‘Remember those great Volkswagen ads?’

Back in the sixties I was a messenger boy in a small advertising agency. For some reason the agency had an international department. This meant I could get my hands on copies of Life Magazine, The New Yorker and McCall’s. Flicking through these magazines, I started to see ads, the like of which I had never seen before. Mostly, they were for Volkswagen.

We were asked to find a director of some artistic subtlety to produce a piece of animated work that, whilst being CGI-based, had to have an ‘organic’ or ‘illustrated’ quality instead of the more normal ‘hard-gloss’ look, in order to give a more appealing feeling to this quality product.

Last Thursday, at the Ham Yard Hotel, the Direct Marketing Association hosted part of their Great British Copywriting Campaign. I was invited to join a panel on the stage of the hotel’s theatre to discuss the demise or otherwise of copywriting. The question that underpinned the evening was this: Is the art of copywriting dead?

This year is the 20th anniversary of family-based charity Home-Start Woking. Anatomised is helping the Home-Start planning team create an event on 31st Oct.

I need your support and I haven’t got much time. Anyone who knows me will realise that the invitation, ‘Let’s walk!’ may as well have been followed by ‘on hot coals’ such is the dread it inspires in me. So you can only imaging my bewilderment when I tell you that somehow I’ve managed to commit myself to walk 20km on the 6th of September.

The mention of Suriname caught David Hughes’ attention when he first heard about J P Knight’s river transport services in South America. He had spent time in the country when he was much, much, younger. In fact his first job in Advertising was in Suriname.

You can’t take your money with you when you go, but you can make absolutely sure that it doesn’t get frittered away in taxes.

A good question, and one that head of Openeye Consulting, Deborah Samuel, asked us at Anatomised.

The answer to this question astonished us at Anatomised. But let us tell you how we came to ask the question in the first place.

Asylum Aid provides legal representation to vulnerable asylum seekers in the UK. This document sets out what the charity does and how it does it.

If I had a penny for every time I’ve sent email attachments from my Mac to PC users, only to be told that the image arrived embedded rather than attached, I’d be able to give up the day job.

This post originally appeared on the David and Associates blog. It was one of the more commented posts and with the closing of that blog I thought it worth bringing over here.

REWIND features on our own bookshelves partly because it chronicles a period that includes a significant chunk of our working lives in the industry and features many of our design and advertising heroes. It’s also included because it features a couple of pieces of work drawn from our own archives: The Tate by Tube and Becks Bier advertising for Scottish & Newcastle Breweries.