We are always interested in new tips and tactics to make brainstorming sessions more effective, and boost idea generation. Marilyn Barefoot of Barefoot Brainstorming has ...

Account Planning as a Tool for Better Marketing

Although account planning has been the buzzword in American advertising for decades, it is well known that ...

Think of your brain as a muscle. Regular exercise keeps it in tone, but you need to balance exercise with rest periods to achieve peak ...

Since the mid-1990s, account planning has been in use in the U.S. as part of ad agencies’ creative development process. We’ve written elsewhere ...

Following is a hard-learned, hard-earned summary from Second Wind to you; hard-learned after years of seeing agencies fail to mind the financial store, and hard-earned ...

As you stroll the grocery aisles in search of brands you are loyal to, you may find it ever more difficult to find that product ...

Great networking means creating relationships that will last your entire career. But how do you make it more fun and less work?

Here are five ...

In the halcyon days of the advertising business, when the economy was stable and we had yet to be swallowed up in the global competitive ...

How many ad agency owners have asked about the return on investment (ROI) on their accountants?

How many owners of agencies completely and implicitly trust ...

Brands today hold authenticity as a very important brand trait. It’s understandable: studies and polls indicate that today’s audiences, especially millennial and younger ...

We’ve written frequently about managing and working with freelancers and independent contractors. But given some of the remarks tweeted around National Freelancers Day (June ...

No industry, except perhaps the dot-coms of yore, ever paid as much lip service to office culture than the advertising and design industry. There have ...

A new brand has stepped onto the body-image battlefield—and it isn’t a beauty brand, but one that could shake up practices in that ...

At a recent Certified Account Executive College meeting, Second Wind COO and seminar moderator Laurie Mikes asked attendees how many knew how “billable” they were ...

Business policies often seem carved in stone… and some of the most deeply carved policies have been around so long, no one actually remembers who ...

Social media is still a young medium; much of what social platform design teams have learned about unintended design outcomes, they learned through actual user ...

Thirty years ago, our founder Tony Mikes started Second Wind with the goal of helping small ad agency owners gain valuable skills to help them ...

Interns can be valuable creative contributors and support personnel, as well as offering the opportunity for some word-of-mouth recruiting. So if you have a corner ...

We live in a colorful world. Every day we are surrounded by color—in how we decorate our homes, the colors of our vehicles, the ...

Ad agencies and marketing firms sell planning as a service to their clients, and promote its benefits as only true converts can. But agencies suffer ...