A Better Course

Julia Roberts Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell Of all the adverts I’ve seen this year, I think this (late entry) surprised me the most. Not because of the concept – the hilarious coincidence that sometimes people who are not famous share names with people who are famous has been used before – or the clumsy […]

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Nivea advert Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell One of my most hated adverts of the moment is this one, for Nivea moisturiser. It is unreadably bland – what is actually going on? How does it relate to the tagline, “Look ready to face the day”? There are some conclusions that we can draw about what’s […]

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From Big Contrarian (specifically this post): I know few people curtailing their spending habits. Quite the opposite. […] Anecdotes are of course useless, but the disconnect strikes me as something to think about. The anecdotes here are, I think, interesting data points – are people spending less and consciously not talking about that? How long […]

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Bad copywriting is something I complain about quite a lot – sometimes it’s because it’s poorly proofread (and I start planning the Alex Mitchell School Of Copywriting), sometimes it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not, sometimes because one tiny phrase just annoys me. Today, I’ve seen two bits of copywriting I really liked. […]

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Matterbox is one of the more fun marketing ideas I’ve seen recently: Matter is a collection of a dozen or so enticing or intriguing physical things, each one from a different company, occasionally delivered to your house in a distinctive box on a Saturday morning. I was going to describe it as one of the […]

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There have been a series of interesting posts on viral marketing recently – advergirl on ElfYourself: this was not just a random great idea from some creatives loopy on spray glue fumes. It was a the winner of a very well-funded test of over 20 holiday sites – each of which was intended to be […]

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Seminar at work today by Nader Tavassoli on “mere exposure” versus “mere neglect” in advertising and brand liking. We are used to blocking things out given the constant competition for attention. Does the act of ignoring something mean that we are biased against what is ignored – in other words, is the statement any exposure […]

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The best advertising campaign I’ve seen recently comes from match.com. Instead of focussing on the benefits of a happy relationship (which, despite their “find someone special in six months” guarantee, no-one can actually guarantee), it posits a single alternative to joining match.com – waiting for Cupid and Fate, which the campaign helpfully personifies. The main […]

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I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted if I’d been part of Orangina’s marketing team and the agency had presented this concept: It looks like it came from a brief that asked for a change (probably for the ‘sexier’) to the previous staples of Orangina’s advertising (happy oranges, attractive people in rural France). […]

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Lovely IKEA adverts (via swissmiss) I like the way IKEA are (or seem to be) responding to the perception of their furniture as entirely generic by placing the home as a site of creativity; as well as the above, the UK “Not For Sale” campaign puts their products in a similar space. It’s an well-timed […]

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