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...
All great marketing solutions start with a well and accurately defined problem and a correct diagnosis of the course of action that needs to be followed. So I thought I’d talk a little about this to kick the new year off in a back to basics style. There is a very basic diagnostic tool I...
Late last year I was asked to give a talk at the IPA, along with the brilliant Rachel Barrie (from sister agency Fallon), about content driven campaigns. Rachel talked about her experiences working on Gorilla and I talked about our learnings from T-Mobile Dance – both IPA award winners in 2010. It was a rather...
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.
My new rubber stamp. If there is enough interest I might get some more made. I gave a talk at Haymarket’s Trends Plus conference this week. I’m sure it was a wonderful shindig – the speakers I saw were excellent – but I couldn’t help feeling a bit contrary about a conference on trends. I’ve...
I have always felt it’s important to honour and respect the legends of our business. The Ogilvys, Bernbachs, Abbotts and Hegartys. Whatever one might think of their work now its clear to see that they were revolutionaries on their own times. But there is one legend that rarely gets the recognition that he deserves, certainly...
Image courtesy of Rebecca Ellen I have always been deeply suspicious of targeting in advertising. I don’t really mean the practice of placing communications, engagement and utility into the lives of the people most likely to buy. That does seem pretty sensible. No, the thing that bugs me is an obsession with targeting and optimisation...
Tango, undoubtedly Jon Leach’s most famous planning hit, or was that the 4th Emergency service? I don’t often get to APG talks, to my eternal shame. However, yesterday I made a point of trucking up to the eternal ghastlyness of the Bloomsbury Holiday Inn for Jon Leach’s talk on the mathematics of creativity.
Image courtesy of Mike 926 I have just finished reading Creative Mischief by Dave Trott. I think its really rather good. He is a first rate storyteller with a no nonsense approach to business, brands and communication. He reminds us that we can get too obsessed with the new and newfangled and bypass common sense...
Downstream – where planning is heading. Image courtesy of SunnyUK I had the absolute privilege of judging the Account Planning Group Creative Strategy awards recently. I love the APG Awards, they showcase real planning and great planners in a way that the other so called planning awards do not. And for me this year saw...
Think Small. This version by Helmut Krone and Bob Levenson. I have just received the most delightful book in the post from Switzerland. ‘Think small, the story of the World’s greatest ad’, written by Dominik Imseng, tells the full story of DDB’s iconic Think Small press advertisement for the VW Beetle. And the emphasis is...
Nice emergency service, shame about the brand extrension. Image courtesy of Ruth Flickr. The Peter Principle maintains that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” in other words as long as people remain competent they continue to be promoted until they reach a level of incompetence where they stay....
