The advertising industry glorifies cleverness and wit. Clever ideas are the ones that win at all the award shows. But clever can also lose the customer. Sometimes folks in our industry use their cleverness to feel superior over the poor schmucks who are their target market. That lack of humility can turn off the target… Read More: The Argument Against Cleverness »
We had done a very successful Texaco promotion featuring Fuji Photo Film. The commercial was a winner at the International Film & TV Festival in New York. The commercial presented a man driving in to a Texaco station on a giant 35mm camera asking for a fill up. Customers received a free roll of Fuji… Read More: How to Shoot Yourself in a New Business Pitch »
Anyone who has worked in marketing or advertising, particularly in packaged goods, has worked on a lot of new product ideas that were never a success in the market. Some products died in concept testing, some actually made it to prototype then test market in regional or local markets, and some made it nationally before… Read More: Lost Products: The Hall of Lame »
If you ever doubted that the social standards in the world are changing and changing rapidly, just listen carefully to an oldies music station. It will soon occur to you that the lyrics might be incomprehensible to today’s young adults. Phrases like “you’re still living in a paper doll world” or even newer, Sheryl Crow… Read More: Listening to Oldies Music »
One of the most important parts of effective communication is completing the Feedback Loop from the creation of the advertising all the way to the customer. If you read, Overcome AD-versity, you learned what goes into creation of the right message. After all that effort, you want to make sure the message doesn’t get garbled.… Read More: Keeping the Team On Message »
Mr. Hepburn, our high school counsellor, gave us all career advice at our mostly blue-collar high school, Edmonds. He had us all do an aptitude test to help him give us that guidance. My test showed I liked to make up things and was good with communications. It suggested Journalism. On the other hand, academically,… Read More: Sorry Mr. Hepburn, The Path Forked »
Working on Madison Avenue can be challenging. There are as many setbacks as there are achievements when you are playing the Ad Game. I thought it was something like a game of snakes and ladders. A work buddy of mine, Bob Sayles, and I decided to actually make a board game of it. I was… Read More: The Ad Game – It’s Hard to Win »
Long ago people used to dry their clothes outdoors on a rope or wire called a clothes line. The clothes dried fine outside in the sunshine, maybe a little stiff, but fine and smelling like outdoors. But sometimes it rained. Or the wind blew the clothes off the line. Washing the clothes was also a… Read More: Products That Compensate for Change »
I spent more than a year working on Jell-O Pudding’s advertising in the early 1970s when I lived in New York. My job was to come up with new advertising directions, back ups to those already running, and also to help with new product development. We got a new TV campaign running featuring Bill Cosby,… Read More: Me Versus the Shah of Iran »
One of my first major assignments in advertising was as the Account Executive on Jell-O Pudding at Young & Rubicam, a huge advertising agency in New York. I went to meet the client in White Plains for the first time a couple weeks later that summer and was surprised at all the varieties of pudding… Read More: Converting a Mistake into Team Building »