A couple of years ago, I did a review of Michael Farmer’s wonderful book… Madison Avenue Manslaughter. At the end of the review I summed it up with this… On a final, final note, apart from Madison Avenue Manslaughter being ...
Read More »More Mad Men…the way to a creative director’s heart
You couldn’t make it up really. Is this what agency life on Mad. Ave. was like in the 1960’s? Still probably the way to a creative director’s heart…or something
Read More »George Parker: the truth about advertising – actually Howard Gossage got there already
Anyone with enough fortitude to endure my ramblings (This is the nineteenth bloody episode of “Confessions of a Mad Man” for crying out loud) will know that I love to quote famous dead people, particularly famous dead ad people. And, ...
Read More »George Parker: why social pimping is all the rage in advertising – but not with me!
If you remember, in last week’s episode, I explained the balls out, diamond hard, number one tactic to be unfailingly employed by any wannabe Mad Man anxious to climb over the fetid backs of the competition on the way to ...
Read More »George Parker: how even I failed to keep a giant computer account for a Big Dumb Agency
In which our hero continues his odyssey among the once-mighty tech companies of Silicon Valley and Houston. Unlike the New York, Mad Man sixties, when agency perks included smoking, drinking and screwing your brains out, during the California seventies, at ...
Read More »George Parker: my triumphant return to London as the Dorlands agency fireman
I arrived back in England in 1972 after ten years in New York. In those days, anyone with that amount of American advertising experience could write their own ticket in London. However, being a schmuck, I allowed myself to be ...
Read More »George Parker: you have to make the bastards pay!
There’s always been a perception in the business world that advertising agencies have an unlimited license to print money. Back in the glory days of the sixties and seventies, this was accepted, because most agencies, in collusion with the avaricious ...
Read More »George Parker: how I invaded Madison Avenue
After arriving in New York in the booze and drug fuelled Mad Men sixties, my first task was to get a job. For two weeks I trudged the concrete canyons of Manhattan lugging my oversized portfolio of samples. I soon ...
Read More »Advertising takes one of its periodic trips into the spotlight – but does it really matter that much?
With a new series of Mad Men on our screens and the death of Margaret Thatcher (indelibly attached to the UK adland of the 1980s), advertising has made one of its periodic trips over the wire; entering mainstream debate as ...
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