The title of this entry, “Step 30″ refers to something many, many otherwise smart marketers hate to do.
Finish stuff.
“30″ is typesetter short-hand for “The End”. When I worked in the newsroom of my college newspaper, we all wrote “30″ on the bottom of the last page of copy. That let the typesetter know […]

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I heard a great piece of advice the other day. Again. (Sometimes I need to hear good advice about a dozen times before it “takes”.)
It’s simple: Don’t put anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see repeated tomorrow in the newspaper.
It’s also violated on a regular basis by people who should […]

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A friend, who is briliant at marketing, asked me a question today about writing that has implications for most people.
This guy is a decent writer… but it takes him forever to get copy down on paper. It’s just agonizingly slow, and he hates me because I do it so fast.
Everytime we talk, he sneaks […]

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I stopped reading Hunter S. Thompson’s missives from the edge around twenty years ago.
I didn’t want to stop reading him… but, like Picasso, he had moved on to a place I could no longer understand. So, I sated my jones for good, hilarious political writing through P.J. O’Rourke (who, conincidentally, replaced Gonzo […]

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The first artist to catch my eye, as a kid, was Wally Woods. His best work was in the “great” years of Mad magazine (before the asshole publisher fired Kurtzman and Elder and turned the rag into a creative blob)… mostly the decade between the Congressional hearings on the dangers of comic books in […]

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I am not psychic, can’t see into the future, and haven’t got any special insider info that isn’t available to anyone else willing to dig a little bit.
What I do have, however, is some wicked-long experience in marketing… and I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.
I’m talking about the free-for-all climate […]

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