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The influencer marketing landscape is changing. Now, that’s not a statement many people would find alarming. It’s always changing. But when you watch the industry like I do and for as long as I have, you see the tea leaves. And when they perk up a certain way, you sense a change is a brewin’.  […]

What are your goals? More importantly, do you write them down? How often do you refer to them?  Or are you like me and have vague ideas of what you want to accomplish in your head, but they kind of morph and change depending on the day? Certainly, we’re more disciplined about business goals. They […]

There are many ways to slice an apple. Or peel an orange. Or for that matter, there are many ways to get from your house to the office or grocery store … and just as many to get back.  There are also many ways to approach influence marketing. If you’ve been listening and following along […]

From time to time people find out in conversation that I’m a published author. It’s a monicker and fact that sits in my social media bios and certainly something I say proudly on my website and such, but it’s not something that typically comes up on conversation. When it does, I get asked a lot […]

Some of you may know I spent the first half of my professional career as a public relations professional in the world of college athletics. Back then we called the job being a sports information director, or SID. The industry evolved to labeling the role something like athletic media relations or athletic communications or similar, […]

You may have noticed I’ve been mixing in more content here recently focused on content creators. It’s not that you brand and agency folks aren’t the primary focus of the show. You are. But if you’re reading between the lines, the advice that some of our guests have had recently about helping creators build and […]

There’s a growing problem in the influencer marketing space with content creators. We’ve talked about it on this show before. But there never seems to be any great push to solve for this particular problem.  The main focus of many an influencer today is creating videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. For posting Stories on […]

We’ve been talking a lot about brand lately on the show. Recent episodes featuring Patrick Hanlon and Rick Ray have centered all of us, brands and creators, agencies and vendors alike … we’ve become centered on telling a brand story. But we can’t leave it at that. We have to put that brand story into […]

We spent some time recently with Patrick Hanlon talking about Primal Branding. Having that deep assessment of who you are as a brand can inform and even drive everything you do. I think we reached the conclusion that spending time to deeply understand and define your brand is important, whether you are a content creator […]

The influencer marketing landscape is big and ever-changing. You have huge agencies that with with big brands for big budgets. You have boutique firms and consultants that mix and match influencer approaches. You have niche players in the agency and software space that focus on micro and nano influencers. And at each of those tiers, […]

If you follow the conventional wisdom around an influencer’s lifespan, you know they start living their best life, then define a strong content niche and build an engaged audience. Then they do lots of brand collabs and make a fair amount of money. Then they diversify and get into creating their own products, services or […]

There’s an argument to be made that influencers are the “IT” channel in marketing. That trusted, third-party recommendation or referral is extremely powerful and often far more effective at communicating big ideas and marketing messages to consumers.  Big brands are eating it up. The influencer marketing industry is growing by billions of dollars per year. […]