There’s a quote from Mark Twain at the beginning of the movie The Big Short that caught my attention yesterday. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Such profound insights aren’t uncommon with Twain (and I particularly favour his outlook on […]

Without the help of Google, I have self-diagnosed a serious condition I describe as “simplicity fatigue”. More accurately perhaps, it could be described as the utter exhaustion caused by a phobia of lazy thinking. I suffer daily when I open links to the marketing and advertising press websites only to find lazy, binary and often […]

There is an inextricable correlation between an ad agency’s talent and the value the agency can create for their clients. It’s the primary reason many of the older agencies had the names of their founders above the door or recognized by their initials. These figureheads like Bernbach, Ogilvy and Burnett were not just trying to […]

Having had a taste of working from home full time, many office workers – clients and their agencies alike – are unsurprisingly reluctant to go back to the 5 day-week commute. Management have had little choice but to trust their employees and those of their agencies to do their work unsupervised – with little evidence […]

There was a time when it was enough to have a reasonable non-vocational degree from a reasonable university to make it in the advertising business – because you could learn the rest on the job. You’d learn about advertising strategies and ways of working, you’d learn about marketing, and you’d pick the rest up through […]

The whole issue around client/agency transparency seems a little opaque. There appears to be an almost blanket expectation of total disclosure by marketing services suppliers to their clients, and that this should be considered normal, reasonable and fair. But as is the case in all good debates, we should first define our terms. What is […]

Well, in all fairness, probably not by starting with an antagonistic headline like this one. Marketing procurement repeatedly seems to comes under fire, being widely criticised for “not getting” advertising, for “hamstringing marketing”, “gutting agencies” of their fee revenues, and so on and so forth. Cost of everything, value of nothing, blah blah and so […]

Gorillas are not for everybody. Gorilla campaigns are those campaigns that stop you in your tracks, make you think twice or make you join some of the dots yourself. They’re emotive for sure, but they can also be polarising or controversial. M&C Saatchi’s latest work for Huawei appears to be a candidate for Gorilla status. […]

“False positive” is a scientific term. It’s used when something gets a positive result from a test that should have produced a negative result. In the world of medicine they are acutely aware false positives (and false negatives) and therefore they will often retest results before acting, particularly if the result seems unlikely and the […]

As we approach the ad-agency-contract-renegotiation-season there is a truth that should be known by clients for their own long-term good and for the good of the agencies upon which they rely: ad agencies sometimes do silly deals. There, the cat is out of the bag. To be fair it has been out of the bag […]

A cautionary word to advertisers: a good intermediary helps you find the right agency, but many employ shady funding models that compromise their basic duty of impartiality.  You might remember the famous Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch in which the latter plays an actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan. We could imagine Moore’s agent only […]

As agency tenure has declined the new business market for agencies has, of course, naturally increased. In a busy new business market, the better agencies have to choose more carefully which pitch invitations to accept – they can’t afford to go after everything. But agencies are repeatedly told their market is oversupplied, and advertisers approach […]