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To my ear, tone-deaf communications reached new decibel levels in 2018, with the tech world contributing mightily to the noise. It was a shrieking cacophony of a year, brimming with inept statements, videos, tweets and posts that offended, hurt, angered or baffled the intended audience—inevitably, to the utter amazement of the tone-challenged communicators. “Tone-deaf” inRead more

I love it when a plan comes together. While any day is a good day to quote “The A-Team,” Hannibal Smith’s catch phrase feels particularly appropriate as we announce our newest A-Team member – and as I reflect on Big Valley’s journey over the past four and a half years. As most of you know,Read more

Misalignment is the scourge of the modern marketing department, and it’s no surprise why: So many channels to manage with no way to predict the customer journey. Highly fragmented roles and teams executing on compressed time cycles. Intense pressure to drive business impact, while staff are drowning in disconnected data and unclear strategy. The problemRead more

It took longer than people expected, but the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) came down hard on Theranos yesterday — banning the company and its CEO from owning or operating a medical lab for two years. As I’ve written before, this is an important story for Silicon Valley business and marketing leaders toRead more

Unicorns aren’t dead yet, though some would like them to be. Others claim we’re now in a “post-unicorn” world. Whatever the future holds, the class of $1B+ private companies continues to expand and contract weekly – providing a valuable microcosm to understand today’s tech trends and startup dynamics. To that end, we’re launching the first complete study thatRead more

Silicon Valley continues to be in the news for the wrong reasons. Theranos is the leading culprit – though not the only one – and it’s important for Valley companies to track what’s happening in the broader communications environment. Crises rarely just impact one company. They tend to drag down a category of like companies (at leastRead more

Silicon Valley has been in the hot seat recently, with several companies facing major and minor media firestorms. Tesla was accused of using low-paid foreign labor for its factories. Facebook is defending itself against charges of editorial bias. Palantir is responding (or not) to staff turnover and customer satisfaction questions. And Theranos is battling a series of disclosures aboutRead more

Unicorns are a phenomenon. Over the past 18 months, they have gone from mythical creature to tech meme – spawning greed and envy for global entrepreneurs, investors and recruiters, while feeding the tech media engine with endless news stories, leader boards and Fortune cover stories. The “unicorn” concept was coined in Nov’13 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, and refers to privately held start-upRead more

Impressions are definitely not what they seem. At first, they were used as a foundational unit of measure for publishers and advertisers, who built an entire economy negotiating to buy impressions by the thousands. They evolved into a lingua franca of marketing measurement, providing a comparable way to evaluate reach (impressions) and efficiency (CPM) acrossRead more

As a long-time content marketer and public relations guy, I was intrigued — and conflicted — to see this headline yesterday: PR is 80% more effective than marketing Skipping past the headline capitalization issues (“Is” should be and “than” should not), half of me screamed “yes” and half of me sighed “oh no.” Then the data junkieRead more