Category: Uncategorized

So this is the link to the electronic flip book version of the newspaper version of the best of this blog. Talk about milking a bit of content some of which is six years old! But hell why not. Big thanks to newspaper club for making the review possible and Saatchi & Saatchi for creating the flipbook and putting it online.

The nice people at it’s nice that have written a little review of adliterate lite alongside some far more worthy titles and better designed publications. It’s nice that champion great creativity in any form and publish a hard copy of the stuff they love the most every April and October. Issue 5 is out very shortly.

Image courtesy of Below Zero.

Forgive this self indulgent post but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that has helped adliterate stay the course for three years this month, whether commenting, linking or reading. Self evidently I couldn’t do it without you.

In particular your comments that offer a thoughtfulness and intelligence often lacking in the original post! And at best they not only get the debate going but take us somewhere new and far more interesting.

Incidentally looking at the 2420 comments so far, the first was from Rob Mortimer as was virtually the last. That deserves the blogging equivalent of a carriage clock.

Greetings adliterate readers everywhere and a belated happy New Year.

I’m not in the habit of writing self referential posts but a little bit of an agenda for the year never goes amiss.

2008 marks the third year in the life of this website, starting as it did in March 2005. And my sincere hope is that I can continue to deliver a relatively frequent diet of new ideas, contrary thinking and unpalatable opinions.

It also sees me take up gainful employment once more as I am now Director of Strategy for Saatchi & Saatchi in the UK, so can once again trouble the ad industry from the inside.

Now conventional wisdom suggests this will see a decline in blogging activity. I really hope not. In fact, having had nine months outside the ad industry doing brand consultancy, I found it more difficult to generate content with all that free blogging time that when I was working in an agency.

I guess the easy bit about blogging is finding the time, the difficult bit is finding the ideas – because if you have an idea then the time finds itself.

And being surrounded by the world of brands and everyday brand problems is always more conducive to having ideas than being at home with the mac.

So fear not readers – the online journey goes onward.

And, of course, if there is anything that you’d like to see more or less of this year drop me a line.

I’m in love with the aphoristic form as you well know. And I think they are extremely handy in our business. Certainly in persuading people of a point of view or course of action – such as David Ogilvy’s why keep a dog and bark yourself, or Bill Bernbach’s we must stop believing in what we sell and start selling what we believe in.

The are also great in framing strategies, approaches and ideas – no one is interested in your positioning, they only want to know your position or Coherence is more important than consistency for example. And on occasions great brand thoughts can take an aphoristic form, I’d argue they are the ones that get remembered best.

So imagine my delight when Russell gave me “The World in a phrase – A brief history of the aphorism” by James Geary.