Tag Archives: MAA blast from the past

I was working on my masters at Lancaster University’s Management School when a note was pinned to our notice board from a strange sounding outfit called Boase Massimi Pollitt, seeking a bright young thing to join them in a fancy ...

Mad Man. Booze. Fags.. In his inimitable wisdom, Stephen has asked me to contribute to the on-going series “MAA blasts from the past.” As I have more of a past than just about anyone reading this, it should be a ...

For me, nothing sums up Brexit Britain quite so perfectly as this comic gem from HHCL in 1996. In what first seems like a cringey corporate video, we are introduced to Tango spokesman Ray Gardner, a heady mix of David ...

My friend and long-time MAA supporter Bob Collins recommends these venerable communications: Strand cigarettes from Ogilvy, often described as adland’s biggest own goal, and all-conquering Daz. “You’re never alone with a Strand” it said, but you were as it flopped. ...

Here’s a blast from the past that actually changed things, Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac’ campaign from TBWA which ran (I think) between 2006 and 2009. In those days (pre-iPhone) Apple was the young pretender to the mighty Microsoft and this ...

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 ...

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 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 ...