Coke + Cats = Fun Times

In a time when so many marketers are focussed on ROI it's nice to know the world's greatest marketer just does what they've always done - appeal to anyone with a mouth.

And I'd hazard a guess that pretty much everyone will get a smile out of Coke's combination of cats, gifs and Coca Cola.

Magical. 

How to kill creativity

I've always said that having ideas is easy. Getting them to actually happen is where the real skill lies.

If you'd like to stop ideas and creativity being put to the sword in your workplace put aside a few minutes to watch this great talk by Dave Birss.

If you enjoy the talk ( and believe me you will) I can heartily recommend Dave's book - A user guide to the creative mind. 

Two ways of looking

The teeny weeny black wasp in that picture reminds me of a conversation I had with a producer today about banner ads.

I've ranted many times on BrandDNA about banners so if you're fed up with me doing it please scroll to the post below.

Anyway the producer was proudly showing me the results of the campaign to which I commented that the results were two thirds of bugger all.

No they're not she said. They're 0.06% which is more than triple the average campaign.

I guess it depends how you frame the numbers.

Three times as effective as the average sounds great.

Six people in a thousand sounds pretty damn terrible.

Which kinda makes me wonder how many award winning campaigns were given awards because the people who wrote the case study knew how to spin the numbers.

Award worthy?

Given they own more global agencies than anybody else I'd have thought WPP would win this award pretty much every year. Which begs the question why on earth do Cannes even bother with an award of this type? 

Thank you Ogilvy Brazil

Brilliant initiative out of Ogilvy Sao Paolo for organ donation.

Brought a tear to my eye and won a justly deserved Grand Prix at Cannes last week.

If only our industry could do more work like this and less work like this.

Nice one Diddy

Kontor Records promo piece

Sending out a record to promote a record company. Nothing new about that. Unless of course that record company is Kontor. 

Jay Z + Samsung = Free music

At time of writing the new Jay Z album drops in fifteen days and seventeen minutes.

Unlike in years gone by fans will not be queuing up out the front of record stores to buy it.

Nor will they be downloading it from a website.

In actual fact he'll be giving it away. For free.

Not one or two copies either. One million.

The catch is you first need to download an app from the Google Play store.

Then the first million people to download the album via the app get it for gratis.

Sounds great. But wait there's more...

This offer is exclusive to Samsung Galaxy phone owners.

Yes you read that right. Galaxy users get their hands on a hot album way before the rest of us mere mortals.

Jay Z is going way beyond the usual realms of brand alignment and corporate sponsorship with this one.

It's the first deal of it's kind. I imagine it won't be the last.

Get info on the album here.

Cut 'n Paste

I've had more than my fair share of briefs like this. Sadly the people who write them don't realise how bad they are. Nor how difficult they are to work. The briefs that is not the people who write them. 

#Dadjokes on Father's Day

I'm surprised it hasn't been done before but have to say I've got a real soft spot for the Heineken #Dadjokes campaign they're running for Father's Day.

Not Father's Day down under obviously.

Although maybe they'll rerun it here when we celebrate it.


The dad jokes above and below this text are absolute classics.

One's my dad told many times.

And if truth be told I've often retold to my kids.

Lee Clow at Cannes

The annual ad industry love in that is Cannes kicks off next week.

This year they're recognising the contribution to the industry of the legendary Mr Lee Clow.

Long overdue recognition if you ask me.

Wish I could be there to hear him speak.

But sadly I won't be.

So instead I'll share this piece of wisdom from Clow with you.

If you're an award hungry young creative please read every word very closely.

"An incredible advertising career is not about creating an incredibly amazing ad, it’s about making an incredible amazing ad every single day of your career, it’s about getting those ads killed, and resurrecting them over and over again. It’s about your season average not that occasional home-run."

Aussie ingenuity

Rock 'n roll animal

Now that my friends is one hell of a headline.

I can't imagine how they'd run a campaign like that in the age of the digital download. 

The future of print

Classic shot of Faye Dunaway the morning after she won an Oscar for the film Network back in 1977.

Obviously she's surrounded by all that morning's newspapers covering her win.

Now fast forward to 2015 and imagine that same picture.

Pretty sure she'd just be sitting at that table staring at her iPhone.

And not a newspaper in sight.

Great bit of pub marketing

Spotted this on a friend's Facebook.

Really made me smile.

I thought it was a fake at first but she promised me it's real.

Great bit of pub promotion I reckon.

Shame about the appalling typography.

But then again maybe its amateurish approach is what makes it so nice.

Punny but funny

Yes it's a pun.

But sometimes puns can be good.

The copy line below the chip packets is pretty good too.

Fingers crossed the chips live up to the advertising!

The designer says

Love the look of this book.

Beautifully designed too. Although I guess that should be expected.

I was going to send a link to my wife so she could add it to my Christmas list.

But it's only June. So I guess it's off to Amazon for me!

The point of Pinterest

I've been on Pinterest for quite some time.

I can't remember how long exactly but it's definitely been a while.

What I don't know is why.

I regularly pin pics. In fact I pinned two this afternoon.

But why?

I rarely look at all the pictures.

And if I do scroll through them I never ever scroll through them all.

Some people have thousands of images pinned. Thousands.

Yet I doubt they look at them very often either.

So why do we pin?

I dunno. Probably because we can.

Commas in headlines

If there's one thing that I hate to see in a press ad or poster it's a comma in the headline.

Yes it may be grammatically correct to use them.

But this is advertising.

And advertising is about conversation not writing.

So let's all try and keep the commas out of headlines. Please.

Score with Scrabble word score

Now this is a clever idea from Ogilvy in Paris.

Scrabble rolled out a free but password protected wi-fi network in parts of Paris.

Nothing clever about that you're thinking. But wait...

Rather than a password you were given a set of Scrabble tiles and had to use them to make a word.

The higher your word score the more minutes of free wi-fi you got.

Like I said. Very clever.

Here's the case study.