Cereal is great. You throw some milk on it, and you’ve got a tasty and relatively nutritious breakfast. Theoretically, cereals–at least the basic, unadorned ones–should be relatively universal. There’s not much about them that predisposes them to any particular demographic or psychographic group. Ap…
Great advertising is exceptional truth-telling. In 1912, Harry McCann and four partners launched the advertising agency that would later become McCann Erickson. Their founding motto was “Truth Well Told,” which beautifully expresses one of the most fundamental (and often misunderstood) principles be…
Is the Häagen-Dazs brand fundamentally inauthentic? The name “Häagen-Dazs” doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s not an ancient Danish city or the name of two Swiss ice cream masters or anything of the sort. The name was made up by Jewish-Polish immigrant Reuben Mattus, who sat at his kitchen table i…
After years of soul searching, experimentation, and dipping our toes in the water, we here at Forty have finally committed to fully adopting the Agile methodology across the board. This is a pretty radical change for a marketing agency. The Agile methodology was developed in the software industry, a…
When you're designing something, it's easy to fall into the trap of designing it for yourself. If you tend to be an emotional decision-maker, you might focus on feelings and sensations rather than raw data. Conversely, if you're a detail-oriented decision-maker, you might skip all that emotional "fl…
When I was young, I had a really pessimistic view of marketing. I thought advertising was about emotional blackmail and manipulation, branding was conceptual mumbo-jumbo, design was pointless visual fluff, and public relations was just a way to hide your faults and deceive your customers. Taken toge…
Behind famous logos are scrappy stories, not pricey brainstorms. From Adidas to Volvo, names often spring from rivers, jokes, and founders’ quirks, proving creativity and context beat consultants.
A customer’s attention: it’s exceedingly difficult to acquire, experts measure it in milliseconds, it vaporizes if mistreated, and it’s worth far more than gold or diamonds. Scared? Don’t be—it’s putty if you know how to handle it. **Attention is the most fundamental unit of design.** Once you get p…
Alltel’s faux lawsuit fizzled. Forced jokes, cardboard characters, and fear of offense drained the story. Viral needs craft and risk, more novelist than ad shop, or the web shrugs.
A tongue in cheek tour of corporate stock photo tropes, from triumphant thumbs and flirty headsets to manure powered growth and rockside WiFi, exposing how cheesy visuals quietly sabotage authenticity.
Once upon a time, marketing was about hyping the benefits of a product in order to convince you to buy it. Whether you were happy didn't matter much, because you already had your money and had moved on to other customers. In a contemporary consumer society, however, that's thankfully no longer a sus…
Stealth marketing blurs the line between clever and creepy. From overt BMW films to disguised Mercedes trailers, buzz wins until backlash hits. In a networked world, deception travels fast.
Forty has been in business for over a year now, and it's been a wonderfully successful first year, having completely blown away our business plan estimate, our own expectations, and even our craziest ambitions. While I don’t claim to be a business expert, I do think that we’ve learned some things th…
The world’s biggest branding crisis isn’t accounting scandals, poor customer service, or ugly logos—it’s executives’ paralyzing fear that they’re going to do something wrong. Imagine that you’ve just been chosen as the new CEO for a Fortune 500 company. The numbers you see each morning are comparabl…
Misconceptions about the purpose of a corporate identity system often cause companies to limp along with a sub-standard business image. Find out how you can avoid these common mistakes in your own organization. (Update: Many thanks to Antonio Mariscal, who took the time to translate [a Spanish versi…