Evidently, the really smart people are working on the Old Spice account. Wow. If this ad had run during the Super Bowl, Betty White is an afterthought. Jim is a father, husband, copywriter and founder of smashcommunications, llc. You can find him on Twitter @smashadv.
The best an advertising agency can do to truly develop a brand is to decipher what is real, and then let that be the tip of the communications spear.
If the purpose of a :30 television spot is to be memorable and to reinforce a brand's core promise of value, then this spot by Staples may be the best ad ever. Think about it – first you have a guy standing in a store branded to the teeth with the company's identity. Then you've got an excited customer screaming the brand's value proposition over and over. Add a couple of helpful employees, and throw in the number of products…
I've noticed a lot of chatter here recently around how companies should categorize social media. After all, the more that businesses get involved in social, they'll need to allocate budgets from somewhere. And when something draws from a departmental budget, the purpose of that thing is usually aligned with the goals of the mother ship. For example, most people here consider social media as marketing and it should therefore be funded through marketing and then, like traditional marketing, prove a…
(click image for larger view) So last week I was looking at some photojournalism on Haiti via Boston.com, and came across this picture. In an instant, the appeal appeared. No, this isn't a real ad for the Red Cross. It's the result of a two frustrated humans who wish they could do more. But even though it isn't an official ad, if you're so moved, we encourage that you consider giving generously to support the human disaster in Haiti by…
I’m Jim. I’m a copywriter. And I could be wrong, but I was always under the impression that whatever I wrote was supposed to create something like an internal dialogue in the mind of the person reading it so that they felt that the correspondence was created exclusively for them. Personal. Like a letter. Think of it this way – are you more likely to act because a stranger commands you to, or because a friend recommends that you do? …
