John Lewis has been much in the news recently, reporting a huge 99% dip in profits and confirming 1838 redundancies across the partnership. Hot on the heels of these shocks, a new television ad has been launched to a decidedly mixed reaction. Whilst it's garnered an average number of positive comments on social media, The [...]
On Sunday afternoon I was belatedly taking down the Christmas decorations whilst listening to the new Bowie album, Blackstar. I was contemplating the obsession with death on the two accompanying videos with Major Tom’s jewel-encrusted skull lying on a distant planet and an eyeless prophet trying to rise from his deathbed with memento mori scattered around [...]
We live in strange times in the land of marketing. My inbox is replenished daily by a stream of snake oil salesmen trying to sell me the next can’t fail marketing trick. Or equally often a seminar at which you can hear someone talking about it at vast expense. Some of the sub-Brentian marketing speak [...]
Last Friday a new advertising panel show aired and it did nothing to raise the standard of dire advertising-inspired programmes on TV. It is debatable whether the world really needs another panel show – OK they are cheap but sadly so are most of the jokes. This latest effort, the Byronically titled The Mad Bad Ad [...]
Finding your inbox besieged by e-shots is a common problem. From the recipient’s point of view this can be a minor irritation, but for the sender the implications are more concerning. On some days I receive over 100 e-shots, so the question is how do you make your company’s effort stand out. The advent of [...]
In a visual age, copywriting may seem to have become a downgraded part of the creative process, and yet in many ways it should now be even more central. The need to present your product or service as succinctly as possible is crucial in today’s marketing environment. Twitter’s 140 characters are, after all, what copywriters have been doing [...]
According to the Evening Standard, those ‘at the frontiers of technology’ reckon emails are dying out. On closer inspection of the article it appears the aforementioned gurus prove to be none other than PR men for Facebook and Twitter. No vested interest there then. Especially as their thesis is that all organisations will eventually adopt [...]
The Times have revealed that 105,000 people have subscribed to the online version of the paper. Despite their proclaimed joy at this figure, it in fact represents a fall of 90% in their online readership. It is also a cumulative figure across 4 months and may contain the same people subscribing more than once. Not [...]
The news that Unilever had crowdsourced its new Peperami TV advertisement should have sent shivers throughout the advertising world. The idea is that a client can post a brief on an opensource website and wait for the hungry creatives to respond. In the case of Peperami, this was 1800 people. The prize of writing the [...]
I was recently subjected to a spate of ads on my Facebook page crudely targeting me specifically by my age. I didn’t find this engaging, but rather intrusive and hectoring. It got me thinking about the dangers of media that knows too much about its viewers. I’m OK with the fact that when you view [...]