Writing Stories: Stranger Than Fiction

There is a childhood punishment that the protagonist of my debut novel describes in my forthcoming debut novel. One of the beta readers didn’t like it. She called it silly, disbelieving it would ever happen. The irony is that I borrowed it from real life. No, the novel isn’t real life. It’s a work of fiction. But as most writers will tell you, we all draw on real people or events, especially those that leave physical,...

Exploring Imagination: The Creativity Equation

This one study continues to surface in articles, and it always stops me in my tracks. It claims a creativity crisis in America, largely attributed to the pursuit of winning formulas over future breakthroughs.The crisis began, they say, as American education put creative thinking on the back burner in favor of measurable rote memorization in the 1990s. Americans wanted to test better than other people at the expense...

Telling Stories: The Fiction - Nonfiction Dichotomy

His question almost stumped me. While taping my appearance on Ira's Everything Bagel, award-winning broadcaster Ira David Sternberg asked me to talk about the dichotomy of fiction writers/readers and nonfiction writers/readers.Is there a difference? I don't really think so.Sure, some people think so. Many people feel like Beasts of No Nation author Uzodinma Iweala as captured by Miwa Messer's column on Barnes & Noble...

Rekindling Creativity: Live, Learn, Leap

When automaton drives marketing, creativity can take a back seat. There is only one problem with it. A world run by algorithms is impossibly predictable. You look up product support, and you're subjected to a series of advertisements for a product you already own; only it’s broken.  Predictably isn’t only inherent in computer programming. It becomes part of our daily routines. We wake up, get ready, exercise,...

Writing Across Communication: Writing For Tomorrow

The writing you read today won't be the communication you need tomorrow. In a world where content can appear on any surface or no surface at all, providing consumers with real time intuitive assistance to find the right product, improve performance, or manufacture reality will require a different kind of thinking, planning, and promoting. The boundaries and barriers are gone. Content will need to be versatile,...

Psychology And Neuromarketing Can Be Fallible. So what?

There has been plenty of buzz up about the Reproducibility Project, which aimed to validate about 100 psychology science studies by attempting to reproduce the studies. Marketers should take note. For those who place their faith in scientific-like testing (and big data), the findings of the Reproducibility Project ought to be astonishing. Two-thirds of the original studies tested proved fallible and even those that...

What Marketers Really Need To Know About Silly Cat Videos

When describing the state of the Internet today, it's all too easy for marketers to see silly cat videos as the polar opposite of mental stimulus (myself included). And in doing so, marketers miss the point. The popularity of silly cat videos has nothing to do with the type of content people want to consume. Their popularity has everything to do with how people want content to make them feel. New research supports...

How Much Marketing Has Become Psychological Trickery?

One of the first lessons learned in advertising is that most purchasing decisions are made based on emotional impulses and irrational conclusions driven by our dreams, hopes, fears, and outrages. But for all marketers knew about advertising, it was social media that capitalized on the immediacy of it. Instant gratification and chronic impatience has shortened not only attention spans but also the ability to make educated...

The Psychology Of Facebook Can Get A Little Bit Crazy

As much as marketers hold on to hope for the promised land of big data — one algorithm to rule them all and in the darkness bind them — the information they covet remains convoluted. Big data can't crack what consumers don't share because algorithms play by the program rules and people never do. One such study making the rounds even proves the point in its attempt to demonstrate the opposite. Despite some headline...

Yes Virgina, There Are Impassioned Objectivists

Anytime I mention "objective journalism," someone contests the concept. They consider it an idealistic pipe dream. They claim that all journalists are biased. And they say it lacks the passion of advocacy journalism. But more than all that, they say objective journalism is dead. Get over it. Sure, there is some truth to the statement that objective journalism is dead, but we mustn't mistake its current condition as...

What If The Only Hurdle Is What You Think?

A few nights ago at her practice, my daughter (age 8) and her softball team (8U, ages 8 and under) were challenged to a base-running relay race by their sister team (10U, ages 10 and under) in an older division. They readily accepted despite the odds. Two years makes a big difference. Most of the girls on the 10U team had a 12- to 18-inch height advantage and the stride to go along with it. Even with...

Does Your Content Marketing Consider Customer Complexity?

As much as marketers are working to understand their customers as data points, many of them still need to understand their customers as real people. That is the fundamental challenge with big data — retaining the ability to see the unique individual within the throng of the crowd that it tends to track. When you separate out one individual from the crowd, even as a thought exercise, it's easier to ask relevant questions....

There Is No Such Thing As An Easy A/B Lunch

"It is perhaps an all-too-human frailty to suppose that a favorable wind will blow forever." — Richard Bode In the context of his book, First You Have To Row A Little Boat, Bode was writing about how almost impossible it is to imagine what it might be like to be caught in a dead calm while there is a breeze blowing hard against your sail or in your face or on your back. It's almost impossible to imagine it because...

Welcome To The Petri Dish. A Great Big Thumbs Up.

Don't expect the fervor over what some people are calling a breach of trust by the social network Facebook to last very long. Despite the growing distaste that most people have for it, big data is here to stay and the abuse of it will always be a few clicks away. The Internet is a petri dish. If you missed the story, Facebook (in cooperation with Cornell and the University of California) conducted an experiment...