We know you have a lot on your plate. We know you didn’t read everything you intended to get to in 2018. But it’s a whole new year, and a lot of those great things you missed last year are still great. So here are a few of our favorite 2018 posts we know you meant to read but might have missed. You’re welcome.
You CAN tailor your online ad experience.
Remember when you thought television ads were annoying? Remember when you complained about slogging through scores of pages of magazine ads before you ever got to a story you wanted to read? The internet has brought us to a whole new level of advertising overkill; yet Christine Hudson is not only unfazed, she’s positively positive about the ads she sees every day. As she explains in “Why Does Everyone Hate Their Online Ads?,” “The power is in your hands. You can literally tailor your ad experience to be exactly what you want and nothing you don’t want.” Let Christine show you how.
Add some fiction to your advice bookshelf.
It’s not that we don’t love marketing and management books. But sometimes a great novel that delves into the souls of fictional characters has more to say about the real world than all the advice books put together. Ken Honeywell has read hundreds of novels in the past few years, and in “Novels for CEOs,” he recommends five of them—including a couple you’ve probably never heard of and one featuring a white whale that you were supposed to read in Freshman Lit and almost certainly never finished. Now’s your chance.
Scooters are everywhere.
This was the year the scooters invaded Indianapolis, infuriating pedestrians and motorists while providing last-mile transportation for commuters and drunken-joy-riding platforms for inconsiderate Mass Ave partiers. One issue/benefit: You can leave them wherever you want. It’s no wonder they showed up in our blog a couple of times—first in Robin Beery’s assessment of “All Things Scootish: Thoughts on the Great Arrival of Electric Scooters in Indianapolis” and again in Alex Mattingly’s “Electric Scooters Get the Bird: A Crash Course in Bad Marketing.” Strap on your helmet and take a spin.
Welcome to Duckburg.
Speaking of Alex Mattingly, he got a little obsessed with The Donald last year—Donald Duck, that is. Alex found inspiration and advice for his create-on-demand work in the comics, including, “Bite off more than you can chew. Pitch the idea the client will never go for. Do the thing you fear the most—because often that’s where your best, most original work is waiting.” He shares that and more in “Life is Like a Hurricane: Lessons in Creativity from Duckburg.”
Stay away from sin.
And, speaking of obsessions, there was a time Nick Honeywell was infatuated with Se7en. He’s outgrown that teenage fascination, mostly. But he’s still thinking about those sins and how they apply to copywriting: slothfully neglecting to do your research, envying another’s work to the point of discouragement or thievery, and five others he detailed in his own inimitable style in “The Se7en Deadly Sins of Copywriting.”
Which pronoun do you prefer I use?
Finally: “Is It Time for Marketers to Adopt Gender-Neutral Pronouns?” Finally, maybe it is.