The Barbie movie grossed $1 billion in its opening weekend. The marketing campaign that preceded it was, in my 20 years of watching brand campaigns, one of the most masterfully executed cultural moments I’ve ever seen. Here’s how they did it.
After two decades advising scaling companies, the same five marketing mistakes appear again and again. Here’s what they are, why they happen, and exactly how to correct them.
Bud Light’s partnership with Dylan Mulvaney became the most talked-about brand crisis of 2023. The backlash was predictable. What wasn’t predictable was how completely Anheuser-Busch fumbled every stage of the response. Here’s my breakdown.
FTX collapsed in November 2022. In its wake, it left dozens of celebrity endorsers exposed, billions of dollars in customer losses, and some serious questions about the ethics of paid promotion in the crypto space. Here’s my take.
In October 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. As a marketing professional, I’ve been watching the chaos carefully. Here’s my honest assessment of what it means for brands and what smart ones should be doing right now.
It took Adidas until October 2022 to terminate their partnership with Ye (Kanye West) after months of antisemitic statements. By that point, the damage to both parties was immense. Here’s why speed matters in brand crisis response.
Netflix announced it would crack down on password sharing in early 2022. As someone who has studied subscriber retention for years, I had a lot of thoughts about the strategy behind this move — and most of them weren’t positive.
On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its corporate name to Meta. I watched the announcement carefully. It was one of the most transparent rebranding exercises I’ve ever seen, and not in a good way.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework launched in April 2021 and immediately wiped billions from Meta’s market cap. This isn’t a privacy story. It’s a marketing strategy story. And the brands that understand the difference will own the next decade.
Zoom didn’t run a single major brand campaign in 2020. They added 300 million daily meeting participants in a matter of weeks. What happened to Zoom this year is the clearest case study in product-market fit as the ultimate marketing strategy.