Former WPP CEO Martin Sorrell – one of the most innovative ad moguls of our time, who crashed amid a misconduct scandal – is prepping to launch a new branding empire. Recently, Sorrell announced plans to build a new advertising, marketing services and ad-tech company. Derriston Capital, a British firm whose website says it was created “to consider opportunities within ...

I‘ve always liked post-apocalyptic science fiction movies. You know, movies like Planet of the Apes, The Time Machine, Mad Max, On the Beach, Book of Eli. Mankind has blown it up and all is a wasteland. The characters struggle to survive. They scavenge the crumbling remains of the civilization their ancestors once built. The good science fiction message, of course, ...

Tourism is on a roll. Although international visitors to the United States is down, domestic tourism continues to climb. Several states posted record tourism numbers. Ohio drew 219 million tourism visits in 2017, up from 212 million the previous year, and saw direct spending rise by $1 billion to $35 billion, according to TourismOhio. Governor Rick Scott said that Florida ...

Bill Crawford has recently written several pieces on how to best train Mississippi’s work force. He makes his point by using the research generated by the Nobel Prize winning economist, Dr. James Heckman, who has shown that the greatest return on investment (ROI) in educating the workforce of the future is through high quality early childhood education. I suppose Grant ...

If a U.S. senator and a public service commissioner get their way, many Mississippians will spend the next six months trying to prove how bad their local cellphone service is. It’s all part of an effort to make Mississippi eligible for as big of a slice of $4.5 billion as possible. What the Federal Communications Commission calls the Mobility Fund II will ...

When it comes to government, Charles and David Koch want to influence, some say control, the political thoughts of all Americans. Yes, including Mississippians.   The Koch brothers and their super wealthy compatriots are spending billions of dollars to inform, many say indoctrinate, Americans on how to think about government, how to vote, and how to take down contrary elected ...

Earlier this week, columnist Bill Crawford penned a piece arguing that school choice proposals authored in recent legislative sessions are not conservative because they represent a “new entitlement.” Instead, Crawford favors publicly funded Pre-K as the best fix for Mississippi’s education woes. Here’s why he’s wrong. To be a new entitlement the Legislature would have to appropriate more money for ...

When I started working for newspapers 45 years ago, Tom Wolfe turned me on to something. It wasn’t a drug, though it did alter my writing sensibility, permanently. “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby…” was the name of one of his early pieces that went a long way in establishing New Journalism. That essay about ...

When I work with startups that are analyzing market opportunities and existing firms that are exploring other opportunities, I try to frame the discussion in terms of white space.  There is nothing proprietary about the term “white space” – it has been around at least since the dot-com frenzy of the 1990s, if not before then.  White space essentially means ...

A new report reinforces what many Mississippi residents already know, but legislators don’t often discuss: affordable child care is vital to the state economy. Parents can’t work outside the home if they can’t find a safe place for their babies and young children to stay and learn. But high-quality child care can cost thousands of dollars a year, and that ...