Strategy

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I love the Oliver Stone directed movie Wall Street that stars Michael Douglas with Charlie Sheen and his dad Martin Sheen. It’s rating on IMDb is a 7.3 and I gave it a 9. The acting is so good you fall in love with the characters and forget they are portraying terrible people doing horrible things.

As a digital marketer, there can be a fine line between promoting a product or service because it’s good for the company rather than good for the customer. True joy in life or in marketing comes from helping others. Although Wall Street is a product of Hollywood, the portrayal of illegal insider trading, greed that is unquenchable, and man’s inhumanity to man seems less shocking in today’s calloused world.

Wall Street was released in 1987 before we had the internet and digital marketing was just marketing. Unless you lived it, you wouldn’t believe the sophistication we now enjoy with technology over these decades. One example is the very, very brief scene where the 1985 Market Projections bar chart was shared. I of course had to pause the movie to zoom in on the details which I included in this post.

This bar chart was obviously not intended to be truly seen, let alone analyzed but let’s do it anyway.

1. The X or horizontal axis obviously just has placeholder names for these markets, X, XX, and XXX. Each of these three markets has four different measurement but there is no way to know what those are.
2. The Y or vertical axis ranges from 0 to 350. Best practice would say to show the 0 and to know what is this measurement, likely dollars but should this also be in thousands?
3. For a movie made in 1987, why would we be seeing 1985 market projections given that projections are about the future.
4. Whatever this X, XX, and XXX is that has four different bar graphs, it’s possible if we knew what this data was, a line chart would make better sense. I guess this will remain one of Hollywood’s secrets.

Bottom line, if you haven’t seen Wall Street, do it. Also, be a better human. There is enough suffering in the world and your kindness and selflessness could be answer to someone’s prayer.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I have listened to nearly 14,000 podcasts with the majority of those being about marketing and business. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to keep a regular podcast going so there have certainly been a lot of podcasts I have loved and unfortunately have been discontinued. Here are my top 10 favorite active podcasts.

Podcast Name	Host(s)	Episodes Listened	Summary
Manager Tools	Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne	900+	Actionable insight covering management and leadership stuff you were never taught.
Executive Tools	Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne	30+	Requires active manager tools subscription – worth it for the show notes alone.
The Paid Search Podcast	Chris Schaeffer	300+	Best paid search and Google Ads podcast out there. No one else would provide this much value in a free podcast.
HBR IdeaCast	Alison Beard or Curt Nickisch	800+	Thought leader topics arm-in-arm with their published magazine
Revisionist History	Malcolm Gladwell	100+	Seasonal podcast that seems to re-write history. Classic Gladwell.
33 Tangents	Jim Driscoll and Jason Thompson	200+ (recently inactive)	Great analytics topics, interesting topics before the topic, and a lover of remote work.
The Marketing Book Podcast	Douglas Burdett	70+ (recently inactive)	Reviews a marketing book with the author every week. Yes, really, every week.
The Analytics Power Hour	Michael Helbling, Tim Wilson, and Moe Kiss	200+	Usually includes a guest; All things analytics and so much fun – don’t miss the outtakes.
The Agile Brand With Greg Kihlstrom	Greg Kihlstrom	15	Newer podcast I started listening to after reading a handful of Greg’s books.
The Digital Marketing Podcast	Ciaran Rogers and Daniel Rowles	200+	I took a break from this podcast but have started it up again.