Showing results by author "David Burns" in All Categories

Ad Chatter from Adpulp.com features ad news and know-how, plus interviews with prominent guests from the marketing, media, and advertising industries. Show co-hosts Dan Goldgeier and David Burn make, analyze, teach, and talk about advertising.

The experience of smell is the closest thing we have to intimate human contact without actually having it. A woman's perfume, a whiff of tobacco smoke, a little bit of diesel fume, and some spearmint gum might come close to someone's first kiss, for example. Of course, it's impossible to create a first kiss without the human element, but for Jim Bronson, it's the best he can do.

Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the first African American to integrate Major League Baseball in the 20th century. Today a national icon, Robinson was a complicated man who navigated an even more complicated world that both celebrated and despised him. 

On a chilly San Francisco night, James Roberts steps out of his customary Union Square pub. He lights a final smoke before his nightly walk to a Chinatown apartment where he will invariably drink himself into oblivion in his living room club chair. As he smokes, a girl emerges from the bay fog, gesturing for a cigarette. In the flare of the lighter, he sees a blue and green bruise on her face, but before he can ask, she vanishes. In the coming weeks, he encounters her as before, giving her a bite of food or a smoke; their street exchanges, wordless.