LEARNING TO BECOME A SLOWCOACH You’re supposed to take things more slowly as you grow older. I appear to be speeding up. It was my misfortune some time ago to be caught exceeding the 30mph limit by a speed camera. Sure enough, a few days later, I received a missive from PC Plod asking who was […]
Bellini
I THOUGHT A BELLINI WAS A COCKTAIL UNTIL I VISITED THE NATIONAL GALLERY It’s amazing what you can learn in an hour at a building in Trafalgar Square – everything from sex to what barrel makers wore. Before I start, I should point out that David Metcalfe, or rather, John Sherfield, inspired my headline. […]
An ad that sells
Selling the idea of buying a book. Want to see a piece of advertising that sells? Go no further than Earl’s Court Underground station. In this electronic age, how do you advertise the good, old-fashioned pleasure of reading a book? With a good, old-fashioned ad – and I mean this in a totally […]
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Walking my way round London
In October 2011, I completed a project that had been occupying much of my time. I strolled through a cemetery in Stoke Newington called Abney Park and, in doing so, walked the final few hundred yards of a long distance footpath known as The Capital Ring. By rights, I should have walked through the […]
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Never knowingly understood.
Would you Adam and Eve it? It’s the new John Lewis commercial: Never knowingly understood. Years ago when I was at Collett, Dickenson, Pearce, Paul Smith and I presented a particularly obscure idea to John Salmon, the creative director. So obscure, in fact, that we had to explain to him what it was all about. […]
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No contest: Lemsip versus Alka-Seltzer.
David Brown, in his role as a group head and later as creative director of Collett, Dickenson, Pearce, often used a phrase to turn down work that he considered to be crass: ‘you wouldn’t like it if you made it’. Thus, many potentially embarrassing pieces of work were rightfully consigned to the wastepaper basket of […]
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One commercial I don’t rate and one I do.
Years ago Terry Lovelock wrote some very funny commercials at Collett Dickenson Pearce for TV Licence Evasion. In one of these ads a man and his mate are walking towards the man’s flat. The man tells his friend that he’s been fined for not having a TV Licence. As they enter the flat, the man says […]
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