Analysis

This is about as woke-free as it gets, A Benson & Hedges Silk Cut cinema ad from 1970 from the clearly over-stimulated psyches of CDP’s Paul Weiland and Graham Fink. Zulu had been one of the big hit films of ...

April is the cruellest month famously opined TS Eliot (can’t help recalling a celebrated Private Eye spoof with January, February and March crossed out by Ezra Pound – try April, he wrote.) But it’s no laughing matter for UK adland ...

In these isolated, locked-down times, with uncertainty and hardship ahead, my blast from the past is a beautiful slice of future-facing optimism – the launch commercial for Orange by WCRS. I re-joined WCRS to work on Orange just after this ...

Choice has driven the growth of the consumer goods market for decades. Offering a seemingly never-ending array of products has for a long time seemed to be the best way of boosting profits. However, this received wisdom has recently been ...

Heineken 1985 by Lowe Howard-Spink I joined Gold Greenlees Trott (GGT) in 1984 and found a place with widely diverging social backgrounds from Dave Trott’s proletariat view of the world versus my assistant Bella who was from the Hanson family, ...

I think my blast from the past has to be pretty much every ad BBH did for Levi’s. Always different, always spot on and always dictating cultural conversation. But if I had to pick one it would be Flat Eric, ...

I remember so many bad ads from childhood. Take the Vortex one, where a woman visits a “bleach lab” and asks a boffin with a Petri dish and a weird voice which one performed best, “S’Vortex” he says. My brother ...

Renault from 1986 by McCormick Publicis They really don’t make them like this any more – a little drama in 60 seconds. Beautiful craft in the writing and production, perfectly cast, with believable characters and a wryly amusing twist in ...

In times of crisis as we are seeing with the Covid-19 pandemic, brands are wondering how to best invest their marketing efforts and which decisions will positively or negatively affect their business and reputations. Some things go without saying, like ...