Find your voice and get your story straight
Category: <span>Advertising</span>

Category: Advertising

What Spongebob Squarepants can teach us about modern ideas and capturing the imagination.

Patrick : All you need is a box. Spongebob : And imagination. It is the oldest parenting cliché in the book that kids play more with boxes than with the toys that came in them. Boxes are more fun because they provide an outlet for imagination. And it’s not just …

T-Mobile Royal Wedding. Big, clever, funny… but not wide enough.

T-Mobile has disobeyed its own (flash) mob rules with its royal wedding ad. Last night, on the train home, I jotted down a list of T-Mobile values on the back of a receipt. (Sorry Evernote, I still love you.) These values are my out-take from the brand’s recent flash-mob style …

Magpie outing.

  Before The Creatives See It is a Facebook page that exposes and “outs” the magpie instincts of advertising creatives by sharing the original content that it predicts will be appropriated into advertising in the near future. A creative director that I used to work with was refreshingly candid about …

Viral is an objective, not a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Seven words that make your heart sink. The seven words that made Patricia McDonald‘s heart sink in the February post of the month (Planning for participation) were… Then people can upload their own versions. I completely second that emotion. But I’d also add the seven words that make every digital …

John Lydon and the Country Life haka.

Advertising effectiveness moves in mysterious ways. One of the unexpected effects of the Country Life Butter campaign featuring ex Sex Pistol John Lydon was that it funded the reformation and American tour of PIL (Public Image Limited). As Jimmy Kimmel says in this interview, he is “fuelled by butter.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04loHm0iRtA] …

Andrex “Nintendogs”. Fit to wipe your arse?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZ88Byh544] I predict that this ad will eventually be deemed an experiment that didn’t work. Whilst it’s always tempting to push the creative envelope, and to explore new and original executions of a long running campaign, there are some things that are best left alone. Incredibly powerful brand properties being …

Foster’s for breakfast, or maybe Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

“Foster’s for breakfast”, in my student days, was shorthand for a certain type of holiday. A type of holiday whose opening ceremony would be a few early morning pints of the Amber Nectar in the airport lounge. The breakfast of champions. Well Foster’s has replaced the early morning pints with …

The correct answer to any Facebook question is “er”. (And the real objective of Facebook advertising).

I presented the EdTwinge case study at a social media conference in Edinburgh last week. It was a reasonably lively affair with plenty of questions from the audience. Not surprisingly several of these questions related to what brands and organisations can and can not do on Facebook. And it struck …