The quirky 2021 documentary, The Automat, recalls an interesting slice of Americana.

Is advertising evolving or devolving?

Here is life imitating art. Thanks to Olson Zaltman friend-of-the-family Nancy Cox for calling my attention to a partnership between the dating app Bumble and the Apple TV+ hit show, Ted Lasso.

It’s election season, so here is a branding lesson from President William Henry Harrison.

The new holiday campaign from Ocean Spray is the best.

Metaphors can convey brutal truths in a way that rational arguments cannot.

Thanks to OZ’s Kathy Shaw for sending along news about McDonald’s Adult Happy Meal rollout. Apparently, since its introduction last week, it has been more popular than McDonald’s bargained for. Stores are running out of special boxes and toys left and right.

Although global warming is a slow-rolling catastrophe for humanity, it ranks only 24th among the list of issues that Americans will consider when they vote in November.

We're proud that the Olson Zaltman Z-Files is ranked #38 in Feedspot's list of the web's Top 100 market research blogs.

This summer I won a silent auction for a case of plant-based sausage for about $25. That’s dinner for a month at less than a $1/night – I was shocked I won with such a low bid.

Are you familiar with the book Six Word Memoirs? In it, famous and not-so-famous people capture the meaning of their lives in six words. For example, Aimee Mann wrote, “Couldn’t cope, so I wrote songs.”

This research has been around for a few years, but it made the rounds on Marketing Twitter again this week and is always worth keeping in mind. In short, the more messages an ad tries to communicate, the less likely any of those messages actually gets through.

It is titled, “The Power of Profanity” and explores the impact of curse words in online reviews.

Mikhail Gorbachev died yesterday. In the West, he is remembered as a visionary who helped bring an end to the Cold War. In Russia, he is reviled as the man who destroyed an empire.

The image above is how Yeezy Gap clothing is being displayed in store. When Kanye West first saw the clothes displayed on hangers, he became upset and instead demanded that they be placed inside these containers that resemble giant garbage bags.

You may have heard about Blake Lemoine, the engineer Google recently fired for telling the Washington Post that a Google AI bot, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), had become sentient.

This is a very simple outdoor ad that is capturing some attention on Marketing Twitter. It’s for a new watch that has emerged from a partnership between Timex and the Brooklyn-based clothing company Adsum.

The book Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein, introduced marketers and others to the idea of nudges. However, the hype around the book almost suggested nudges were like magic. Do A and B will happen, every time, which isn’t the case.