Posts

What challenger brands could learn from the London Olympics opening ceremony

Wasn’t that a brilliant, inventive show Danny Boyle put on for the Olympics? Beijing’s opening ceremony was a tough act to follow in terms of spectacle. And Boyle had a relatively modest budget of £27 million. So he needed to make his money work hard to create a memorable show. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Unless […]

How to ruin your new campaign without realising it

An error marketers sometimes make when judging creative work. The other day an agency asked me to do something odd. They wanted me to rewrite the endline of a new campaign that was at concept stage. It was strange because I reckoned the existing one was very good. So did they. Unfortunately their client didn’t. […]

How to be more original with less

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi doesn’t have 10 fingers. He lost the ends of two of them in an accident. Since then he’s had to play in an unusual style, which has helped give his band its distinctive sound. In Iran, there is widespread censorship. To find ways around it, film makers there have to […]

What hasn’t changed in 350 years of advertising?

Modern marketing seems so different from older forms, doesn’t it? With things like social media and content marketing, it’s easy to believe that advertising has changed fundamentally. But has it really? On the left is something interesting I stumbled across the other day. You can enlarge it by clicking here. It looks like an old […]

When copywriters are “too clever”

Have you ever experienced this: The other day I saw a very funny commercial.                                                                 It was well shot. The casting was excellent.                                                                  And the dialogue between the two, very antagonistic                                                    characters was worthy of Raymond Chandler. It had a simple, clever idea – usually the basis for an award-winning ad. The trouble […]

Are banners an effective ad medium?

Are you an unbeliever? Do you sneer at the suggestion that banner advertising is of any use to marketers? It seems to me there are a lot of unbelievers about. They remind me of people you used to meet in pre-internet times. People who claimed they never responded to ads – on TV, in the […]

Do Ideas Matter Any More?

Twitter, Facebook, mobile marketing – how the media landscape has changed since I started my advertising career as a junior copywriter at Saatchis’ London, 25 years ago. Back then, if you wanted a job in the creative department, you needed to be good at coming up with ideas – lots of them and good ones. […]