Thom Schoenborn
Editorial Director
Thom earned a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon in 1997 and then went on to work at various media outlets including Investor’s Business Daily. He came to Pop Art in 2007 as Copy Editor but was soon promoted to Editorial Director. He has since led the messaging efforts for most of our clients including Detroit Diesel, ITI and Waggener Edstrom. Thom is also very active in the Portland Advertising Federation as their current newsletter editor. Outside of the digital realm, Thom is an avid cyclist, homebrewer and Bar-B-Q aficionado.
It never gets easier. You just go faster. — Greg LeMond
Education
BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon
Community Involvement
Sweat-stained content machine for the Portland Ad Federation newsletter
Other Interests
- Swimming
- Biking
- Riding the bus
- Brewing beer with Dave and Andrew
- Smartassery
Favorite Movie
On any rainy weekend, I could watch The Fifth Element and be happy. This has caused more than one argument between my wife and I.
Top Five Viral Videos
Only five? You sadden me. Here’s 10.
Current Magazine Subscriptions
- Bicycling
- Gourmet
- The New Yorker
- And I drive a Volvo
- Oh shit, I’ve become everything I hate…
Recommended Books
Networks
Posts by Thom Schoenborn
Interrupting Makers with Meetings
There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham. I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning [...]
I Work with a Bunch of Smartasses, Part IX
I threw out a question I couldn’t remember the answer to: “the difference between 14 percent and 11 percent is how many basis points? Three or three-hundred?” Andrew tells me 3, then later IMs me: Andrew Hay: and by “three”, I mean 300 http://www.investorwords.com/434/basis_point.html Thom Schoenborn: Look, are you married to a math teacher or not? a STATISTICS teacher, no [...]
Portland Bike and Marketing Freak Out
Local web analytics powerhouse WebTrends recently rolled out a new transit ad campaign to demonstrate their ability to measure offline and online sentiment and conversation using the question, “should cyclists pay a road tax?” Kablooie. Cyclist meltdown and freakout. I’d chalk this campaign up as a “near miss.” WebTrends did a great job of getting the [...]
“Consumers will have these conversations anyway”
Stumbled across this interesting article about the mobile marketing, teens, and conversational marketing, and loved the following quote from Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC: “Advertisers are terrified of [conversational marketing]. In their hearts, many really don’t want to interact with customers because they are afraid that either there will be [...]
Use Social Media for Customer Service
We’ve all seen stories about rogue customer service teams using social media to help customers, but here’s a great way to institutionalize it. At the end of the article, you’ll find a reminder and links about why great customer service improves both sales and profits. Using Social Media Opt-Ins for Customer Service Imagine if at the end of [...]
iPhone 3.0 and Amazon Kindle: How Much Will They Pay?
When Amazon rolled out the Kindle iPhone App (iTunes link), it lacked one key feature: the ability to purchase new books or subscriptions through the iPhone. You still have to go to Amazon.com to get your content, then sync your account via iPhone. (And yes, I’m totally spoiled for whining about a simple extra step [...]
Managing During Hard Times: A First-Timer’s Perspective
What’s a new manager to do during their first real big downturn? There’s a lot of conflicting feelings, obligations and advice about how to manage during a recession. I’ve been sorting through it in my own mind, and have developed my own mental checklist. Know Yourself I went through the “dot-bomb” back in 2001, but I was [...]
How to Time Your Holiday Email Marketing
A friend of mine writes and manages the online marketing for a local online retailer, and asked via Facebook about how to time her holiday email marketing to her customers. I’d been tweeting (thomschoenborn on Twitter) about a webinar from Nielsen Online about online holiday shopping, and she shot me a message asking about Black [...]
Being a Little Bit Transparent is Like Being a Little Bit Pregnant
It seems that I can’t have a conversation about blogging without also talking about fear, legal liability, and transparency. Which I find somewhat ironic: as a business, most of our clients have tens, if not hundreds, of employees who are trained to talk to clients. Customer service reps. Sales people. Technical support. They’re trained in [...]
Who is Pop Art?
In the course of re-launching the website for our interactive agency, we wanted to bring the Pop Art people forward. After all, Pop Art is in the business of interactive advertising and marketing services. Services that are provided by people who like to laugh, explore geeky things, and do great work. The question became, “What [...]
Food and Advertising: How to Cure the Culture of Obesity
I am the world’s worst eater. Bar none. Put a burger in front of me, and I’ll ask for bleu cheese and bacon, too. Which is why I was dumbfounded when I started seeing this McDonald’s commercial a while back: I wanted an apple. The commercial illustrates a conundrum faced by the U.K. government anti-obesity [...]
Copywriters and SEO
It’s time for copywriters to evolve and embrace search engine optimization. And not just re-writing headlines, but owning the search-optimized content creation process from start to finish. The only reason writers and editors haven’t been responsible for SEO in the past for interactive agencies is because SEO firms (and interactive firms) position it as some [...]
Photo Caption Contest
We got a little press from the Newhouse News service, who was looking for tips for interns. The article shifted in focus a little from internship tips to employer tips for staying on the right side of employment law. It’s still an interesting article, and I believe Pop Art has one of the best organized internship [...]
What Was I Thinking?
Great book(s) review from the New Yorker about why consumers make stupid decisions. There’s a lot of “duh” statements in here — Consumers are effort-averse? Really? — but stated in a researched, academic way. A few Halloweens ago, Ariely laid in a supply of Hershey’s Kisses and two kinds of Snickers—regular two-ounce bars and one-ounce [...]
Forget Viral: Start a Wildfire.
We’re all big fans of Malcolm Gladwell over here. And so when I saw this article in Fast Company titled “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I dug right in. If nothing else, I love a good academic smackdown. The article interviews a former prof who now works for Yahoo, and who refutes the “viral” theory [...]
*cluck*cluck*cluck* Who Are You Afraid Of, Ya Big Chicken?
I bet you’re not trying to be No.1. I bet you’re making excuses. I bet there’s someone in your company, or in your industry, who OWNS you. They’ve got the Midas Touch, and you’re niggling about process documents and sweating out a 15 percent improvement. No? A new study on professional golfers suggests otherwise. Call [...]
Portland Food Donation Cornucopia
So Fred Meyer’s got this coupon where you get a free, frozen turkey when you buy $100 worth of groceries. And we ALWAYS spend $100 on groceries, especially the weekend before Thanksgiving. But we don’t actually need a turkey, right? Nor do we have room in our tiny freezer. But a free turkey is a free [...]
The Danger of the Em Dash
When I write, I use em dashes. A lot. At one point in my career, my creative director returned an article to me in which I’d used an em dash in EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH of a 700-word article. Clearly, I had a problem. Em dashes (or the long dash, like this: — ) are remarkable little devices [...]
Facebook Etiquette
One thing I’ve loved about Facebook is finding old high school friends. People I haven’t spoken to in ages, right? So when there’s a “friend request,” Facebook wants to know how we know each other. So I check the box “went to school together.” But then there’s these other boxes, right? “We hooked up.” “We dated.” And, in some [...]
On the Value of Teamwork
“Hey, we’ve got this comp due to the client in 30 minutes. Think you could knock out a headline for us?” (If you found this funny, you’re a total ad nerd.)
Impaling Copy on Your Brand Pyramid
Probably one of the best things clients get from typical brand pyramid exercises is the “who would your brand be?” But how do you use that information for copywriting? One of our interns this summer loved theater, and she simplified it well: Branding means writing in character. I love this copywriting short-hand because our culture’s weird [...]
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Case Study: Portland Beer Blog
Search engine marketing and copywriting make uneasy allies. SEM means writing for a machine, for an equation, for a filter. Copywriting means expressing human desire, passion, creativity for people. Yet when you can combine the basics of search engine marketing with creative copywriting, your clients win. Big time. And I’ll address this at the end. But [...]
You Can’t Please All the People All the Time (And Here’s Why)
And now, an IM conversation between Dave and myself. Dave Selden: 10:11 very interesting article here: http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html Dave Selden: 10:11 I really like the “mind doesn’t know what the tongue wants” part the fact that you can’t design a universal ketchup and please people you have to design several ketchups that sub-groups can rally around Thom Schoenborn: [...]
Measuring Creative
I attended some event in which a group of Wieden+Kennedy dudes talked about a survey they’d done to prove the value of their creative. So they asked a bunch of media buyers and marketing folks what they thought NIKE’s annual media spend was. The average guess was ridiculously higher than it actually was. To translate: [...]
