Category Archives: advertising

It’s OK to be an idiot. Sometimes.

Share In the age of social media, every­body want to be an expert and nobody ever wants to be an idiot. Ones idiocy could be on their per­ma­nent Twitter-record after all. But I’d like to stand up and say it’s OK to be an idiot, at least some­times. Early in my career I worked with

Top 10 things about being an advertising copywriter.

Share More than a few of my posts have been about the dif­fi­cul­ties of work­ing in adver­tis­ing these days. It’s always been a com­pet­i­tive indus­try with high burn out and turn over. But it’s been even worse lately thanks to the econ­omy and the rapid change in tech­nol­ogy. But there are also some really great

I play utility

Share If you work as a cre­ative, chances are your job isn’t nearly as glam­orous as you imag­ined it would be in port­fo­lio school. Like the kid shoot­ing hoops in the dri­ve­way, or prac­tic­ing his pitch­ing  on the mound, you most likely imag­ined your­self becom­ing the hero by apply­ing your skills against adver­sity. Instead of

The business of Art

Share When I first started in the ad busi­ness I couldn’t decide if I was an artist, a crafts­man, or a hack. Now I’ve come to real­ize that I’m all of those at the same time, maybe even on the same day. It may be a cre­ative busi­ness, but busi­ness it is and some­times in

Where is Alex’s chorus? Or the triangle of ad deprevity.

Share Imag­ine a tri­an­gle. On one side is push­ing tobacco. The other side is glam­or­iz­ing gam­bling. And the last side is exploit­ing chil­dren. When I started my career this was the ter­rain I promised myself I would never work. And I never have. And, frankly, my moral com­pass hasn’t wavered much through the years. But I’ve

Why your advertising sucks. You forgot why you hired your agency.

Share Some peo­ple who get divorced from or break up with a lover often talk about how they for­got why they ever got involved with their spe­cial some­one in the first place. Or they just won­der what hap­pened to the love. As if it was a mag­i­cal thing that came and went with the wind. These

Gordon Ramsey — Epic Creative Director

Share I’m not really the biggest fan of his or even watch his shows too often but I do find him a curi­ous spec­ta­cle. Mostly because he exem­pli­fies what so wrong and right about lead­ers in the cre­ative fields. First top five of what’s right wrong with his cre­ative lead­er­ship. 1) Yelling. If you have

Turning the tables at the agency with social media

Share Prob­a­bly the most fun thing about the agency embrac­ing social media has been the inter­nal learn­ing around the agency’s blog. Along with Jonathan, I play a cen­tral role in edit­ing and admin­is­trat­ing it. Being a copy­writer, you may think I’m going “yeah, it’s funny to see an AE strug­gle with the blank page.” (It’s not,

New post on Agency Blog — Thank you for sharing

Share Part of the creative’s job these days is to develop ways to encour­age shar­ing a new cam­paign. It’s no longer enough to cre­ate bril­liant cre­ative that con­nects with the audi­ence. Now, cre­ative needs to be so pow­er­ful that it encour­ages “engage­ment” and “shar­ing.” Read the rest here.

Are we in a post-branding world?

Share Eco­nomic pres­sure has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion where mar­keters are ask­ing for imme­di­ate results before they ask for per­ceived lux­u­ries like brand recog­ni­tion. Clients are demand­ing met­rics that con­nect mar­ket­ing to sales. Met­rics for things like brand recog­ni­tion are tough to tie to con­crete things like sales and thus to ROI. They’re also push­ing for media