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Cuprinol from i2i on Vimeo. It began almost costing my job and ended with an IPA Advertising Effectiveness award. In the early 80’s Cuprinol was one of those DIY household names that had become desperately unfashionable simply by virtue of having been around for so long. Then owned by the German Berger-Magicote giant, there was…

1985. London’s future mayor, Ken Livingstone is paragliding outside the Houses of Parliament,in a vain attempt to persuade Margaret Thatcher not to close the GLC down, under a campaign theme I wrote for the Greater London Council. 1980. I’m a Group Head at Norman Craig and Kummel; the agency was invited to present to the GLC,…

Behind the scenes, there may be more safety notices to the yard in the Underground network than anywhere else in the world. So how do you get general messages noticed? We did it with a themed poster campaign, showing each subject as a spoof film poster. Not only did awareness of each issue rise, but…

I got a call from a media pal to ask me to meet the Bembom brothers, two Dutch theme park entrepreneurs who had bought and renovated the Dreamland White Knuckle Park in Margate, with its world famous roller-coaster and some terrifying new rides; could we do a radio campaign, get the public to fill the…

You’d think a group the size of Royal Dutch Shell would have suppliers coming out of their ears. So when a little birdie told us they were stuck to deliver a set of conference materials on a tight timeframe, we only half believed it. Next thing we knew, we had a linkup with The Hague,…

When a client goes safe the upshot is often sorry.  For years Colgate-Palmolive had produced an extensive range of Ajax household cleaners, all containing much the same ingredients but with different labels, for use on floors, windows, kitchens, cookers and bathrooms. Eventually they decided to rationalize the centre ground into one product – hooray! The think-tank…

They are almost hard-wired as tranquillisers, comprising, as they tend to, a mishmash of sales figures, performance targets, teamwork palliatives and shortfall arse-kicks, all in the shadow of a zeppelin corporate ego. To add to this, Cisco’s Emerging Markets department was as global and as disparate as the international community could be. Bringing all this…

No-one wants to read your ad, sorry! No-one wants to know what you’ve got to sell or what you want to say. Ultimately, all anyone is interested in is … themselves. But talk to that bit of them and you might find you’ve held their interest long enough for your message to slip in under…

Retailers who believe advertising is entirely about content are not just barking up the wrong tree, they aren’t even in the wood. As with virtually all of broadcast advertising, it’s largely about feeling. Whatever specifics a retailer promotes, the recipients will almost always have something else in mind. But if you make the ad resonate…