It’s amazing how brands get watered down in adland. Interpublic is now merging the Lowe network with middle-ranking US agency Mullen to create Mullen Lowe. Which as an international agency network will have no purchase whatsoever. Affable and capable Lowe ...
Read More »Lord Bell’s memoir ‘Right or Wrong’ – is Tim Bell really Roald Dahl’s ‘Fantastic Mr Fox?’
The Fantastic Mr Fox, you may recall, is a Roald Dahl story about a fox, a much-decried species in the English countryside, who triumphs over his adversaries (boorish humans) through a mixture of cunning, wit and charm. And, it has ...
Read More »George Parker: veteran US adman Fred Goldberg lifts the lid on ‘The Insanity of Advertising’
I’ve just finished reading Fred Goldberg’s recently published book… The Insanity of Advertising. Hopefully anyone who knows anything about the ad biz will know of Fred and be familiar with his long and illustrious career at Y&R, New York, Chiat ...
Read More »Zurich and McCann pluck defeat from the jaws of victory in new TV campaign
Maybe CCO Linus Karlsson is having a beneficial effect on McCann. Here’s a new ad for Zurich Insurance from McCann Worldgroup that actually manages to give insurance a human dimension; which is what it’s for, after all. But why isn’t ...
Read More »George Parker: how the unlikely combo of toffs and cockney gits created British advertising
In this excerpt from Confessions of a Mad Man our hero returns to the UK from the US to find a rapidly-changing agency scene populated by a new breed of agency determined to change all known rules. Although the greater ...
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