Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
(or 'towards a complete redefinition on the role of the brand strategist') There's a terrible joke or riddle I still remember from school: 'What was the longest river in the world before the Nile was discovered?'. The answer, of course, is 'the Nile'. The launch of the landmark Stephen King retrospective on planning poses an… Continue reading Planning planning
There's a brilliant post here by George Parker. As per usual, no prisoners are taken as George savages advertising's attempt to shove their films into YouTube with the new "Overlay ads". George is a fan of dogs on skateboards. Personally I don't think you can beat a cat with attention deficit disorder operating a toilet… Continue reading Dogs on skateboards or cats with ADD
There are a few things in life that sound like they're going to be great but always seem to fail in practice: fondues, windows mobile devices, the conservative party. But surely king of the hill in terms of 'will never live up to expectations' is direct marketing. Advertising is so random, we hear. So what we… Continue reading Direct to Hell
You kind of have to take your hat off to Chinwag for having a go at organising a massive summer bash for an industry once again in rude health. Big Summer '07 is their attempt to bring the industry together for a big event, oodles of (social!) networking, a drink and a dance. Well I… Continue reading Summer in the city
Interesting to read Simon Gill over at LBi Framfab Wheel Icon gushing about the Goodby Silverstein-generated 'Get the Glass' campaign (which just won a Gold at Cannes CyberLions) in the same week that Planning for Fun remembers the genius of the classic 80s Ian Rush advert by the UK Milk Marketing Board. If I could post… Continue reading Milking it
Quite suprised to read Robert Gray's article in Campaign about user-generated content and advertising. What starts well quickly becomes a bizarre instruction manual for loading your ads onto YouTube. Then we steer on to the concept of user-generated advertising. Steve Henry (of TBWA\London) has apparently taken to posting briefs in their Soho reception so that anyone can wander… Continue reading User-generated nonsense
Quite funny to see the polarity of views about digital at the Design and Art Direction (D&AD) awards - the most respected forum for rewards creativity and craft in the advertising industry. On the one hand, you got Jeremy Garner from LBi waxing lyrically about how exciting it is that both Nike+ and Leo Burnett… Continue reading D&AD in the water
If we got rid of blog postings about whether big ideas are essential to advertising, we could afford to make the whole internet 13.2% smaller (approximately). However you do that. It's like a compulsion in AdLand. On and on and on it goes. In conversations in RealLife(TM), I've been party, within advertising circles, to… Continue reading Hey, what’s the big idea?
When Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1bn in April, aQuantive said it expected its Atlas platform to benefit since advertisers were likely to have concern over impartiality when the world's biggest ad-serving network is owned by the biggest interactive adveritising seller. It seems highly unlikely when they said this that they weren't already doing a dance… Continue reading What’s the big deal?
Leading product 