Everyone dreams of hitting the big game-winning home run. You picture it: Cameras are flashing all throughout the stadium. The crowd is ready to burst with excitement. Every player on both teams is fighting to conceal the mounting pressure they are feeling.
You swing, and send the ball deep, deep, deep over the second basemen’s head. You arrive comfortably at first base with a single. The air goes out of the stadium for a second, but then it builds again as the next player comes up to bat.
This isn’t how the …

Since our economy collapsed and the great recession sunk its tentacles deep into the psyche of our nation, I’ve noticed that our industry has come under fire. People come up to me and cry about the fact that advertising creates demand for things we don’t really need.
To which I usually reply, “you’re welcome.”
Does anyone even understand how the economy works? If everyone suddenly stopped buying stuff they didn’t need we’d all be out of work, homeless and most likely killing each other for a small share of the rapidly dwindling …

How many times have you seen (or heard) an ad and immediately responded to it?
Be honest.
Once? Five times? Maybe 10? If you give me a higher number I will assume you are either a liar or did not understand the question.
Fact is, you almost never immediately respond in any meaningful way to an ad. You might enjoy the ad. You might even have some vaguely positive feelings about the product being advertised. But it’s doubtful you actually do anything about it at that moment.
The impact of most advertising happens over …

I was invited to talk on MTV the other day.
They have a show called Debate MTV, where 6 people share their points of view about controversial subjects with the audience nationwide.
So they invited an ad creative (the one who’s writing), a photographer and an art director of a masculine magazine to talk with a feminist, a psychologist and a guy who runs a blog about anti-advertising or something.
The starting point was a simple question:
“Does the media treat women as objects?”
Curiously, the feminist, the psychologist and the blogger were sure about …

A wise comic-strip beagle once said, “There’s no sense in doing a lot of barking if you don’t really have anything to say.”
Somebody get this puppy a job in advertising. Please.
These are the words we all need to live by, agency and client alike. People think if you shout loud enough or make something clever enough, it will make people think you actually have something worth talking about.
More likely, they will either be annoyed by you or simply forget about you.
Think of the greatest ads or campaigns you’ve ever seen. …

If ten people, who can each pull a rope attached to a strain gauge with 200 pounds of force, were to combine their efforts, they would not be capable of pulling with 2,000 pounds of force.
The group result will be much less than the sum of individual efforts.
This counterintuitive phenomenon was identified by Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, and has come to refer to the concepts of coordination losses and social loafing.
Basically, there are two reasons for this effect. The more people you have, the less likely it becomes …

I worked on big tobacco. I also worked on anti-tobacco. I prefer big tobacco. Please smoke more so we can prove anti-tobacco ads don’t work. Any idiot can write an anti-tobacco ad. To prove it, I am going to write 100 while watching 2 and a Half Men. For visuals, just picture a lonely kid or a lung x-ray or a guy talking with one of those buzzers to the throat.

-Smoking kills 45,000,000 people a year and orphans twice as many.
-Smoking isn’t just for losers, it’s also for dead people.
-Smoking is sexy, …

Here’s a humbling thought.
It’s the World Cup.
Thousands of people have traveled to South Africa to watch.
Millions more will watch live on television from every corner of the globe.
It is by far the biggest global event at this moment in history, and it’s being ruined for many, by a swarm of vuvuzelas.
Now, obviously, no one tuned in to hear the vuvuzela.
They’re actually only interested in the football.
And right there is the rub.
Most advertising is like a vuvuzela.
It’s loud.
Obnoxious.
It’s not what people tune in for.
If anything, it’s really more of a distraction.
And …

When I started in advertising, in my first day in the agency someone gave me an annual book and told me: take a look, this is the work our market is doing right now.
Today, looking at the Award Shows that are coming, I was wondering: what are we telling to someone who is starting now in our business? Basically, this:
-       Copywriters don’t need to write headlines anymore. Everything can be explained with a visual metaphor and a lazy concept.
-       Body copy? What is body copy?
-       99% of the art director’s …

So you may have heard about this little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Anywhere from 5,000-1,000,000 barrels a day spewing into the sea (the pinpoint accuracy on these estimates is amazing) and no end in sight.
It’s one of the greatest unnatural disasters in our hemisphere’s history.
And, perhaps just slightly less important, it shows that advertising doesn’t mean squat if you don’t actually practice what you preach.
I remember when the BP-Beyond Petroleum campaign launched. I loved it. The ads looked great. The copy was on point. The new logo …