Marketing
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Preparations for Chad
Planning now well advanced for the trip to Chad in two weeks. For me this has already meant several jabs, and the final one, yellow fever, will be done privately next week. I’ve also had to buy some lightweight, UV and mosquito-resistant clothes and urgently renew my passport. Africa, then. I have never been there…
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Just because you hate an advert doesn’t mean it doesn’t work
I really, really despise the campaign for Haribo sweets, currently making a return to UK screens as welcome as a bout of acid reflux. What’s weird is that I don’t understand my own irrational, visceral loathing. After all, it is patently intended to be a funny and cute little advert about how Haribo sweets bring out the child in…
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Hatred in advertising, Mumbai’s dark Mirror
Dark and fascinating advert here for the Mumbai Mirror, made by Taproot India found thanks to bestadsontv.com It shows how the Mumbai Mirror newspaper is hated by those up to no good. We see a doctor conducting illegal organ harvesting, a pair of sex criminals, a woman prostituting young girls and the public scandal of train…
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Play, engagement and climate-changed futures
Yesterday I attended a talk by Ken Eklund, a writer and games designer based in California, at an event organised by The University of Brighton, and excellently hosted by Matt Locke of Storythings. Ken creates ‘cli-fi’ games that allow people to ‘immerse themselves without fear’ in challenging future environmental scenarios. One game requires people to locate unusual…
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Looking the other way: Paul Fusco and the power of implication in marketing
Paul Fusco is quoted in The Guardian this morning. In 1968, I was assigned by Look magazine to get on the train bearing Robert F Kennedy’s remains from New York to Washington DC. Barred from photographing the Kennedy family in their private car, I took note of the people lined up along the track to…
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Zen and the art of flogging stuff
In the frenzy of creating concepts to an agency deadline, invariably someone will propose a ‘Zen’ execution. Usually this can be attributed to a free-floating miasma of stress, or too much coffee. It is a knee-jerk idea that you see all too often. This Zen territory (as I call it) has little to do with the school…
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The Sun sinks even lower
The Rupert Murdoch-owned UK tabloid The Sun reached new depths this week. That Murdoch, an Australian-American can so blatantly intervene in British politics is of course galling enough. His discredited newspapers have been implicated in the phone hacking scandals, necessitating a personal apology from Murdoch to the family of a murdered child Milly Dowler, after his…
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Postmodern Homelistic Art? Guilty as charged
Hilarious. I’ve not enjoyed an advert as much for a long while. Love the mockery of po-faced artistic statements and its talk of ‘Postmodern Homelistic Art’. Also hats off for recognising the latent botcher in us all and how, having botched something, we attempt to justify it. Madefor Promart by the Fahrenheit DDB agency in…
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Accidentally on purpose
Many creative people learn to accommodate seemingly random events into their process. Film maker David Lynch, for example, invented a terrifying character when he glimpsed Frank Silva, a set dresser on the pilot of Twin Peaks, accidentally reflected in a mirror during the filming of a scene. Frank Silva was then cast as Bob, a demonic…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 