Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If a 150-million-year-old Brachiosaurus could talk, what would it say?You can find out at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where many of the exhibits will soon tell their own stories using local voices, thanks to an initiative from local museum advertising specialist Leo Burnett.

The agency wrote more than 100 short scripts, each a paragraph or two long, designed to capture the “voice” of various plants, animals and minerals in the museum’s permanent collection. The write-ups combine history and humor. For example, the Brachiosaurus bemoans its girth while also discussing the contributions of paleontologist Elmer Riggs.

Everyday Chicagoans are invited to record the first-person monologues in a special pop-up audio booth that is traveling around the city this summer. (It visited Chinatown this weekend.) Ultimately, the best voiceovers will be accessible via smartphone for Field visitors to enjoy on audio tours....

Think Nike: just do it. Think Apple: Hello. Think EA Games: Challenge Everything.

If your campaign speak keeps going and going and going like the Energizer Bunny, you may wear people out before they catch up with your this. Make it simple. Get on your Harley-Davidson until you can define your world in a whole new way.

Thinking big about speaking simply is power.

Complexity is difficult. Complexity will drown in the noise.If you can’t speak simply about whatever this is, take a step back, think bigger about simplicity. Do something different with this. Look at the heart and soul of this. Simple will rise above the noise.

Think Big. Speak Simply.

Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one.

Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute.

It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done.

Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion....

Ethical journalism is all about not being inconsiderate, insensitive and immoral....

A state of incredulity took over me as I viewed this disgraceful work, glorifying the man who made a tragic mark on the lives of so many Bostonians. While the citizens of Boston are definitely Boston Strong, the city still feels the aftermath of this event every day....

When the picture was released on the magazine's Facebook page, comments started pouring in attacking the decision to highlight a bombing suspect like he was a rock star. Among the remarks were comments on how long time subscribers were planning to unsubscribe, and a Do Something petition to have this cover replaced....