If you’re looking for people to blame for the often-confusing generational tags, look no further than William Strauss and Neil Howe. They pioneered the concept of generational cycles and coined the term Millennials in their seminal 1991 book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. Strauss and Howe theorized that people who grow up under similar circumstances often share the same characteristics relating to attitudes and behaviors such as work ethic, respect for authority, spending habits, technology adoption, and patience. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you’ll act one way. But if you’re a Millennial, you’ll behave differently. Well, that’s the idea anyway.

 
Today, the youngest Baby Boomer is 53 and the oldest is 72. This wide-spanning group has witnessed and shaped almost every major event of the past century. While they may be aging, they still have more buying power than any other demographic, and there are no signs of them slowing down. Baby Boomers are defined as the group born immediately following World War II, from mid-1946 continuing thru mid-1964.

 
Low hanging fruit is probably one of the most overused terms in marketing today, right after ecosphere and disrupter. But what is low hanging fruit and why is it important to your overall marketing strategy? The dictionary deems low hanging fruit as “the obvious or easy thing that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or progress towards an objective.” In marketing speak, this is your core target audience that’s already engaged with your brand and needs little convincing to convert (i.e. the holy grail for what your business is trying to accomplish).

 
As one of the Zion & Zion team members that has been trained at the Stanford d.school’s intense Design Thinking program, I always look for ways to incorporate this new model of thinking in my everyday work with clients. Design Thinking encourages you to look at problems from a different perspective, usually from that of your end customer. Design Thinking pushes you into new territory by coming at a problem from a wide variety of angles, some of which you may have never thought without a Design Thinking approach.

 
Things change so fast in the world of web development. Tried and true gives way to the hot and new more than any other industry I’ve seen. I mean, in 2003, everyone was losing their minds over boxy Flash-based websites that offered a never before seen level of animation and interactivity, but Flash did not sit atop its pedestal for very long. A few years later, the writing was on the wall that Flash was all but dead due to lack of mobile support and severe SEO hurdles. Fast forward a bit to about 2008, skeuomorphic design trends were running rampant and with it came a new set of challenges for developers. This trend, in particular, often involved a ton of layered images to pull off its real, tangible aesthetic. It also often came with grungy, non-repeating textures everywhere. Meaning, there weren’t just a lot of images, there were some big’ins and pagespeed was worse than ever. Back then, there was no CSS grid, no flexbox, and a lack of transparent PNG support (IE 6). This led to some daunting development challenges to make the design come to life.

 
Empathy interviews are the foundation of Design Thinking, practiced by forward thinking organizations and taught at leading institutions such as the Stanford d.School. Empathy interviews are used to gather insights that otherwise might not be apparent. These insights can then be used to identify issues and generate potential solutions.

 
Being interviewed by the media is hard. However, as a spokesperson, your role is to promote your company’s mission, brand, products, and services to the public. And, as a spokesperson, it’s up to you to make sure you deliver the best interview possible to showcase your organization. It’s part of your job. You’re a brand ambassador for your organization, and you must know how to deliver a stellar interview.

 
Unabashedly speaking, there have always been a lot of great perks behind Zion & Zion’s status as a Google Premier Partner. The most recent example came in the form of an invitation, an exclusive offer to take part in AdWords expert training onsite at Google’s sunny LA campus. A chance to peek behind the Google curtain mixed with a healthy dose of California sunshine. The multi-day training event was overseen by a specialty group of Google product experts. Our instructors provided plenty of actionable advice, designed to tackle the real issues we’ve encountered with our paid accounts. Participants came from all over the advertising spectrum—agency, in-house, and freelance consultants. These sessions ultimately provided an exhaustive overview of new and developing AdWords product features, features that are dramatically changing the strategy behind managing paid search.