Occasionally, very occasionally, a client will ask me advice on how they should judge their advertising. It’s easy to tell a terrible ad from a great one, but it’s rare to have such a big gap between ideas. A more likely comparison be trying to assess average against quite good? good against great? Some creative people will advise that ‘If it’s right, you’ll feel it in your gut.’ Sometimes true, but…

Is the world turning?

I risk sounding like a bad planner here. At least he ones that make  a trend out of a coincidence Over the last decade I’ve watched creativity in advertising shift. Simplicity used to be king. It was the mountain all creatives attempted to scale. All over the globe you’d find creatives giving themselves aneurysms by trying to tell stories using as few words and pictures as possible. ‘Minimum…

BOSS No.5: Mark Denton

DAVE: Why advertising? MARK: It all happened by accident. I was quite good at drawing as a kid and my Uncle had gone to Art School and had ended up as as a Silversmith. The Dentons weren’t that imaginative (they all worked in the Family Scrap business) so ‘good at drawing’ meant that I should go to Art School too. My Mum thought I could get a job as one of those people who paint the patterns on the…

‘Dear Lenny’

LEN SIROWITZ. Hired by Bernbach in the fifties. Ran VW in the sixties. Set up his own shop in the seventies. Now in his eighties. One of the finest Art Directors ever.

  DAVE: Len, before we start, I heard a rumour you grew up in the Bronx with Ralph Lauren? LEN: Yes. In fact, I am still friendly with his older bother, who I first met pushing Ralphie in a baby carriage.

DAVE: So it’s 1953, why…

Another green scrapbook. (For the young people out there, a scrapbook is a kind of pre-internet, analogue way of bookmarking web pages, only heavier and, as it turns out, longer lasting.)

This one is full of photographic reference. It’s from about 1993/4, when Satoshi Saikusa, Raymond Meier and Rolling Stone Magazine were all the rage. At least they were in my world.

There’s a couple of images…

‘That funny looking king-size brand’ Pt 1

    In 1962, a bright, shiny new agency Collett Dickerson Pearce was offered a big account, the DuMaurier cigarette brand.

This good news was particularly timely, as many at the fledgling agency were starting to worry their jobs.

The agency turned the offer down.

Founder John Pearce told the potential client the brand was a ‘dead duck’, and he didn’t want his agency to work with ‘no-hope brands’o…

“Astonish Me!”

Legendary Harper’s Bazaar Art Director Alexey Brodovitch would always commission photographers with the same brief; ‘Astonish me!’.

At he moment, it feels like the brief given to most photographers is ‘Can you do it like that?’. On one level, it makes complete sense, how else do you get the third party, the client, to write a cheque without showing them existing imagery to give them an idea of…

Turning Stories Into Ads: Dave Trott & Paul Grubb on LWT

I’ve written previous posts on ‘turning stories into ads’, The Guardian, BBC’s Panorama and GQ. I wrote them because it struck me that although the brands were very different, what they wanted was exactly the same; An appropriate look to hold an idea about any subject under the sun. Take The Guardian, the ads I worked on ranged from the trial of mass murderer Fred West to the fact that footballer…

Tim Berners Lee.

What an absolute rascal.

Not only did he shaft the chaps at Yellow Pages, the manufacturers of Fax machines and the purveyors of XXX filth in the Soho district of London, he’s made scrapbooks virtually extinct. 

Their numbers are dwindling, reportedly below those of the Snow Leopard.

Before you could simply call up a hundreds images for any photographer or illustrator you care to…

When I got into the business GGT was like Mother, Weidens & Droga5 rolled into one. It was the place every creative from my generation wanted to work more than any other. It wasn’t just that they did good ads, they were new and PUNK, making other creative agencies appear like Emerson Lake & Palmer, pompous, overblown bores. As far as creatives were concerned GGT stood for ‘someone beginning with…

The reception at Mother London. It’s also true the other way around, Advertising can be graffiti. No one epitomises than more than the first incarnation of Kirshenbaum Bond,late eighties/early nineties. I first read about them in this Campaign profile. From a few thousand miles away, they seemed so New York. For a start they had a ‘baum’ in their name, that sounded very New Yorky to me. But…

Adnams Pt 2: Words

Agencies and clients generally shack up together after a single blind date, (or a pitch, to give it its technical name.) As a result, the relationship is a marriage of convenience – “Do you, Least Bad Agency In The Process,  take you, Client Who Needs To Look Like They’re Shaking Things Up?”

But when an old flamecomes back, the dynamic is different, you feel you have to do everything you can to…

It’s sometimes tough to argue the obvious. When you have teams of people analysing, strategizing and theorising it’s difficult to sound like the dumbest guy in the room. Take ABC, someone must have had to ‘How about we base our campaign on the idea that… “TV is good? Duh!” It doesn’t sound very creative or intelligent, but it’s right. It’s not the kind of idea that’s greeted with joy; “Shouldn’t we…

Hands Up Who’s Heard Of Jean Paul Goude?

When you start a job with the title ‘Creative‘ you feel compelled to be very creative. People starting out, Me included,  confuse being described as creative with descriptors like being  ‘nuts’, ‘bonkers’, or ‘out there’. Consequently, you tend to emulate or simply copy people who appear very weird. In 1987 I attempted to do a ‘Jean Paul Goude’. I can’t recall whether it was of lack of money, poor…

Google ‘Pat Burnham’, ‘Pat Burnham – Art Director’ or ‘Pat – Burnham – Creative Director’ and images like this pop up: I’m pretty confident this isn’t the former Fallon McElligott Creative Director in his younger days.

The was the one I was after, captured by Tom Litchenheld: After I put up the Tom McElligott post, I got a lot of feedback. Aside from the hundred-ish comments on the blog, I got a…

One of the earliest ads I can remember liking: It’s for Charles Jourdan shoes, and it just seemed so exotic. Surely fashion ads featured smiley, but unattainable models ‘demonstrating’ how to wear that particular bit of fashion, didn’t they? This one showed an arse virtually against the camera lens, it was too dark to see the whole picture, one of the shoes was at an angle where I couldn’t see it…

I used to love those long copy  ads Leagas Delaney used to specialise in.

True, I never read the copy, but the theory at the time was that if  you write a thousand words on, say, how a boot was made, you’d appear like a very well made boot. Showing a thousand words of copy was like a bit like a quality mark. But I liked them because they looked nice. Well, sophisticated, to be more precise. In…