A muffin company wants to make more money. It’s hard to increase their current customers weekly muffin intake – so they need add some new ones. To flip muffin fans who aren’t choosing theirs, they need to tell them about their company or muffins that will get them to try one. And tell them in a way that gets their attention. But the first thing they need to do is choose who to speak to. An ad agency? A designRead more
BLOGCAST: Graham Watson #2
I met Graham 33 years ago. My partner and I desperately wanted to work at BBH. At the end of a book crit, Graham gave us a brief and told us to come back the following week. We left excited. Maybe this test was our way in? The following Thursday we lugged a stack of ideas back to Graham detailing how we’d make Bama Thermal insoles the season’s must have for fashionistas. (Bama Thermal insoles? is there a less BBHRead more
BLOG/CAST: Graham Watson #1
In the style-obsessed 80s, no agency was more obsessed than BBH. Everything that came out of the place reeked of it. Including the staff. Their men’s toilets were stocked with tubs of hair gel (What? It was the eighties!) Their AAR reel, a tool for agencies for clients to compile pitch lists, didn’t follow the template the rest of the industry did (pasty faced public schoolboys using big words, diagrams interspersed with clips from their ads). BBH’s simply showed endingRead more
PODCAST: Mary Warlick
I’ve just finished watching ‘Coco Chanel Unbuttoned’. Not only did I discover Coco wasn’t her real name (Gabrielle), I discovered her philosophy. Pre-Coco, high end fashion used the finest, most expensive materials, like silk, lace and satin – a visual display of one’s wealth. Coco chose instead, the basic materials she’d grown up with, poor and in an orphanage. Like jersey, previously used to make men’s underwear, she used it to make dresses. She did the same with the tough,Read more
PODCAST: Roger Woodburn (1 & 2)
1 and 2? Well, it came in at just under four hours. Tell me about it? I tried cutting it. Maybe I could’ve edited out the pre-directing bit? Lost the chat about growing up; the nine months in walled hospital room with one wall missing or the time he appeared on national tv as a puppeteer. Or cut the bits about his endless list of non-directing jobs? Maybe trim the stuff about his previous bosses? But his previous bosses areRead more
PODCAST: John Stingley
There are many ways of writing ads. Simply stating that your product is good. Giving evidence that it’s good. Or making people feel that it’s good. Ai could spit out versions of the first two pretty quickly, but it’d struggle on the third. The third requires a bit of psychology, observation and understanding of what makes people tick. Bill Bernbach put it this way “It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more forRead more
Hands up who’s heard of TOM LICHTENHELD?
In the late 80s, I discovered a discount bookshop on Shaftesbury Avenue, amongst the junk, ‘Knitting For The Whole Family’ and ‘Fun With Chives’ were piles American advertising books I’d never heard of; One Show Annuals. They were dirt cheap – £4.99. For the cost of one D&AD Annual I could buy six One Shows. So I bought six One Shows. The work was a revelation. Bolder, funnier and less genteel than the stuff in the D&AD. One agency stoodRead more
ROY GRACE SITE. With Allen Richardson
Roy Grace may well be the best ad guy you’ve never heard of. But you’ll recognise some of his Volkswagen ads below, created at DDB between 1965 and 1986. Whereas most creatives will lean towards a particular medium – Roy was as good in print as he was in tv. Many creatives make their names on one, great account, like a Nike or Volkswagen, Roy did great work across everything; from J&B Rare whisky to Alka-Seltzer, from Chanel to SOSRead more
ANOTHER POST ON POSTERS.
Clever-clogs, San Franciscan adman Howard Gossage once said that advertising had a responsibility to society not to pollute our environment. Particularly outdoor, as everybody was exposed to it. I’m sure everyone in marketing at the time nodded sagely in agreement, then got back to polluting. After all, job one is shifting product. Creating a more pleasant trip to the shops is an indulgence. Isn’t it? If you believe dull, ugly ads shift more product. Do they get you to buy?Read more
COPY SAFARI THOUGHTS.
Last week, Vikki Ross asked me to do one of her Copy Safaris. A stroll around London judging advertising in the wild, then posting on Twitter. One of the good things is that you don’t pick and choose, you comment on everything; the good, the bad and the fugly. One of the benefits of having to give an instant take, often on the move, is you can’t overthink it, you react more like the rest of the people on theRead more
PODCAST: Adrian Lyne
In 1969, fourteen years after the first commercial aired in Britain, colour arrived. The bar was raised. Ambitious ads could now go beyond the over-lit, creakily acted black & white output from adland. Ads, well, the good ones, started to look like they could’ve been snipped from a movie. But they were still pretty formal. A couple of years later, a young producer decides he wants to stop producing ads and start shooting them Rather than chase the formal perfection,Read more
WHAT I LIKED before I knew what I was SUPPOSED TO LIKE – Paul Burke
My childhood, to put it mildly, was not a middle class one, so I was spared that haughty parental diktat to watch BBC and not ITV. Thames and LWT were our channels of choice which meant that I grew up watching Opportunity Knocks, Benny Hill, Man About the House and The Sweeney. Good job too because watching the commercial break during every episode of On the Buses turned out to be the perfect preparation for my future career. I mustRead more
PODCAST: Dave Brown
When I put these blogs together I build up a file. Work for every client goes into a file, that goes into the appropriate agency file, the agency are numbered so that they come chronologically. It sounds a faff, it is a faff, but the only any way I can do it. Anyway, the last file is generally ‘P.R’ – all the news clippings, interviews and pictures that the individual has accumulated over the years. It helps me get aRead more
Podcast: MICHAEL WOLFF
Leap before you look. That’s written on the back of Michael’s business cards. He prefers instinct over logic; everyone can access to logic, so they all end up in the same place. At Wolff Olins he took a brief to rebrand a paint company, now most would end up with rainbows, peacocks or some colourful iconography. Not Michael. He chose a fox, because ‘the owner reminded me of a wily fox’. When Bowyer’s needed a new logo, Michael went withRead more
PODCAST: HORRY
You can’t advertise a product unless you can get attention. You can’t get attention without standing out. You can’t stand out without being different. You can’t do different if you think the same. If you think different, you’re are different. But, being different is a problem in ad agencies. A BBH Planner once complained ‘the problem with this place is they can’t accommodate black sheep’. Equally, I doubt TBWA embrace disruptive people to create disruptive work. Why hire people who challengeRead more
CHARLES SAATCHI.
He changed British creativity, global advertising and the world of Art. But unlike most big names in our business, Charles Saatchi has a tiny digital footprint, in terms of his advertising career. Only half a dozen photos, only two interviews and just a handful of credits on Saatchi & Saatchi’s creative work. Being slightly delusional, I’ve reached out many times in an attempt to get him to do a podcast – I’d love to pick his brain about those earlyRead more
PODCAST: Cabell Harris
Ad agencies often claim to have no set style, that each campaign is created from scratch, bespoke for every client. It may be true for the mediocre ones, but not the great ones. Nobody used to confuse the work of AMV, BBH and GGT. The same with Wieden, Chiat and Fallon. Today, stick me in front of a tv and I’d fancy my chances at picking the Droga5. Or spotting the Uncommon on a tube platform. Because although ad agenciesRead more
PODCAST: Malcolm Venville
Whoever it’s with, whenever I do these podcasts, personal links seem to turn up along the way. Things I’d forgotten or been unaware of – Paul Weiland was once my landlord, I judged the One Show with Gerry Graf 15 years earlier, David Holmes drew a poster for me 25 years earlier. This isn’t like that, this time it really is personal (isn’t that the Jaws 2 strap line?) Malcolm and I started out together; he’d shoot pictures for free,Read more
PODCAST: R. O. Blechman
That was the first drawing I saw by R. O. Blechman. I loved it instantly. Firstly, it’s a great observation of how companies operate, particularly ad agencies. But also, I was in the ideas business and I’d never seen them represented like that – in different levels from a tiny lightbulb to an enormous chandelier. I also loved the naive style of the drawing. It looked like a note one naughty child would pass to another secretly in class. DrawnRead more
BODDINGTONS. The Cream of Advertising.
‘There is a possibility that ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Cream of Manchester ad campaign, which ran from 1991 until 1999, is responsible for the transformation of that city’. – Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 2019. I know, it sounds ludicrous? Who knows whether it’s true, but one thing is unarguable; they took a little-known bitter from the North of England and created a campaign that made it famous. Even beyond our shores. Here it is being referenced in Friends. IRead more