Even ignoring the cocaine budgets of the 80s, the advertising industry isn’t renowned for its ethics. We prey on insecurities, fears and ego to peddle poisons, carcinogens, junk food and pollutants. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And I think, secretly, a lot of us are. So why do it? For most people in […]
Would you get a drink with your copy? Read your website. If it sounds like someone you wouldn’t mind having a beer with, then yay! Give yourself a star and stop reading this article – you’ve already nailed it. Everyone, from banks to cafes to web designers, wants their brand to have personality these days. […]
“A business with a marketing department is like a church with a religion department” – Mike Hutcheson Slow clap, Mike. Slow clap. Marketing departments and marketing people – we’re the fluffy ones, the hipsters with the nice hair, buttoned up collars, buzz words and snazzy charts. Segmenting us off from the main business is comfortable […]
Content is king, right? Not really. Good content is king. Since the new Google algorithms were released last year, Google now more strongly favours content that’s relevant and shared – so, yeah, content people actually find useful. Suddenly churning out cheap, poorly written and conceived content isn’t worth the effort, so our copywriters have been getting a lot more […]
How to brief your writers so you get the goods When you want to get the best from your copywriter, there’s no shortcut to a proper briefing. To do an effective job, your copywriter needs to know all about you and your company; otherwise you’ll be wasting their time – and your money. If you […]
Social media. Wasn’t it supposed to solve our problems and make us millionaires? For a while there, I think some of us believed it. Then we got off our unicorns and realised it was just another way for our brands to connect with people. Sure, consumers could talk back, but we still needed to employ […]
It’s a good title for an excellent study from Princeton on the effects of using more complicated words in your writing. Basically, simple writing will make readers think you’re smarter. Read the full article here The study backs up what I’ve suspected for a long time. Overly complicated writing is the nouveau riche of the […]
Trump. No one expected this, because, most of the time, Trump doesn’t make a lot of sense. He lambasts the American job losses from Chinese manufacturing while selling made-in-China Trump merchandise. His financial ideas can be summed up as, “I’m rich, put me in charge” and his policies are so impractical and lacking in substance […]
You should be blogging. You know this. It’s that niggle that starts whispering to you every time you knock off an hour early, or spend 20 minutes browsing Facebook. Writing that blog is important, but the impacts of not doing so are hard to see. It’s about lost leads, lower brand engagement, missed opportunities – things that […]