We don't save people's lives
We don’t save people’s lives. It used to be a joke didn’t it? With a laugh in our throats, we would chortle that what we do ‘isn’t exactly brain surgery’, or that ‘no one dies’. It doesn’t feel like a joke any more. Let’s be very clear, while we do support people’s livelihoods we don’t...
Don’t let your marketing become famous
In August 2003 Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Director of Communications, resigned. For some months he had been at the centre of allegations that the intelligence dossier that created much of the case for the invasion of Iraq in March that year had been doctored. Whether or not this was the case, the reality was that...
Monopoly, the commercial dividend of powerful brands
My favourite episode of South Park is ‘Gnomes’. Not only is it properly funny, if you like your humour puerile and immature, but it also holds a small cautionary tale for marketers. ‘Gnomes’ tells the story of a gang of animated garden ornaments that live beneath South Park and steal underpants while its residents are...
We need more ‘non-working marketing spend’, not less
There are many phrases to which I take exception. I hate dead metaphors such as “Achilles’ heel”. I hate euphemisms that are designed to disguise their true meaning, such as “collateral damage”. And I hate out-and-out lies such as “we will give the £350m we save from the European Union to the NHS”. But one...
Banishing unconscious bias from your planning
To celebrate the 55th series of Have I Got News For You, the show’s team captains, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton gave a now infamous interview to the Radio Times, a publication not normally used to setting the news agenda. Amid a conversation with ITN anchor-man Tom Bradby, the duo offered a highly criticised answer...
Can brands help the cohesion of divided nations?
It’s Winter and that means one thing these days. The National Health Service is in crisis. A perfect storm of seasonal pressure, changing demographics, advances in healthcare and chronic underfunding have conspired once again with predictably disastrous consequences. And yet for all the challenges that the NHS faces, it remains an undeniably central part of...
The real genuis of ‘and’
There is one word the advertising industry really hates. In this word lies the root of all perceived evil. It’s only a little word but its sends shivers down our collective spines. The advertising industry hates the word ‘and’. Instead, if we are really honest, we much prefer the word ‘or’. We tend to be...
Made in Britain
Heatherwick studio’s cauldron for London 2012. Provenance has traditionally been the last resort of the strategic scoundrel. If you fancy an early lunch at the Delaunay and you simply cannot think of anything else to say about a brand you fall back on where it is from. Australian lagers, German cars, Scandinavian furniture, French sexual...
Crimes against social
Image courtesy of freefotouk 2012 may not have be greeted by the industry with a great deal of enthusiasm, after all the big Olympic event that should have marked the end of our economic woes will now merely record their nadir. Nonetheless, it is a fresh, crisp, virginal new year so not only is it...
‘Tis the season to obsess about trends.
Image courtesy of SonOfJordan. For those of you frustrated by the lack of sense my trends presentation makes when you only have the charts, here is the story. I wrote it as a column for Brand Republic so its not identical but covers much the same ground.
Crisis, what crisis?
What’s the plan for planning? Image courtesy of see_another_side. A few years ago in an orgy of self-congratulation and a pithy monographs invoking the spirit of King and Pollitt, planning turned forty. The second great advertising innovation of the twentieth century alongside Bernbach’s pairing of creative teams seemed confident and cocksure with a rosy future...
Keeping the magic alive
Image courtesy of last.fm Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science fiction author, formulated three scientific laws over his lifetime. Apparently he stopped at three on the basis that three laws had been good enough for Newton. His first law suggests that when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost...