Increase it by say 70%

Struggling with clients who want big logos rather than big ideas?

Then you need a tube of new 'Make My Logo Bigger' cream.

On or offline. Ad or brochure. "Make The Logo Bigger' cream works on any logo.

Click here to watch this amazing product at work.

If you need a tube in a hurry, them simply click here right now!

Why?

First time I saw this video I thought it was a piss-take.

Just another cornball homemade video that a couple of stoners had uploaded to YouTube.

Then I did a bit of digging.

Believe it or not, this is an actual video for the just launched Australian version YouTube.

Looks a lot like the normal version of YouTube if you ask me.

Except it has a seriously crap video to promote it.

Where are all the Lemons?

Australia's annual celebration of newspaper advertising, The Caxtons, was held in beautiful Byron Bay over the weekend.

Winning a Caxton has never been easy and this year was no exception.

Awards were given in only 11 out of a possible 20 categories.

Categories where no award was given included automotive and charity.

Yes charity.

I remember when charity was one of the most popular categories.

Strangest figure to emerge over the weekend, was that 51 ads were nominated as finalists.

At first I thought that was a reasonable number considering the high standards expected by the jury.

Then I thought about it for a little while. And that's when the figures became a bit of a concern.

Every city in Australia has its own daily newspaper. Some cities have two or three. We also have two national papers.

Given that these papers are published pretty much every day of the year, that adds up to a lot of ads.

Better make that a hell of a lot of ads.

And since only 51 of them were considered worthy of the affections of the Caxtons' judges. that means we only produce one great print ad a week.

One single solitary print ad in the whole of Australia.

Oh dear...

Love those curves

If there's one relatively recent adland phenomenon that I'm not overly keen on, it's the global alignment of accounts.

It's given rise to way too many playing it safe, trying to please everyone, type ads.

One brand that isn't globally aligned and definitely doesn't have this problem is Mini.

Almost every ad, wherever it originates from, stays true to the brand strategy. Yet Mini seems to have a different agency in every country.

I can't recollect seeing any Mini work from Switzerland before, but this piece by Jung von Matt really made me smile.

Even sweeter than a block of Lindt.

Interesting snippets

For me, one of the pleasures of having an RSS feed is discovering that Lynette has added another clever and insightful 'snippet' to her Flickr collection.

Now she's gone one better and collected her favourites into a book.

It's called Interesting Snippets and is a terrific snapshot of how digital technology is impacting on society.

Click here to purchase or preview the book.

Reaching new heights

So nice to see some ambient work that doesn't rely on a set up photo to demonstrate it.

Simple. Punchy. And hopefully effective too.

Love to know who's responsible.

Oh dear

Great ad from W&K London for the rugby World Cup final.

Sadly like many ads, it over promises for a product that seriously under delivers.

Make way for innovation

"The biggest challenge facing organisations is not so much coercing people into being more innovative as getting themselves out of the way when people try to innovate.

Innovation almost always comes out of frustration with the status quo and is almost inevitably disruptive.

If you don't let people find fault with how you do things currently or begin to disrupt your perfect systems then you are unlikely to experience innovation."

Thanx to Neil who discovered this great quote from Euan.

Do'nt "quote" me on that

Came across a great blog today.

The blog of "unnecessary" quotation marks.

While I was reading I came across a link to another great blog.

Apostrophe abuse.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who cares about this sort of stuff.

Mambo Italiano

If there's one thing I can't stand it's racial stereotyping in advertising.

Especially when it comes to Italians.

Surely it can't be that hard to come up with ideas to sell things like pasta better than big Italian Nonnas and old guys who talk-a like-a this-a.

Of course there's always an exception to the rule. And this ad for Burger King's Italian coffee is it.

Molto bene Burger King.

Barf power

I think I'll be giving this detergent a miss.

Beautiful brochures

My long lost blog buddy Amber has unearthed a fabulous collection of Citroen brochures from the 60's and 70's.

There's some very really nice typography. And sweet illustrations too.

Click here and take a look for yourself.

Charming charms

One of the many memories I have of my visits to Japan is the way even the most buttoned down business man has a quirky charm on their mobile phone.

I just love phone charms. I even created one myself earlier this year for one of my clients.

Today I came across this colourful selection of charms. Mostly from Korea I think.

They're from a fun Flickr collection by Timo.

Would you like fries with that?

Stumbled on this little beauty over at Scamp's blog.

Really made me smile.

Any idea who did it?

Hard to stomach

How to starve to death on a full stomach.

That's the headline on this simple yet powerful ad for Greenpeace by Mojo Auckland.

The carefully art directed pieces of rubbish on the right came out of the stomach of the Albatross.

All 272 of them.

Click the ad to enlarge.

How kind of you

Free shipping on orders over $250!

Hardly generous.

Luckily I'm a big fan of Puma. So dumb online offers like this won't affect my brand loyalty.

But it's hardly going to entice new customers to give it a try, now is it?

Second hand junk

I have a great little DM piece using recycled envelopes about to go to print.

After seeing this cartoon from Jetpacks I don't know how I feel about my recycled idea anymore.

Such is life, as Ben Cousins would say.

Click pic to enlarge.

Get involved

Iain Tait and the crew at Poke in London have come up with a lovely idea to help raise awareness of climate change issues.

They're joining with the WWF to build a massive paper plane and paper boat and sailing/flying them to the British Houses of Parliament.

Every person who signs their petition will have their name on the plane/boat. I imagine they'll be constructed from recycled paper.

Click here to find out more and get involved.

Gaming is not a game

I recently worked with a client on a website aimed at pre-teens. One of the ideas we investigated as part of the site was a couple of simple games.

We ditched this idea after I discussed it with my son Max. His argument was who would want to play one of our simple games when they could be playing a real one.

Excellent advice I thought.

Your average PS2 or X-Box game has a massive production budget. No brand could possibly stump up that kind of money for what is essentialy an experential ad.

A good case in point is the Toyota Yaris game developed by Saatchi & Saatchi in the US.

Kids have much higher expectations of games than us old folks in advertising. If a game isn't brilliant, it dies.

The Yaris game has been slammed by several gaming sites. One of the worst reviews came from Joystiq:

"Yaris does nothing right, and everything wrong. Every element, from the graphics to the controls to the online play, is just busted.

Even at the price of free, this lemon isn't fun or worth the sticker price and no factory dealer incentives could get me playing Yaris again."

Nike rethinks media spend

I've been doing a lot of online advertising recently and one of the things that bugs me is the media planning.

There are always what I like to call superfluous ads. Silly small sizes and other ads that make you wonder why on earth anyone would book them.

Seems I'm not alone in this.

There's a terrific article in the New York Times today looking at how Nike are shifting their media spend from advertising to experience and social media.

“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive, we’re in the business of connecting with consumers.” - Trevor Edwards, Corporate VP Nike.

Nike kicks a goal in Argentina

I'm a big fan of street art and often sceptical when brands try to dabble in this area.

Last year's Sony PSP launch graffiti being a particularly bad example.

This street campaign for Nike soccer by BBDO Buenos Aires is very good though.

The pics themselves are made up from pieces of newspaper.

A few good creative men

You can't handle a bigger logo - Nuff said.

The X Factor

I gave a talk about advertising to a group of schoolkids this morning. One of the ads I used in my presentation was the Cadbury Gorilla.

It's not one of my favourite ads, but the kids loved it. So much so they made me play it again.

When I came home this evening I told my son Max about it. He'd never seen the Cadbury Gorilla so we searched it up on YouTube.

The amazing thing was there were dozens of remixes and remakes, of which this X-Factor version was my favourite.

Brilliant.

Thought for the day

Bright ideas

I've been doing a lot of work with a leading green energy company of late, so I've become very conscious of switching off lights and other power wasters.

Which is probably why I love the push button in this picture so much.

It's from the front window of the Howies store in London.

They're doing their bit to conserve energy and at the same time offering customers and passers by the chance to do a bit of evening window shopping.

What a bright idea.

Thanx to NP for the pic

Do your thing elsewhere

There are some things that just don't belong in an ad.

Like old people on the verge of a knee trembler.

I know I'll be old myself one day, but still.

That was quick

The iPod is surely the most successful product launch of recent times.

Apple were justly proud of the fact that a million of them were sold in just two years.

The recently launched iPhone puts the iPod to shame.

It sold a million units in its first three months.

Three months!

Thanx to David

Tick, tick, tick

Special thanx to Hugh.

Pure genius

Sony Bravia hype has passed me by I'm afraid.

I thought the 'balls' ad was cute, but mostly I liked the music.

The 'paint' ad was, I felt, bombastic and the choice of music left a lot to be desired.

This new ad is the most wonderful piece of thinking I've seen all year.

Wimsical. Charming. And one of my favourite songs too.

Two big Fonzie thumbs-up from me to the team at Fallon London.

Here's a lovely teaser/making-of that's also well worth watching.

How many?

"Last year more transistors were produced, and at a lower cost, than grains of rice."

This incredible statistic from Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, is taken from an LA Times article.

Even more amazing, is the fact that the number of transistors produced is around 100 times the number of ants estimated to be stalking the planet.

Wow!

Outsourced thinking

First time I saw this piece by Lynette I dismissed it.

Yeah...Whatever. I thought to myself.

Then I went online to find a mate's phone number.

Later on I checked the spelling of a word at dictionary.com.

When I finally found time to tee up drinks with a friend via Facebook I realised Lynette was right.

Many of the things my brain used to do, like remembering phone numbers and spelling, is now done by my computer.

Thing is, I wonder what I'm using all that spare brain space for now?

Click the pic to enlarge.

Third Reich Realty

I wise man once told me that we advertise benefits not products.

Wonder what the benefits of buying a house from Conqueror Real Estate are?

Hand crafted news

I went for a wander through the State Library today. It's a wonderful gold rush era building that has been beautifully restored.

Given the Library is home to many important historical documents, I decided to take a look at the website when I got back to the office.

I couldn't believe some of the stuff in their archives to be honest. Best of all, many of these historical pieces have been digitised for posterity.

The piece of paper in the pic above is, believe it or not, the first ever newspaper published in Melbourne.

It dates back to 1838.

The most amazing thing about this four page newspaper though, is the fact it was hand written.

Must have taken ages to put together.

As for distribution, I guess they simply posted it somewhere prominent in the settlement for people to read.

Click here to see more. Click pic to enlarge.

Blogger bashing

A little while ago journalist Graeme Philipson took blogging to task in Sydney and Melbourne's leading broadsheet newspapers.

“I don’t blog,” wrote Philipson. “Can’t see the point, when I write this column and others. I also rarely read them - the letters page of this newspaper and the many emails I receive is for me more than enough exposure to the unfiltered opinion of the common man.”

I took Philipson's comment as the starting point for my latest Around The Blogosphere column in Marketing magazine.

Click here to read it.

I'd love to hear you thoughts on the article, so feel free to leave a comment.