… is something I hear myself saying now and again. Usually when talking with clients and prospects about why good design, good illustration, good video and good photography matter.

… Cleveland, Ohio. It’s where I was born. Where I was baptized. Where I went to college. And grad school. It’s where I worked for the first six years of my career. Until I left.

. . . a dream assignment, if you ask me. Why? I like wine, a lot. I also like Michigan, also a lot. Therefore, when the opportunity came to work with the folks at the Michigan Wine Collaborative to promote this great state’s great wine industry, that got my attention.

. . . is something you hear a lot about in the ad business. It can mean different things. The way a narrative unfolds in a TV commercial. The way language, tone and voice are used in a radio campaign. The way headlines are phrased in a billboard campaign.

. . . or at least you have a pretty good idea. You immediately have the impression somebody’s the right person for a job you need to fill. They’ve got the right talents, the right temperament, the right fit with the rest of the team.

. . . by any measure of what it means to be a bad man. He was abusive to the woman in his life; he drank disadvantageously; he was violent. He was by all accounts what they used to call “no-account,” a poor, shiftless immigrant who gives a bad name to immigrants as a class.

. . . what you agree to. That’s an important takeaway from what transpired this year (and a bit of last year) as we undertook the job of overhauling (and I mean completely and totally, starting over from scratch) the website . . .

. . . Skonieczka. That last name is pronounced Skoy-nyetch-kuh. At least that’s the way I pronounce it, so it must be right. She joined the team here at Factory back in early 2014.

. . . was the theme here at Factory yesterday. We’re looking to hire a new copywriter and found ourselves in a “fish where the fish are” kind of mood. We put together a mobile billboard promoting the open job and . . .

. . . are you looking for? It’s a question I’ve heard a lot since we started Factory. I think when people ask it, they expect the answer to be something like automotive or fast food or travel or whatever. But my answers are never about categories or industries.

. . . for a lot of reasons: Detroit, where we live, is a factory town. Cleveland, where I grew up, is a factory town. My dad worked in a factory. His dad worked in a factory. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, worked in a factory.

. . . is a contentious thing, apparently. At least that’s the impression I got from this book I started reading a while back. The title is How To Fly A Horse, the author Kevin Ashton, the subject creativity and the theme, more or less, talent is nothing special.

. . . in the advertising business is a subject much discussed, debated, argued and even, sometimes, ridiculed.

On the one hand, advertising is a collaborative medium.

. . . are relative constructs, of course. How big does something have to be to qualify as “big” in the common sense of the word? And while there’s a bottom limit on small – one more than zero – when small stops being small is a matter for discussion, at the very least.

. . . might sound like an exaggeration. But isn’t. Way back in June 1976, the summer when I was 12 years old, I was in the Leader Drug up the road from where I lived. They had what most drug stores had in those days . . .

. . . are of course wildly outnumbered by those that do. The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon long ago tersely framed an observation about the culture we live in that came to be known as Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crap.

. . . get me down. Here you have the greatest branded good ever devised. Ever. And this incredible diversity of vehicle types, makes, models, features and audiences. And giant production budgets for shooting TV commercials.

. . . was a year ago today. It was overcast in Cleveland, Ohio. It was cool outside. And it was the day my mother passed away.

Her name was Carol Jean Lantz. Nee Martiscus, as they say in the obituaries.

. . . gets about 300 thousand hits on Google. “Marketing and faith” gets about 200 thousand. One might expect more, but one would be wrong. “Faith” gets about half a billion hits, “marketing” nearly two billion. Overlap them? Chickenfeed, relatively speaking.

. . . supervisors, superiors, directors, chiefs, captains, head honchos. There’s a reasonably broad vocabulary for describing those in the workplace in charge of others in the workplace.

. . . have been on my mind these days. On April 2, Factory celebrates our first second anniversary. We’ll also have a second second anniversary in June (the 15th, to be exact), celebrating two years . . .