This morning I woke up to an email from someone who a Google search tells me is well known in US ad circles, informing me, "you are not Mark Earls" (I'm not?) and telling me I was "infringing on his brand...stop it."
Who is Mark Earls? For those of you that don't know (plenty do but I didn't until just over a year ago), he has authored a book called Herd, maintains a typepad blog of the same name and is active on the marketing speaker circuit.
Being told I was ripping off someone's brand pissed me off as that's kind of not how I work. But to avoid any doubt, here's what I've done about it:
First of all why is this blog called News from the Herd? Pretty simple really: The agency I work for is called Cow and we once used to have a division called Herd. The division's gone for reasons I won't bore you with, but rather than create a new one from scratch, I kept the blog of the same name going.
Now I'm clearly not going to change the name of this site, but I'm also most definitely not out to impersonate anyone.
So after a separate email conversation with fellow blogger Gareth Kay - I've done the following:
On the right hand side under 'what's happening here', you'll see a link telling people where to go if they've come here hoping to find a marketing author.
If you want Mark's site that's your link. I'll keep it up for August and if my site logs show there are a lot of click throughs and people really have been confused, I'll keep it up after that.
End of story.
Now. I'm going to order Mark Earls' book from Amazon to see what all the fuss is about. It will be much easier to copy chapters wholesale that way anyway.
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