The most important context of user experience design is consumer mindset. Before we start pushing pixels around, we should be working hard to understand consumer wants and needs. Gathering insights into their emotional desires is critical to creating an experience, throughout the entire customer journey, that in both subtle and direct ways will reinforce your

Asynchronous and disharmonious, the overuse of slow motion has become a sickness, a plague on the timeline of corporate video. Slow motion is very often beautiful to watch, but it should be used with intention and in support of some action or emotion essential to the story. Used appropriately, like close-ups, like a spice, it

While in New York City, I took the opportunity to visit some old haunts. I hadn’t had the chance to step inside the renovated Hotel Chelsea, so off we went. I’m not claiming I was a denizen of this much celebrated bastion of creativity in residence. I wasn’t. In the late 70’s as an art

The air was blue with my rants as I discovered my site had been hacked. The blog section filled with spammy, fraudulent posts — from the bizarre to the disgusting. I removed all the bad posts and changed my login credentials, only to discover a few weeks later they were back in my site. How?

Disrupting your creative team is a detriment to their productivity. You may not want to believe it, but it’s true. The agency ecosystem is rife with meetings, some days are spent almost entirely in meetings. Meetings are not the only black hole. There are the armies of account service personnel, project managers and producers who

Here’s a challenge; find two pieces of content on the web, one with good quality audio and a poor image and the other with good image and poor audio. Which one keeps you more engaged?  A recent study suggests that inferior quality audio reduces credibility of the content. You can read the findings here. If

Allow me to rant about YouTube for a few minutes.  I consume a lot of media via YouTube. I’m insatiably curious. I watch all kinds of media from all kinds of publishers from all over the world. Maybe you do too. YouTube is sort of like TV, but worse in its use of advertising. TV

One of the challenges that comes with the democratization of camera technology is that anyone who can afford a video camera or smart phone can consider themselves filmmakers. “Do it yourself” starts to feel like an obligation because it seems so achievable.  Running around swinging a camera, pointing-it here, there, and everywhere without the benefit

When I founded Brandforming, I began to work with archetypes and their application to brands. The idea of brand as archetype was not something new but I sought to bring something new to it. Combining the use of archetypes with primary and secondary market research, coupled with a client workshop, has proven powerful in the

I love light in all its many variations. I’ve walked into walls studying light as it falls on some object or person. It’s an infatuation, an obsession and capturing light is at the root of my love for image making. Perhaps there is no more beautiful expression than light illuminating human emotion. A face, an

There was a time when almost all media was inclusive. The old analogue days of 13 TV Channels, rooftop antennae, a handful of news programing and perhaps a few dozen major newspapers and magazines. There were some specialized publications, and radio stations were somewhat local, but they were the exceptions. Media was broadly casted by

As some of you may be aware, I’m currently teaching at Skidmore College as the F. William Harder Chair Professor of Management and Business. Being a place of higher education and a fine one at that, there are weekly guest lectures given by thought leaders from both inside and outside academia. For the most part,

In the world of corporate content creation, it often happens that the work is evenly lit, the sound is good, and the music is canned. It’s workman like but lacks dynamism. The work can feel like a forced march through a shot list vs delivering a story. When I see work like this it’s almost

What was true during the American Revolution is still true today and applies equally well to the media. Better together. The hyperbolic segmentation of media is a landscape of diminishing returns. With some notable exceptions, media performance reviews leave more questions than answers. The ideal scenario is one of ever improving ROI as refinements are