Three sister agencies were merged into a single agency called Signal. And it fell to me to define the values of the merged entity. The output of that process is contained in the Slideshare file embedded below. It is designed to be self-explanatory and easy to digest. The output reflects …
Pete Townshend stole his trademark arm swing from Keith Richards. And Andrew Oldham cut the Rolling Stones from six members to five, not for an musical reasons, but to improve their aesthetic and their memorability. Here are three extraordinary passages from an extraordinary book; Stoned by Andrew Loog Oldham. Firstly …
My career in advertising was mainly spent erecting credible facades on behalf of my clients. That sounds like a disparaging comment from a jaded ad-hack. But there is no disparaging intent behind the statement. It is what the industry mostly does. We search for compelling truths about brands and bring …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URxLYupra5s&has_verified=1 Guinness has made a Honda ad. Only the absence of a Garrison Keillor voiceover left me in any doubt when I saw it for the first time in the inordinately long sequence of ads that preceded Skyfall at the local Odeon. Otherwise I would have bet my house on …
The Daily Mash doesn’t give a fuck. It will take the piss out of or start a fight with anyone if there’s a satirical point to be made or a pomposity-pricking laugh to be had at their expense. Just ask Mitt Romney. So, on the face of it, its approach …
A long time ago in a faraway decade I was promoted to account director at BBH. But the cloud to go with this silver lining was that the promotion parachuted me into a difficult second album situation with the Cadbury client. The first album was this very popular, very successful …
Attitude and behaviour are the chicken and egg of the marketing world. For the longest time it has been generally assumed that you change attitudes in order to change behaviour. There is a pleasing, intuitive, logical linearity to that view of the world. It’s a view of the world that …
But soft, what light through yonder taxi window breaks? This, this light through yonder taxi window breaks. The breaking light is coming from an art installation sun commissioned by Tropicana. When I first heard about this I was impressed. I was impressed because it ain’t easy being a packaged goods …
A year ago I wrote about “The method behind the madness that is @Betfairpoker“. The post was based on a telephone interview with Richard Bloch, Betfair’s Head of Global PR. At the time the question on my lips was the question on the lips of most people who were encountering …
Newcastle United has changed the name of its famous stadium from St James’ Park to the Sports Direct Arena. In the parlance much beloved of digital media planners, the stadium is now “paid media” for Sports Direct. (I am not going to get sidetracked here by the fact that …
