Insights from Nebo

It’s the end of the year, a time to reflect on huge successes or just be thankful for squeaking by. And how do we celebrate? By extending our workday to attend the worst oxymoron in the world: the company party. We get dressed to the 9’s and mind our P’s & Q’s for fear of potential humiliation. No more than two drinks. Speak to your boss. Don’t use your co-worker’s purse as a barf bag. So many rules and regulations to make sure you don’t receive a pink slip instead of your Christmas bonus.

This year, let’s look at the holiday party not as an exercise in masochism, but as an art. An art, that, when mastered, will raise you and your co-workers above the doldrums of Bing Crosby and holiday cocktails, and bring you the one thing missing from most company holiday parties: tidings of comfort and joy.

This is the Art of the Company Holiday Party. 

Anyone who’s ever read a boilerplate knows that there’s a certain amount of baloney involved. You know the boilerplate; it's the cookie-cutter nonsense, usually at the end of the press release, extolling the virtues of whatever company wrote it. Essentially, it's an "About Our Company" paragraph (e.g. "Nebo is a human-centered interactive agency. We believe that great work comes from...") that can be pasted into whatever the PR department is sending to publishers. Although they're pains, we accept them as somehow necessary. With that said, we wanted to take a moment to highlight the nonexistent purpose of the boilerplate as well as conduct a little experiment of our own to find out who actually reads them.

It’s the holiday season and now is the time when jewelry companies like to crawl up out of the sewers and bombard us with their newest brood of wretched commercials.

I’m looking at you, Kay, Jared, Zales, and others of your ilk. I’m sure you guys run your businesses well, take care of your customers, and make boat-loads of money. That’s great. But your commercials suck.

Almost everyone in digital marketing is slightly obsessed with Analytics. You might say that some of us are unhealthily obsessed. However, if you aren’t the type of person who has nightmares about anthropomorphized bounce rates growing to giant sizes until the room can’t contain them and they suffocate you (just me?), you may not be as familiar with the differences between “Last Click” attribution and “Multi-Channel” attribution.

During a government background check in 1988, Steve Jobs famously remarked:

“The best way I would describe the effect of the marijuana and the hashish is that it would make me relaxed and creative.”

So, was one of the most creative minds of our time onto something, or was he just a turtleneck-wearing stoner who happened to be a genius?

They say that the holidays, particularly Christmas, have become all about commercialism, but we say that it's really all about the commercials. Here is a list of some fantastic Christmas and holiday ads to warm the heart and make you jolly. As ubiquitous as Best Holiday Ad lists are, so are the ads themselves. It just wouldn't be the holidays without either one, so enjoy!