We’re going to engage our audience, we’re going to answer questions and comments in something like real time, and we’re going to look for opportunities to tell positive stories.”

Dumenco: And dealing with any negative sentiment that’s out there, I suppose? Like, when people bash a brand in blog comments.

Blanchard: Right. We created this set of protocols so that when a negative comment comes in, before it can catch fire, we pass it onto the appropriate person at Dodge with a proposed response. Because the message that the social-media world likes to propagate is that if corporations won’t respond to us, it’s because they have something to hide, it’s because they don’t care about us. You have to respond.

Clients are only really comfortable speaking from a controllable broadcast perspective, and it’s hard to just jump into this new pool where other people share the control. They always start by thinking — hoping, really — that they can use social media as another channel to push PR messages out. That’s a broadcast mentality. It’s hard to wrench corporate marketers’ heads around the notion that the fact that people are commenting on your things, even negatively, is not a threat — or, at least, it’s also an opportunity. You can now literally read the minds of your customers, so what are you going to do with that knowledge?

Dumenco: I think a lot of corporate marketers don’t take the term “conversation” literally enough. If consumers try to engage you in a conversation, positive or negative, they’re not looking for a clinical, corporate, canned response. They want something that’s, you know, conversational. It’s about a human connection.

Blanchard: Exactly. Corporate blogs should be sort of as uncorporate as they dare. They need to publish interesting stuff that’s useful to their audience. It can’t be just about trying to sell cars to them: They know you sell cars. They’re enthusiasts, so talk about road trips and music and pop culture — and by the way, it’s OK to talk about the new Lamborghini because it’s not really competing with your Nitro; it’s not going to hurt sales to talk about it.

We’re already living in an age in which everyone is potentially a publisher. You have your Twitter followers, I have my Facebook feed, etc. If you’re a corporation and you speak in a corporate voice — if you’re still thinking press-release style — you’re not going to be able to compete because there are so many interesting, authentic voices out there.

Dumenco: Give me an example of the offline work Story does for clients.

Blanchard: Well, Ilori is a good example — they’re a high-end sunglass maker, part of Luxxotica. We sat down with them and figured out what their brand was all about, and then we did some consumer research and figured out that people were getting intimidated coming into the stores. You go into a sunglasses store or an eyeglass store and you’ll see all kinds of racks of frames and it’s like a wall of eyes staring at you, so you walk back out again. So part of the solution was these fun, inviting little written-card displays that could be read almost kind of museum-style as you wander in the store.

Dumenco: Telling stories in print, but in a retail environment.

Blanchard: Exactly. And it worked — their sales rose 94% in ’09 vs. ’08. We also did a physical print magazine — a spiral-bound little beautiful book showcasing some of their frames — that they’d give away in the stores. Not everything has to be digital; we find it’s usually about simple solutions, extremely well-executed.

Dumenco: Do you ever think, I used to edit Maxim — I don’t want to tell a story, I want to tell fart jokes?

Blanchard: I can still tell fart jokes. [laughing] Nobody wants to hear them now.

~~~

Simon Dumenco is the “Media Guy” media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.

Story Worldwide has been awarded “Best in Class”, the highest honor in the Beauty/Cosmetics category, for their work on The Hair Book Online at the 2010 Interactive Media Awards.

The Best in Class award is the highest honor bestowed by the Interactive Media Awards. It represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award, The Hair Book Online had to successfully pass through the IMA’s comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of their judging criteria – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.

Said Simon Kelly, Story Worldwide’s Chief Operating Officer in the US – “We’re very proud of this award as it is further proof that a narrative approach to marketing – in any channel – can deliver the very best experiences for brands and their consumers.”

The Hair Book Online features top Regis stylists giving their “in the trenches” insights, tips, trends, thoughts and professional secrets. The blog also features celebrity hair experts, how-to videos, peeks at star hair treatments and more. A quarterly print magazine complements the online version.

Story Worldwide has been honored with 16 awards spanning three categories and 13 sub-categories in the seventh annual Magnum Opus Awards. The competition included more than 550 entries and the winners “showcase the amazing evolution of the content marketing industry” said Program Coordinator Jenny Babich. Story Worldwide took home more awards than any other agency.

Said Simon Kelly, Story Worldwide’s Chief Operating Officer in the US – “As we apply storytelling techniques through every emerging channel, it’s still nice to know we can win more awards more than our traditional competitors.”

Story Worldwide’s Mariner publication, the official magazine of Holland America Line, scored six awards in the Print Magazine category, including the top honor of Grand Award Winner for Print Magazine, as well as two Gold Awards and three Silver Awards.

Story’s Lexus Magazine garnered five awards, including two Gold Awards for Overall Editorial and Overall Design for an Electronic Publication. Story’s work on Lexus Magazine was honored in both the Print Magazine and Electronic Publication categories.

Outlook, Story’s print newsletter for Acura Financial Services, earned a Gold Award for Best Overall Design and a Bronze for Best Editorial – New Publication in the Print Newsletter category.

Endless Vacation, a custom published magazine for RCI, brought home two awards in the Print Magazine category for Best Use of Photography and Best Special Topic Issue.

The Magnum Opus Awards are an annual competition dedicated to the world’s top content marketing efforts. The awards are conducted by ContentWise in conjunction with the University of Missouri School of Journalism and are judged upon informational and entertainment value, quality of writing and display copy, creative use of imagery and typography and consistency of color palette and style.

by Lynette Chiang

“Hey, seen that latest GM ad … ?”

I’m standing in the train with weekend warriors, and the conversation is about ads. Usually seated, suited and sullen during their daily commute, today they’re hanging off the pole in biking gear, yammering about the 30 seconds they pressed MUTE on last night.

“I know they turned themselves around, but the ad’s enough to make me throw up,” says Fred.

He’s not talking about a wonky car ad made with switchback-cam, but the one starring Ed Whitacre walking and talking about GM. As Slate pointed out, featuring the Big Cheese is getting popular.

“Hey, what about the ad with the blonde in the suit who floats out between two panels talking about ‘the new oil’?”

Collective groans.

From loitering in adland with intent I know one thing: ads are expensive. Big ass humming trailers, 500 watt lights, gourmet lunch spreads on the pavement, lots of people running around with clipboards, board meetings, claustrophobic studios, Powerpoint rationales, and loads of overwrought revisions. And lots and lots of hangers on.

What’s the end result? Millions of dollars later, something roundly lampooned by consumers standing in trains.

“It’s like throwing a mil off the top of a roof,” said one straphanger.

Go to your laptop and Google “ads are boring.”

As the hits show, people are annoyed by Blandads– bland, boring ads.

Even worse, people are annoyed by the heightened volume of ads– go and google “TV ads too loud” and marvel at the results.

Why do companies continue to commit the felony of blasting us with blandads?

I’m not sure who is in charge of the master volume control, but as far as the ad itself goes, the single most useful test I learned in adland was the “Do I Give a ****?” test.

Put more politely (for ‘merican audiences), it’s the “Do I Care?” test.

It’s really simple. Forget research groups sitting in boardrooms plied with chip’n'dip and the lure of forty bucks. This test is best done by the CEO, and the filing clerk, and maybe one other person standing in front of you in the bagel line. How about the janitor (didn’t someone in a modest role suggest an extra hole in the top of the baby powder can would sell more product?)

So, Mr. CEO, get your team to put together a typical segment of ad-smattered evening viewing with your proposed ad inserted in the mix. Put on your slippers and robe, grab a beer glass or soda.

Sit comfortably in front of TV. Hold the remote in one hand, finger poised over the MUTE or CHANNEL button–just like us, your customers. You’re not the CEO. You don’t work for your company.

Now pay close attention to the ads as they pop up. For each one, ask yourself,
“DO I CARE?”

When your own proposed ad comes up, be honest now. Ask yourself,
“DO I CARE?”

If the answer is no, you better believe that none of us will either. Not only will we not care, we will diss you mercilessly and mock your product while standing in bagel lines at barbecues and ballgames all over the country. We will hit the MUTE or CHANNEL button so hard it will break and Radio Shack China will be rejoicing.

Don’t forget to apply the “DO I CARE?” test to music and voice over too–the same ole same ole sound of an ad will not make us turn to face the TV as we raid the fridge.

So what kind of ad should you be doing these days, if at all?

According to Storyworldwide, an agency that clearly understands we’re all tired of ads in their present form:

Intrusion is dead. High impact, engaging content is the only way to reach ever more cynical consumers.

The clearly fed-up-with-ads CEO Kirk Cheyfitz expands on this.

So how to create “high impact, engaging content”?

And I’m not talking about the zillions of lame e-articles clogging the Web, created purely for raking in as many Google Ad-cents as possible. I’m talking about content that people want to read and can’t help remembering.

First, apply the “Do I Care?” test.

Second, look what’s happening on either side of the commercial breaks.

The wildly successful Undercover Boss is a great example. People loved seeing the boss step down the corporate machine and Just Like Us, crawl down on his knees and scrub, baby, scrub.

What a story–and an incredible non-ad for that waste management company – which memorably calls itself Waste Management. Despite the formulaic tv-land delivery it is content you can believe in – especially when they included a drone or two who looked like he wasn’t quite with the newly enlightened boss’s program.

Now imagine if instead, they’d featured the CEO floating out between two digital panels with hands clasped, simpering about the company’s latest eco-techniques? Hello, fridge, who carpeted the cheese?

What makes great ad content these days is a whole other blog post, but suffice to say I have encountered few oddballs who relish blandads, and absolutely no one who likes them blasted at a louder volume than the surrounding program. So if you’re going to shout at us, you’d better be good.

Try the “Who gives a ****?” test on your ad today. You’ll be so glad–or maybe mad–that you did.

Former adwriter the Galfromdownunder insists the most convincing ads are the little anecdotes broadcast at a normal speaking volume while standing in a line for bagels or the restroom or in a subway car. The shirt touts of Asia are of course, experts at this cheap, non-intrusive, centuries-old advertising technique.

www.lexus.co.uk/online-magazine/natural-hybrids.aspx

Bicester Village website

James Fallows, normally a cogent and insightful journalist, takes leave of his senses for the cover story of June’s Atlantic magazine, delivering an uncritical, open-mouthed kiss to Google’s Schmidt, Brin, Page and their entire high-tech army while boldly asserting (in all caps) that their company has a “DARING PLAN TO SAVE THE NEWS (AND ITSELF).” As it turns out, sadly, Google has no such plan.

At best, Fallows’ essay is noteworthy for demonstrating (again) that the news establishment doesn’t understand online publishing and is incapable of imagining a way out of the news business’s ongoing disaster. At worst, the entire article–or, at least, Google’s participation in it–can be seen as a ploy to generate some undeserved positive attention to help Google counter the increasing anti-trust scrutiny that Washington and others are now focusing on its near-monopoly in search. (In contrast to Fallows’ embarrassing embrace of Google’s goodness, see The New York Times‘ recent story on Google’s political problems in “Google: Sure It’s Big, But Is It That Bad?”)

Fallows’ argument is that Google cares deeply about the news business and believes that, one day, all news will be delivered online and the online revenue will easily support quality journalism. This will be true, Fallows asserts…because Google says it will be true.

I wish I were kidding. But Fallows actually writes near the end of his ramble, “The solution is simply the idea that there can be a solution.” He attributes this “solution” entirely to Google. Because Google cares, because Google is the master of online advertising, because Google sees the future, because Google says so, everything will be fine. (With this reasoning, by the way, BP’s idea that there can be a solution to the Gulf oil spill is the solution to the Gulf oil spill. So the fish, birds and sea turtles can stop dying right now.)

Fallows’ scary tautology paints online media more as a religious mystery than an exercise in communication and commerce.

The article tries to be business-like. Fallows wants to convince us that Google cares about the future of news because its own survival depends on people having serious news content to search for. But that, of course, simply isn’t true. Very near the end of the roughly 9,000-word piece, Fallows finally reports, “But Schmidt and his colleagues realize that a modernized news business might conceivably produce ‘enough’ good content for Google’s purposes even if no one has fully figured out how to pay for the bureau in Baghdad, or even at the statehouse.” Translation: Google’s future in no way depends on the future of news.

There’s some discussion in the piece about various ways to implement payments for content online. There are a couple examples of Google’s manipulating its algorithms to make original sources of news rank higher in search returns. There is even some tangential discussion about the industry’s real challenge–maximizing online ad revenue.

But the article embraces the dying notion of “display advertising” and fails utterly to deal with the news industry’s central challenge, which is to create new forms of advertising that actually work–that are as valuable to the audience and as engaging as the news itself. (More on this in “Redefining Advertising to Save Journalism,” a piece I wrote more than a year ago.)

Google, of course, has nothing to contribute when it comes to transforming ad content (or any content) into something that is valued instead of ignored. As Nikesh Arora, president of Google’s global sales operations, acknowledges to Fallows, “We don’t generate content ourselves.”

The level of insight in Fallows’ piece emerges when you wade through the first 2,500 words before being told that paper, printing and trucking are expensive. OMG! Who figured that out? Fallows says it was none other than Google’s chief economist Hal Varian! But, of course, thousands of newspaper managers figured that out long before Varian. That’s why the Seattle Post-Intelligencer killed its print editions and went completely online. That’s why the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News stopped offering home-delivery four days a week. And so on.

Fallows reverently quotes Varian saying, “The three most important things any newspaper can do now are experiment, experiment, and experiment.” This sounds brilliant and very Google-like, I am sure. But it pales a bit if you understand that literally thousands of journalism experiments currently are underway. Huffington Post, of course, is one such experiment. So are the changes I mentioned at the Seattle P.I. and the Detroit papers. So is the Daily Beast, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, the Dallas South News, Honolulu’s Civil Beat, Toronto’s Open File and a thousand more.

I have no doubt that some of these experiments will yield results, but Google has nothing to do with any of them.

In contrast with Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has poured millions and millions of dollars into funding experiments in journalism. (Disclosure: The Knight Foundation poured a tiny bit of that money into an experiment that I am helping with in Detroit called “Taking Charge of Our Story.”) It was two years ago that Marc Fest, the foundation’s vice president for communications, publicly characterized Knight’s philosophy as fostering “relentless experimentation.”

All this made me wonder where Fallows has been while all these experiments were getting underway. Then I got to this startling statement in The Atlantic article:

“Before, ‘publishing’ meant printing information on sheets of paper; eventually, it will mean distributing information on a Web site or mobile device.”

Eventually, Jim? Really? On what planet does that expanded vision of publishing still exist only in the future? Needless to say, it shouldn’t be news to anyone that survival in today’s media world demands mastery of publishing across all platforms.

You really begin to wonder about Fallows political objectives when he delivers an unqualified endorsement of Google’s recent “uncompromising stance toward repression in today’s China,” which he attributes to Sergei Brin. Fallows, however, has nothing to say about Brin’s stance in 2006, when Google started up in China with an agreement to abide by Chinese state censorship. Is the Atlantic piece just an effort to rehab Google’s fading reputation for goodness by letting it pose as a defender of serious news and democracy? I hope not. But that’s just a hope.

The bottom line here is that Fallows’ piece at once betrays a childlike naivete and a pervasive sense of helplessness. Neither is attractive nor useful. In the world Fallows inhabits, the news business is incapable of rescuing itself. But, praise the Lord, we will be rescued by Google because Google knows more and Google MUST rescue the news in Google’s own self-interest.

If only it were that simple. Here’s the bad news, Jim: Googling it doesn’t make it so.

(Published on the Huffington Post)

My Latino Voice Speaks with Chiqui Cartagena, Story Worldwide

We visited with Chiqui Cartagena, Senior Vice President, Story Worldwide Agency, to catch up on her latest career adventure and her journey, as a journalist, filmmaker, book author, marketer and inspiring Latina role model.

Chiqui has worn many hats throughout her successful career. As a journalist, she helped develop and launch the popular People en Español magazine. As a fan of film, she founded her own film production company when she was 27 years old (and has written several Latino scripts that she hopes to produce in the future.) Chiqui then became a successful Hispanic segment marketer, leading efforts for major companies such as Sony.

Her marketing book, “Latino Boom,” is a must-have manual for marketers seeking to succeed in reaching and engaging the Hispanic segment.

Chiqui has also learned that balance in life is important and is involved in projects outside of the “office.” One such effort is the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in NYC (Chiqui sits on their Board.)

The festival runs June 3 – June 13th at the School of Visual Arts in Chelsea and includes many Latino stories (so don’t miss it!)

Watch our interview with Chiqui, where she candidly talks about her heritage, her career, her success and what being Latina means to her.

Since becoming a preferred supplier, Story has quickly won four briefs, including a media website, the company’s intranet, an internal training programme and a social media awareness campaign.
Jim Boulton, Deputy UK Managing Director at Story, said: “Janssen-Cilag’s aim is to improve lives, an ethos close to our hearts – we help brands tell their stories in ways that add value to peoples lives.”

Irina Osovskaya, E-Business Manager at Janssen-Cilag, added: “We selected Story because of their integrated marketing approach which allows us to use new and exciting methods of communication as well as their in-depth knowledge of online technologies.”

A subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, Janssen-Cilag is one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, operates in virtually all countries in the world and is active in a number of therapeutic areas such as pain, psychiatry, immunology, HIV, neurology, gastrointestinal and infectious diseases.