Every year I forget. But this year, finally; a Christmas related post in time for Christmas! Does blogging get any slicker? For most people, Christmas cards are an opportunity to reach out to family and friends to let them know you’re thinking of them. For Creatives they’re an opportunity to win yourself an award. Here’s a few examples. My agency was no different. We’d find a bit of budget to help us send out season’s greetings to all our friends,Read more
Posts tagged: #Dye Holloway Murray
YE OLDE ADVERTS.
Before we start, full disclosure: I’m not anti old ads. I quite like them. But weirdly, a surprising number of creatives leaders don’t. At least, they say they don’t in public, I’m sure in private they must have a cheeky flip through the odd One Show annual now and again? They put out phrases next to their profiles like ‘All about the new’, ‘Future facing creative’, ‘Forwards, not backwards’ ‘I never look back’. It sounds so cool. Frankly, it makes meRead more
GUT v NUMBERS.
Whether it’s qual, quant or O.T.S, ROI, A/B testing or big data, when numbers turn up in marketing they must be obeyed. They’re distilled and translated into ‘rules’. Everyone wants their next campaign to be better than their last, but applying these ‘learnings’ to creative work often kills it. It can feel uncomfortable, because what’s being said makes total sense, but the effect is to complicate and make your ad more like every other ad out there. The ones youRead more
PODCAST: Richard Foster.
Read any article on good copywriting and you’ll find the same names appear. David Abbott and Tony Brignull usually battle for the top two slots, Tim Delaney and John Salmon fight it out for third place. But talk to writers about the same subject and another name appears; Richard Foster. Richard is the only one of the five who has worked under the other four. (He may well be the only writer to have worked under the four?) For aRead more
PODCAST: Me (Pt.2)
When I interviewed Sir Alan Parker he kept saying ‘take that out, take this out!’. I tried to explain that these ads were part of his journey, they shed a little light on his journey from the mailroom to Hollywood. He was having none of it ‘I’m a less is more guy, you’re a more is never enough guy’. He’s right, well, in terms of ads I’m definitely a less is more, but in terms of the blog, interviewing peopleRead more
Working for fruit.
A few months after setting up Campbell Doyle Dye a publisher came in for a chemistry meeting. Before we’d set up I’d been at AMV/BBDO, The Economist was one of the clients I looked after, so I was excited to share the work Sean and I had produced as it was not only relevant, it was arguably the best campaign for a publisher ever? “Did you do those here?” “Er…well, no, that was at our last agency, Abbott Mead Vickers”. “Oh?”Read more
VERTU: Handle with care.
I once pitched for Vertu (I’d never heard of it either). It turned out to be a luxury mobile phone brand and when I say luxury, I mean luxury, some phones were a hundred grand a pop. Ironically, given some of their products were made of solid gold and had diamonds stuck on them, the brief was “to take the bling out of the brand”. Their previous advertising had desperately tried to justify the price – ‘thousands of hours ofRead more
POSTERSCOPE: Selling empty spaces.
‘‘I’ve just had lunch with someone who used to work at Simons Palmer, I told him he needed some advertising for his company, Posterscope, and you’d do it. You could do something good like that old Mike Shafron ad?’’ – Mark Denton.I remembered the ad well, the ads within it were great. But the more I thought about it the more I had an issue with it – the ideas within it were too good, who can think of ideas as goodRead more
VOLKSWAGEN: ‘Abbo’.
‘‘Volkswagen want us to pitch.’’ If you’ve just started an agency – that’s what you dream of hearing. It was the Commercial Vehicles division, but was still big and still Volkswagen. Volkswagen; DDB, Bill Bernbach, Helmut Krone, etc. What an opportunity! But it’s 2009, the post-bank meltdown is really starting to bite. We’re officially in a recession and Volkswagen vans are dearer than non-Volkswagen vans. I need to find a writer who can actually write. Who can make the caseRead more