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Cider company HP Bulmer, UK owners of Jamaican lager brand, Red Stripe, had a budget of £35K to do some press ads and a small poster to put in stores across the country, to see if the brand could appeal beyond its ethnic core market. You couldn’t do much nationally with that kind of money, but…

I was sent to Portugal, with a packaging designer from Michael Peters Associates, on a brief to come up with a name for Sandeman’s White Port. We were booked for a week – the agency were charging my time  at  £2000 a day so were happy to let me out of the office. Our schedule…

In 1986, the London agency I was working in was bought by a group representing News Corp and I found myself working on The Sun newspaper, which was never going to last; so I left and went to Ireland to stay with friends. While there I came across the most extraordinary group (I use the…

At first glance, the banner space at the bottom of your local paper may not look like the perfect spot to launch a successful business-building campaign. But regular fortnightly slots in the Maidenhead Advertiser helped our family lawyer client grow more than 300% in just three years. You can’t fault the logic. When a marriage…

Rosser Reeves and Ted Bates came up with the concept of the Unique Selling Point or Proposition to meet the challenges presented by the proliferation of parity products and services in the 20th Century. When there was no Unique Selling Point to be made, its equally important sibling, the Unique Selling Personality, came into play.…

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,…