Archive for the ‘soapbox’ Category
The power of simplicity.
Why I chose posters for my Desert Island ads.
Recently the advertising news website ‘More About Advertising’ published my choice of ads to take to a desert island. Many people have chosen their Desert Island Ads before. Often they select ads, (usually TV commercials) that others have previously chosen, which is fair enough. If you’re going to be alone, stuck on a desert island, you’re entitled to take whichever ads you want, even if a bunch of other people have picked the same ones. But I wanted to be different.
The ghost writer of Christmas present
For the second year running, I have been asked by Stephen Foster, editor of advertising news website, More About Advertising, to ghost-write an article on behalf of one of the site’s more unusual contributors. The contributor in question is Ebenezer Scrooge, the Victorian miser. Unlike his creator, Charles Dickens, Scrooge isn’t much of a writer. So the task falls to me. And what a task it is.
As if Bernbach never lived.
Compare the ads in this book with those that run today.
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.
Dribble down your chin peaches:
Is the art of copywriting dead?
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?
Helping Home-Start Woking celebrate 20 years of family support
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.
Taking the Fun out of Fundraising
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.
Images sent from a mac as email attachments appearing as embedded on a PC.
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 – 40 Years of Design and Advertising
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.