What used to be called Singles Day (November 11), and now is referred to as Global Shopping Festival, continues to be the "world's biggest shopping day," according to Adweek. Lisa Lacy reports: "It was another record-breaking day for retail as Chinese ecommerce platform Alibaba rang up 268.4 billion yuan ($38.4 billion)." Lacy compares the day with two shopping dates we're more familiar with: "Even on the biggest shopping days of the year for Americans, the U.S. doesn’t come close: Consumers spent...

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For some reason, this phrase keeps popping into my head lately: Breaking the frame. What I mean by this is that something -- possibly a building or a show or an approach to marketing -- escapes the container in which it's normally held. For example, when Hotmail first launched (in 1995, I think it was), it was a frame-breaker. It was email, but on the web. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, but at the time, it was. It spread...

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