Advertising and marketing copywriter based in Norwich. I can help you to build your brand by helping you to sell your products and services.
Dave Dye, one of the UK's most respected and experienced Art Directors, runs a fantastic blog called Stuff From The Loft that features stuff from his (metaphorical) loft. It's packed to the rafters with interviews, stories, case studies, portfolios and all manner of flotsam and jetsam that shows how fascinatingly fun and creative advertising used to be. Truly marvellous.
Always entertaining, often funny and never wrong, Bob Hoffman's new book should be just the thing we need to cut through the endless marketing drivel that's out there. As the promotional blurb states:
"In marketing today, delusional thinking isn't just acceptable -- it's mandatory. In "Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey", Bob Hoffman, author of "101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising" and "The Ad Contrarian" explains how marketers and advertisers have lost touch with consumers and are living in a fantasy land of their own invention -- fed by a cultural echo chamber of books, articles and conferences in which people like them talk to people like them."
Buy it here for only $1.56.
Sexist advertising - a fine old tradition that carries on to the present day (thanks to American Apparel). A number of women share their views.
The excellent - and always correct - Bob Hoffman offers free advice to McDonald's new CMO: someone who is well-versed in the cliches and jargon of modern-day marketing:
1. Clean up the f***ing stores.
2. Serve the burgers off the grill instead of those plastic drawers.
3. Teach the crew how to smile.
Full post here: McDonald's Jargon-Fest.
A great series of fun ads that get across the message that WeightWatchers isn't just a last resort for the morbidly obese: it's there for everyone, for both you and me (well, not me). There's an ad for men, an ad for parents and an ad for busy people like you and me (well, not me).
The production and editing is superb. But it's the carefully chosen cast of characters that make the difference: stressed out mums, busy management types, the working man, drinkers, eaters, joggers... the lot. And best of all, you get the impression that taking part in WeightWatchers will be fun, easy and completely tailored to you. Great work all round.
From Northern Ireland, yet another public safety ad that relies on shock value and the dramatic consequences of speeding in order to promote safer driving. What it doesn't do - as these ads never do - is talk to people on a level they can relate to. Nobody who speeds seriously thinks they're going to end up killing a child. It's such an implausible, unthinkable thing - the kind of thing that only happens to other people. This distance of thinking is stretched even further when the message includes a whole picnic blanket of kids crushed to death by a rolling car. So ludicrous and cartoony that it's almost comical.
I live in a nice middle-class area with loads of houses and kids and schools and shops. The speed limit around here is clearly shown as 20mph. Yet every morning and afternoon, when the kids are to and fro-ing from school, I gnash my teeth at the sight of nice middle-class mums driving around like idiots (at the same time, of course, as displaying their 'Child on Board' stickers in the back windows of their nice middle-class cars.)
If you asked people what kind of people speed near schools, I imagine most would reply that they were pretty awful people. And I imagine most people wouldn't dream of admitting that they speed: after all, that's the kind of thing only awful people do.
(There are too many 'peoples' in that paragraph.)
A much more effective campaign, I reckon, would be us collectively adopting and promoting the following sentiment: "Only Scumbags Speed". The road signs would carry it, the information leaflets that kids bring home from school, TV ads, radio ads, posters... the lot. "Only Scumbags Speed". We keep it, we repeat it and we encourage ourselves to ensure that in the eyes of other people we're never seen as the kind of scumbag who speeds. Seriously, who'd want to be thought of as a scumbag? The really good thing about it is that it's self-evidently true: the only people who, for instance, choose to speed near schools are scumbags. I don't care how nice and middle-class and worthy you think you are. You do something like that - you're a scumbag.
Of course, the government would never go for anything that uses the word scumbag. They can show kids being crushed to death and whine about the amount of people needlessly killed on our roads every year, but using the word 'scumbag' - well, that's going too far. They wouldn't want to offend anyone.
The likelihood of me killing a kid this morning as I drive 40mph up a 20mph street? Highly unlikely. The likelihood of people thinking I'm a scumbag for doing that? Fairly likely.