There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.
~ Indira Ghandi
When it comes to competition, I know a lot of people might say ‘don’t worry about what other people are doing’.  My mom would say that.  My grade school teachers would say that.  I might even be tempted to say that if it weren’t so helpful in strategy building to know exactly what other people are doing.
I …

The film ‘Between the Folds’ is a documentary about origami.  It covers everything about how origami originated, how its made, and who is the best at it.  It also shows all of the different uses for origami – some scientists are using it to figure out how to fold the airbags into the steering wheel of a car.  Some people are using it to talk about math and the universe.  One artist is making little people out of it and says that he can never make the same one twice.
There …

I wasn’t supposed to go to Coachella (which, if you are over 30 you might not know is a music festival of about 100,000 people in the desert outside of LA showcasing a huge lineup of bands, mostly indie) but ended up there because of some good luck (thanks Christina and Asos.com!), in 97 degree heat, with a lot of sweaty people.
So, the first thing I did was of course, look up the sponsors and see who was doing what.  100,000 music fans are a good group to be able …

I’m not a huge football fan, but I AM a huge advertising fan.  So, when I went to watch the game I brought along some magazines to read at the same time.  I believe my sister said something to the effect of “oh, Caitlin brought her coloring books to play with at the kid’s table during the game”.  Nice.
So while I may have been the only dork at the party watching the ads so closely, the moment I hopped on Twitter I found hundreds of other nerds like me watching …

Last night I was reading an article in AdAge about advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy and something one of the founders said about marketing creatively really struck a chord with me.  Dan Wieden said:
“It was like doing crossword puzzles for a living”
And he’s so right that I underlined it, read it again, and then ran in to tell the New Jerseyite about it.
Strategy is a LOT like doing crossword puzzles for a living, and even the basics have elements of a puzzle because you have to know a lot about …

I have to say, I’ve been really enthralled by all of the logos making headlines over the last few months.  Seems like everyone wants a logo makeover and we’ve seen the good, the bad, the Gap, and now even Starbucks is joining in with it’s newest logo where they’ve opted to remove their name entirely.  Like Prince.
So why are all of these brands so eager to shed their logos in favor of something trendier, cleaner, more or less colorful, and just plain different?
I thought about it while I got my …

The minute I saw this simple site I started thinking of all the ways that different industries could use the concept. It’s a site that’s set up so that the default is ‘dear Copenhagen’ and then visitors can use 250 characters to tell Copenhagen what they think of their city.
Here’s the best part:
Comments are divided by category into colors – so traffic comments are yellow, talk about social issues (like noisy streets) are blue, and so on. This way viewers can see at a glance what the most …

Instead of just the regular “here’s who we are” and “here’s what we do”, which I think you’ll agree can be boring, spend some time introducing yourself online.
I stumbled on this video for the Dare Agency in London and thought it was pretty cool.

This is Dare. Are you? from thisisdare on Vimeo.

I am sort of a phone addict.  Not in the ‘can’t have a conversation with you because I’m too busy eyeing up my phone’ kind of way (I cannot believe how many professional people do this incredibly rude thing) but definitely in the ‘check it when I’m bored’ kind of way.  Obviously, I’m not the only one that’s doing this sort of thing but here’s a scary graph to back it up:
The rest of the article goes on to outline all sorts of horrors about how tons of people are …

photo credit – from moon to moon
When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after …