The Power of Good Customer Service, Happy Employees, and Tooting Your Own Horn
By Bob Hiebeler When it comes to building a business that lasts, reputation is everything. Being number one in your vertical is certainly nice, but to continue to grow and push your business forward, people need to know you’re incredible…and the fastest way to achieve this is by providing unparalleled customer service. It’s one thing […]
Marshall McLuhan: Electric Age Prophet in a Post-Gutenberg Galaxy
“He was a pyromaniac of the imagination, starting prairie fires over our intellectual landscape.” — Patrick Wilson, Knowledge Organization Theorist The late 1960s saw mass media coming into its own. Radio waves had been transmitting for decades. Film had become an established entertainment source. Television had grown well beyond its gawky, teenager phase. And […]
Before There Was Rock and Roll, There Was Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Imagine an alternate universe without the frenetic fretwork of the late Eddie Van Halen, without Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page. How about a world without the King of Rock and Roll replete with his unruly pelvis and whiplash grin? Sure, other musical greats like Bo Didley and Muddy Waters played a part in […]
Star Wars and Staying Indy—From a Certain Point of View
The release of Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker in late 2019 marked the end of an era. That first film in 1977 was a panacea for the times, and the pioneering innovations in special effects and CGI spawned spinoff companies that changed the aesthetic of science fiction films for generations. We […]
The Quest for Fire and Food for Thought
Some modern-day diet trends might have you believe that early man sustained itself on an endless buffet of fire-roasted animal flesh. In reality, our nomadic forbears were more likely omnivores of the opportunistic type than they were mammoth-herding ranchers. They hunted. They gathered. They ate whatever they could find—the majority of which was lacking any […]
How B-Team Superheroes Saved the Box Office Day
For more than a decade, the holidays and summer have been the season of the superhero with Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe consistently knocking it out of the galaxy. Before we arrived at this new golden age of superhero films, there was an endless run of really lame films and TV shows. If you’ve seen the […]
How to Ride Ahead of the Pack (Without Selling Your Soul)
In January 2019, Harley-Davidson marked an infamous anniversary, that of its 1969 sale to “leisure time and industrial products” giant AMF. Six months after the sale, on July 1969, “Easy Rider” debuted in movie theaters. The timing could not have been better for the H-D brand. The true stars of the counterculture classic are motorcycles […]
Smells Like Analog Spirit
“In this age of technology where you can simulate or manipulate anything, how do we retain that human element?” – Dave Grohl in “Sound City” There’s no understating Kurt Cobain’s role in the musical paradigm shift that Nirvana initiated with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but sonically speaking, it’s Dave Grohl’s monstrous four-beat drum intro […]
Wash. Rinse. Save Lives. Repeat.
Lifehacks, they’re definitely a thing in our culture. But the word seems to have lost a bit of its luster through overuse. The minutiae of everyday life appear to have become one big lifehack leaving a truly awe-inspiring life hack to become a footnote in a sea of shoelace hacks and moustache hacks. Not to […]
How Women Are Providing Healing and Promoting Hope
Happy March and Merry Women’s History Month! Since this year’s theme is “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope”, we wanted to shine a light on women who have been providing healing and promoting hope through health care and education while the world is still spinning on an uneven axis. In the last two years, healthcare and […]
Super Bowl LIII Commercial Round-Up – One Random Guy’s Take
Being in the ad business, there’s one question I can count on fielding each February from friends and family. “So what did you think of the Super Bowl ads this year?” As the presumed “expert” on the subject, I dutifully deliver my reply that is, in reality, just one random guy’s take. So in […]
