It has been said that in the audio business, the hardest thing to recover is not market share but the trust of people who once believed you understood them.
The phrase "switching costs" has long been a favorite of business school professors and wireless analysts, typically referring to the contractual and logistical obstacles that keep customers tethered to their current mobile phone brand.
The phrase "in real life" has become a curious modifier in an era when many advertising professionals spend their days staring at screens, optimizing for platforms that did not exist a decade ago.
The phrase "agency of the future" has been promised so often on Madison Avenue that it has come to sound less like a destination and more like a perpetual motion machine — always arriving, never quite arrived.
The history of NFL broadcast promotion is largely a history of disposable enthusiasm: characters appear, shout about football, and vanish into the same void that claims most September advertising.
There was a time when an agency's name on the door meant something specific: that the person whose name it was had built the place, and probably still walked its halls.
There was a time when the path to consumer awareness in financial services ran through television commercials featuring reassuring spokespeople and branch offices with good parking.