By If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?
"Endearingly belligerent" – another blogger
About a year ago I was listening to a podcast called The Plot Thickens. The subject was the messy production of the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. As the story unfolded I realised that the format – a documentary...
This is the sixth episode of my series of podcasts about the great David Abbott. This one is called ‘David’s Department’ and explores what it was like to be a creative working under David. I’ll link to the episode here,...
Good morning. Apologies for the recent silence of this blog. WordPress lost all my data recently, so that had to be sorted out. We got most of it back, but if you’re wondering where a few of the more recent...
Anthony is many things: comedian, journalist, DJ, presenter, author, pilot, maker of excellent roast potatoes, and, of course my next-door neighbour (find out all about him/hire him here). But he is also a top-level voiceover artist, who has lent his...
So I was watching this video the other day: …and I found myself in violent agreement with everything Tim Lindsay was saying. There are lots of questions advertising has to ask itself right now. The industry is in a state...
Andy is a winner of a Cannes Grand Prix (he talks about how Nike Tag and Shaderunner happened). Andy helped build a small Dutch ad agency into the third best in the world (he talks about his time at 180)....
The second part of my chat with Paul. iTunes link, Soundcloud link, direct play button:
Paul would be far too modes to say this, but if you watched a brilliant ad from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, there’s a decent chance he had something to do with it. As one of the founders...
I used to collect movie posters. I still have a few favourites, but in the end I ran out of wall space and it seemed a shame to keep so much great stuff rolled up in a cupboard, especially if...
This is the third and final ‘people who were heavily involved in the Blackcurrant Tango ad’ series: my chat with the client, David Atter. (Episode 1 with director Colin Gregg can be found here. Episode 2 with copywriter Chas Bayfield...
This is the second in my series of three posts/podcasts about Blackcurrant Tango, apparently one of the most beloved ads of the last thirty years: You could read the Colin Gregg post, or read this repeat of what I said...
I’ve been putting up great ads from the 90s on LinkedIn. It started as a snarky attempt at pointing out how ads used to be better, and that even ads from 20+ years ago would be better than the ‘best’...
Stephen was the 25th employee of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which means he saw it grow from a very good agency to the best in the country in a few short years. After a stint on Audi he became the first...
Jean-Louis is the Chief Strategy Officer of The Concept Bureau. (Slight aside: I wonder why job titles are sounding increasingly military.) I asked him on the pod because ‘strategist’ is becoming a very common word in advertising-adjacent job titles. Jean-Louis...
Rob McFaul is the founder of an organisation called Purpose Disruptors: A network of advertising insiders whose goal is to create a visible, large scale, bottom up movement within the industry, that will act in solidarity to meaningfully tackle climate...
This is my attempt to make sure the podcast adds to the iTunes feed. Fingers crossed…
I loved chatting to Trevor. We’d never met before, but he was a warm and lovely fella. His first Tango ad broke the mould, as popular with kids in playgrounds as it was with award jurors. But then there was...
At last! Paul is one of the people I’ve most wanted to interview. He’s arguably been responsible for more classic advertising over the last 30 years than anyone else. Whether it was for Stella, Nike, Playstation, John Smith, John West,...
So here’s the second episode. Thank you for your patience, and thanks to Paul for his.
Here’s my chat with Matt Follows, an award-winning creative turned mental health professional and coach. After 20 years as a writer/creative director at places like W+K, M&C Saatchi, Clemenger and Naked, he left the industry to retrain as a performance psychologist,...
Here’s my chat with Mr. Jeremy Craigen, one of the first names that sprung to mind when I first had the idea to do this podcast. He’s a very good bloke, an excellent creative and one of the best CD/ECD/CCOs...
Hi there. Apologies for the wait since the last episode. I’ve been busy. Anyway, this one’s a corker. Ian Reichenthal is the one US creative I really wanted to speak to. This is because he’s been involved with most of my favourite ads of...
Jo Arscott is a true pioneer. When she started in advertising she was a teenage girl of colour. And that was back in the 1980s, when the planet was a lot less woke (as the kids say) than it is now. Then...
Last week I had the idea to interview a client. Come on. Haven’t you always wanted to know what they hell they’re all thinking? So I put the word out and found one: an automotive client for a big brand that works...
Here’s my chat with my old AD, Cam Blackley. Looking at his awards haul since we worked together, you could make a good case for the fact that I was just holding him back: D&AD Gold and Silvers, Titanium and Gold...
Like most episodes of ITIAPTWC, my chat with Hugh offers many thought-provoking lessons on creating work, doing your best for different bosses and working out what to do next. In addition, Hugh started around the same time I did, so I...
Here’s my 6th, and hopefully not final, chat with Dave Dye. It’s the story of DHM and the various occurrences that created the excellent work at the bottom of this post. As always with Dave, there are many excellent lessons for...
This week’s guest is the lovely and excellent Mr. Dan Germain, whose name almost looks like ‘Dangerman’. His involvement in advertising, writing, branding and design has almost entirely been in the service of Innocent, which is now a big, global company...
Libby Brockhoff is the current CEO/Founder of the agency Odysseus Arms. You can read all about them here. We discuss how that agency came about, but we also discuss how Libby became one of the founders of Mother. It was a somewhat...
I sent Ben an email a while ago to ask if he’d do the old podcast. He kindly and politely declined, saying he’d done a few already and didn’t want to repeat himself. So I waited a bit then asked him if...
A bit of a different chat this week: it’s not a start up and it’s not an ad person, but it is someone who is deeply embedded in a conversation we all need to have right now: how do we...
Here’s my chat with George Prest, former ECD of DLKW, DLKW Lowe and RG/A. He’s now a partner at You and Mr. Jones and a founder of Blood Global. His journey from copywriter to those things is an interesting one, mainly because...
Sorry about the gap since the last one (how have you coped?). Anyway, rather than dwell on that, here’s Episode 40… When I emailed Danny to ask if he’d chat with me for an hour he happily agreed, I then said I...
I’m not sure which episode of my start-up series this is, but does that really matter? Of course not! Here’s Vic Polkinghorne on how the excellent Sell! Sell! began, and how it’s still going strong after twelve years. We also the discussed the...
It’s another start-up episode! Well, semi-start-up – I spent about a third of the chat getting some of Matt’s background before delving more deeply into how 18 Feet and Rising came about and all the pros and cons of the...
Continuing the start-up theme, we now have the inception of Campbell Doyle Dye. I remember at the time that it seemed like the ultimate agency dream team: Walter Campbell, creator of many brilliant TV ads, together with Sean Doyle and Dave Dye,...
This week’s episode marks the start of a series (I hope) on the mysterious subject of start ups. Mark Denton has started five different companies, each with their own particular set of circumstances. So, despite his protests to the contrary, there’s plenty to...
Chris and John are probably the hottest creatives in the world right now. OK, they didn’t do the statue of that girl for some client I can’t remember, but they did do this: I don’t pay much attention to awards these days,...
Caroline Pay has been one of the most successful UK creatives of the last twenty years, which obviously makes her one of the most successful female creatives of that time. Her Mother partnership with Kim Gehrig made them the most awarded...
Stef Jones (along with his longtime creative partner, Tom Burnay) is the founder of Big Al’s Creative Emporium. For those of you unaware, it’s that very rare thing: a successful ad agency founded and run by a pair of creatives. How does...
Four years ago my good friend Brydon Gerus created an advertising award scheme called Adcan. Unlike literally every other award scheme in the entire industry, it seeks to combine young, hungry creative people with briefs for companies that do GOOD THINGS©. It...
This week’s interview is with Javier Campopiano, Chief Creative Officer of Saatchi and Saatchi New York. On the basis of his award-winning work and super-high-flying job, he’s a very worthy interview subject, but I also wanted to chat to him because...
This week I was utterly delighted to chat to Danny Kleinman. As I looked through his work a Kanye West lyric kept repeating in my head: ‘I’ve forgot better shit than you ever thought of’. This is because I kept finding...
If you were in advertising in the late 90s you would have been swept up in the delight and excitement that was E. Yes, I do mean the drug ecstasy, but I also mean Matt Beaumont’s brilliant novel, set in...
This week it was my great pleasure to chat to Fredrik Bond. As one of the best directors in the world (DGA nomination this year to go with the ones he got in 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008, 2007 and 2004, and he deserved...
Hi there, As it’s a holiday weekend I don’t want to put out an interview podcast that might be ignored. Instead I’m putting out a monologue podcast that might be ignored. And that monologue is from my own fair mouth/brain. It concerns three slightly...
Chaka is the delightful CCO of Leo Burnett London. How did that happen? Well, her journey started at the BFI and went via the Boilerhouse Studios and Fox through ITV and Mother. It’s an unusual path, which is why I wanted to chat...
We now reach the AMV years, a time at which Dave and I worked in the same agency. That time was part of a golden era for AMV, where incredible work seemed to flow from it much like yummy gin flows from a...
