Posts

How well do you know your audience?

As good marketers and their agencies know, there are two essential bits of information copywriters need before starting work: 1.        A description of the people we’re selling to (your audience or market) 2.        What needs to be said to those people (your proposition) Pretty basic, you say? Well you’d be surprised by a lot of […]

Why can’t B2B be more like B2C?

Think of a consumer ad campaign, current or past, that you like or maybe even love. Easy, isn’t it? Now think of a business-to-business one you have similar positive feelings about. That’s harder, wouldn’t you say? Apart from IBM campaigns over the years, there are few b2b brands that have made an impression on me. […]

How to give your direct mail piece a fighting chance

There’s so much talk about digital these days, you might think traditional (paper) direct mail just crawled away into a corner and died. But, like radio after TV came along, paper DM is still here. If my letterbox and workload are anything to go by, there’s still plenty of DM landing on Britain’s doormats. I […]

Four things marketers can do to make their lives easier

Ever heard of Hutchison Whampoa? It’s not the catchiest name for a brand. Especially for one that arrived late in the UK mobile phone market. So when the Hutchison Whampoa company launched a new mobile brand here, they had the good sense not to use their name. They knew they needed to stand out from […]

Could a copywriter have saved HMV, Blockbuster and other high street chains from bankruptcy?

Creatives don’t think like chartered accountants. Most of us don’t know how to run a big organisation. We don’t know what management consultants know. Even so, we can and do see things that so-called business experts don’t. Coming from outside a client’s business, we have a fresh perspective. We get to know their business and […]

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 […]

Would this creative idea have happened in London?

For its size New Zealand has produced a lot of excellent creative work over the years. I asked a Kiwi art director why this was so. He said agencies there work closely with client decision makers. Does that happen in London? Maybe it did a few decades ago, but in my experience, it’s increasingly rare […]

Mouthwatering marketing in Shoreditch

The past few weeks, I’ve been working in The Tea Building, the former Lipton Tea warehouse, in Shoreditch, E1, an interesting, edgy area: a mixture of dilapidation and gentrification. There are quite a few new businesses here, but no central gathering place where everyone goes to shop and eat. So the retailers in the Box […]