A Better Course

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.
The [...]

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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 better ideas, [...]

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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 viral… [...]

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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 is [...]

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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 conceit [...]

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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). The [...]

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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 branding campaign, [...]

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Russell Davies writes about the personalised advertising promised by social networking that “the people who can be arsed to do a little bit of research [...] plunge into a kind of direct marketing uncanny valley where the more desperately they try to personalise their message the more I’m reminded that they’re not really my friend”.
The [...]

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The tube station near where I work has had advertising screens installed. The best adverts for these are ones which depend on four screens (about as many as I can take in at once) showing different parts of an advert for the same product.
One of those was on the screens today; it was for a [...]

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Two charity campaigns have been interesting in the last few months. The most recent is Oxfam’s “Rubbish Presents” campaign:

Advertising their line of gifts in time for Christmas. It’s likeable because it’s obviously self-mocking; the celebrities in the advert look genuinely distressed, the language used (”Speak out against the horror of”) is an exaggeration of the [...]

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