Archive for the ‘soapbox’ Category
How International Rescue came to the rescue And led to a TV commercial that features in a book written nearly 40 years later.
Come with me now, back to the seventies. Paul Smith and I are sitting in our office at Collett, Dickenson and Pearce, the advertising agency. Suddenly, the looming presence of Frank Lowe, the agency’s managing director, makes itself felt. (Frank did a lot of looming in those days.) In his hand he has a script […]
A happy choice of musicMusic may be the food of love but it was the lifeblood of Hamlet commercials.
In last Friday’s edition of the advertising website, More About Advertising, editor Stephen Foster reprinted an article that had been written by the late John Webster for a magazine called Commercials. Stephen published John Webster’s article as part of his Desert Island Ads series. John Webster very gamely chose ten commercials from an agency that […]
The unforgettable Alan Waldie The legendary art director Alan Waldie died last Friday aged 76. Here is just one memory of him.
Alan Waldie was unforgettable for me long before I ever met him. My first creative boss, Ron Brown, told me stories about Alan from his time working with Alan at, I think, the Roger Pryor advertising agency. My first full time art director, Phillip Eldridge, also regaled me with the antics of Waldie, gleaned from […]
The fallability of research It’s astonishing how often research jumps to the wrong conclusion. Brexit is just one example.
As I write this I have beside me Thursday’s London Evening Standard. The headline reads as follows: ‘Remain ahead in final poll’. Also beside me I have Friday’s Evening Standard, whose front-page headline shouts ‘We’re Out’. So, as with last year’s General Election, the polls have got it wrong again. Not that I’m surprised.
Speed kills, but it’s the lifeblood of a website.A slow loading website can lead to slow moving sales.
Research has shown that visitors to websites possess little in the way of patience. They give up if the page they are trying to access doesn’t load in a couple of seconds. They soon turn their attention to some speedier site.
The tyranny of the blank piece of wallIt’s often said that the writing’s on the wall for advertising. Might that be because of quite the opposite: there’s no writing on the wall?
The other day I was invited to visit the new offices of AMVBBDO. And what splendid offices they are, too. Occupying a modern building in Southwark Street, with views over The Shard, this sparkling workspace, is set amongst a complex of shops and restaurants, a stone’s throw from the Tate Modern.
A timely reminder of Trumbo
This is a rewrite of a post I published a few years back. It concerns the feature film, Lonely Are The Brave. But seeing as the feature film’s writer, Dalton Trumbo, is the subject of a new movie I thought it was timely to update it.
A celebration of the career of Alan Waldie.
The other day I was privileged to experience something that one person who was present described as ‘magical’. It was a specially-convened event to celebrate the remarkable career of Alan Waldie. Alan is noted for many great pieces of work but most famously for the Benson & Hedges ‘Swimming Pool’ commercial which won a coveted D&AD Black Pencil in the late seventies. Last Tuesday, Alan was presented with another Black Pencil, to mark his extraordinary career. But rather than describing the event in detail, I can do no better than to publish below a press release prepared by Tim Lindsay, CEO of D&AD. Here it is.
If only the management of Volkswagen had heeded this ad.
A great English copywriter wrote this ad when he worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York in the sixties.
If only Volkswagen had clung to the ethos that it embodies.
Being Jeremy Corbyn Of all the people to resemble, why, in my case, did it have to be the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition?
Why couldn’t it have been somebody like George Clooney? Or Cary Grant? Or Martin Shaw, even? No such luck. It turns out that my near-doppelganger is not so much a Clooney as a loony. I wouldn’t mind, but people keep pointing out the resemblance, even complete strangers. Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that, like Jeremy, I live in Islington.
How the ads were done
Most great ads have an interesting story behind them: how the writers and art directors dreamed up the ideas, and what inspired them. I thought it would be an interesting idea to research some of these stories and describe the process behind their creation. I pitched this idea to Stephen Foster at the advertising website ‘More About Advertising’.
Mixing it with Nate Brown at Merchant House.
What happened when Merchant House’s head mixologist got to work with Asterley Brothers new amaro – and what Mark Andrews and I thought of the results.
Rob and Jim, the Asterley Brothers, have created Dispense. ‘A modern British amaro’ is how they describe it. However, its roots are firmly Sicilian.
Having been invited to take part in the beta testing, Mark Andrews and I took two sample bottles down to Nate Brown, head mixologist, at Merchant House, a bar in the City near St Paul’s.