It has been almost two years since this blog was updated. The last post before this one went up in July 2014. Absolutely no new content was added in 2015. This is noteworthy because, despite going completely dark, views on the blog increased 33% in 2015 over the previous year. September of 2015, more than one year after the last post was added, was our highest traffic month ever. There appears to be an inverse relationship between the success of this endeavor and my level of direct involvement with it. (Some might say this is a persistent pattern in my life.)
I found the growth surprising, but what really shocked me about it was that the gains were driven almost entirely by the popularity of a single post — a look back at the “Coffee Achievers” ad campaign from the 1980s. Each month since it was posted, the Coffee Achievers post has significantly outdrawn every other post on the blog. That’s probably because not a lot has been written about the campaign, so somebody searching for information about it online will find a link to the post fairly high in their Google search results. Of course, the fact that such searches are even taking place leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that I’m not the only person in the world weird enough to care about a thirty-year old ad campaign that shows Ken Anderson and Cicely Tyson sipping coffee.
That conclusion in turn leads me to believe that perhaps there is more of an appetite for arcane marketing-related weirdness, nostalgia and snark than I thought possible when I first started the blog. With that in mind, I am encouraged to dust off the keyboard and start posting again. That decision might kill all the momentum created by me being away for 20 months, but so be it. The Marketing Smart Aleck blog is once again open for business.