Matt Sweetwood is known for his innovative and transformative ideas as a marketing, social media and business-development consultant. He has experienced professional and personal success as an award-winning marketer and CMO club member and as president of Unique Photo, through his reinvention of the modern camera superstore. Sweetwood is currently writing his first book, Man Up, and is a regular contributor on national TV and to several publications in the business, social media, marketing. parenting, ethics and politics arenas.
Celebrating mom is as American as apple pie and it has been for the past 101 years since Woodrow Wilson proclaimed mother’s day a national holiday. I remember the joy I felt when I would bring my mom breakfast in bed, flowers, a present and a hand-made card on mother’s day.
I couldn’t be a role model to my girls for the way to be a successful woman – or could I? – I finally just (a tad nervously) asked each of my daughters. What is the one thing they have learned from me in my examples that helps them be a successful woman today? And here’s what they said:
And then our keynote speaker, Vicente Fox, the former President of Mexico spoke. What, I wondered, would his talk have to do with clever marketing? “There’s no limit to what you can do in your life with a purpose,” he said, “but it is a purpose that has to be…
I expected there wouldn’t be a lot of men in the audience and I was right. But what I didn’t imagine was that the audience would be mostly young girls – well under the ‘R’ rated age of 17 you needed to even get in.
I think it’s fair to say most of us were shocked when we saw the Nationwide 2015 Super Bowl Commercial, “Make Safe Happen.” It’s pretty risky business to have a child in an ad who speaks about missing out on the best moments of his life because he died in a preventable accident.
When I became the sole and single parent of my 5 children, my 3 little girls were ages 18 months, 4 and 8 years old. Obviously dating was not an issue to be dealt with at that time but my thoughts of what the future would hold in that area weighed heavily on my mind. I know most dads (and moms) think about these things often.
My oldest daughter Michelle got married two weeks ago at a scenic venue overlooking Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea. I know destination weddings are now trendy, but that had little to do with the choice to have the wedding there…
No, it’s not the beginning of a joke. Yes that really happened. This past fall I was sitting at the bar of a Manhattan restaurant next to my friend, Adam Jacobs, who is a Rabbi at Aish Center, New York. We were having a cold beverage to celebrate the premiere of his documentary.
The urgency I felt when my own children were suffering, unproductive and unhappy was greater than keeping my own job. This was a real creative problem unlike anything I knew before because the solutions are not linear. I had significant problems occur every day. They had to be solved.
I got my get-out-of-jail-free card by just following the advice of the famous philosopher, Nike: “Just do it.” I couldn’t quit my job. There was no one else to do it, so I just put my head down and worked my ass off all over the place. I needed to be a dad, and dads do things with children that are perfectly good and are perfectly acceptable to me.
