When I heard this ad I made a weird little animal sound; my body reacted before my brain could process it. So, I emailed myself a little reminder to find and fix the offending copy.

Some of us can’t help it. When we see or hear mediocre ads in the wild, our weird brains automatically switch to punch-up mode. We replace weak words with strong words. Flip it from passive to active voice, from convoluted to clear. Usually I keep all that inside. Today I’m…

If you could get away with breaking one marketing rule, what would you choose? What deeply ingrained, widely accepted “best practice” holds you back? Makes you love your job less? Today I’m sharing a simple process for liberating yourself from the most restrictive, time-consuming, and utterly useless “rules” in marketing. …

“But now we’ve realized that, well hang on, if you’re gonna build a driverless car, how does the car interact with the humans on the road? …

Ann Jackson popped onto my radar when several colleagues shared her blog post “Aiming for data-driven? Don’t forget the people.” It was one of those tabs you keep open after reading because you know you have to do something with it, but you’re not sure what. …

This is Part 3 in a series about Collective Data Empowerment. If you want to get the whole series and accompanying tools in an ebook, go here. Think about a challenge your company faces. Who among your colleagues knows the most about it? Who has the most experience with it…

This is Part 2 in a series about Collective Data Empowerment. If you want to get the whole series and accompanying tools in an ebook, go here. The world looks different from an airplane window. You notice things you can’t see from the ground: the way power lines cut across…

This is Part 1 in a series about Collective Data Empowerment. If you want to get the whole series and accompanying tools in an ebook, go here. We’re on the edge of what could be the biggest multiplier in data productivity yet: the shift from Selective Data Empowerment to Collective…

Owen Temple (@owentemple) was curious: What makes some TED Talks so persuasive? To get his answer, he applied Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to metadata and transcripts of all posted TED Talks and published Words of Persuasion: Text Predictors of Persuasive TED Talks. I found that the change in…