September 30, 2016

CAN A PERSON AGE 20 YEARS IN JUST THIRTY SECONDS?

That was the critical question Asher faced on a recent television commercial shoot for SUBWAY® Restaurants.

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September 27, 2016

Advertising Awards Don’t Matter

Sure they don’t.

That’s why, last year, agencies submitted over 40,000 entries to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The American Advertising Federation’s three-tiered award program – called the ADDYs – generated another 40,000 entries. And, that’s just two of the big ones.
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December 16, 2015

Part Two: Account Executives Make Strange Bedfellows

Editor’s note: This is the second half of “If you want to be successful in the ad business…”

It happens pretty early in the career of a young creative. Almost from day one.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an art director. A writer. A broadcast producer. Every day at global agency brands in the largest holding companies and at regional boutique shops a common thread that binds us is being woven.

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October 15, 2015

If You Want to be Successful in the Ad Business…Part One

It’s almost impossible to go it alone in advertising. It is, after all, a collaborative business.

Part one focuses on developing partnerships that evolve into friendships. Let me illustrate a game of six-degrees-of-separation for a moment.

If I asked you who John Orr Young was, the response, most likely, would be a head scratch. But if I tell you he was an agency account guy who partnered with a talented writer named Raymond Rubicam? Well, you’d most likely get Young & Rubicam.

McCann had Erickson. Weiden, of course, is inextricably linked to Kennedy. The list goes on and on. Would they have succeeded on their own? Maybe. Would they have created such lasting legacies? Maybe not.

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August 21, 2015

Use Twitter to Tighten Up Your Writing

A consultant once told me that “tighter is righter.” A handful of well-chosen words provides so much more power than paragraphs that endlessly spool on and on and dilute themselves.

As a guy who writes advertising slogans and headlines, I’ll tell you right away that a powerful one-line headline trumps anything I can do in the descriptive copy to follow. If I can’t punch through the clutter and noise and commandeer your attention with a three-word statement, then whatever wonderful language I employ in describing the product is moot, because you’ve already moved on. Luckily for me (and the many others who make a living by churning out words) modern social media is a perfect whetstone to sharpen our verbal tools.

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