A print ad looks simple at the end but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you go deeper, a lot of work and thinking goes into it. A lot of this is touched on in Overcome AD-verity but here is an example of a specific print ad.
In this season of awards – no wait! … awards always seem to be in season. Doesn’t having so many awards for so many different things dilute the value of any award? We are just getting through Nobel Season. Soon it will be time for Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Emmies, Grammies, Junos, ESPys and on… Read More »
How do you decide whether to believe a message or not? As reviewed in Chapter Four of Overcome AD-versity, there are three basic components to judging a message to be credible. The receiver of the message assesses the source’s expertise, trustworthiness and motivation. To do so, you have to read between the lines and read… Read More »
The first year I was at school in Philadelphia, in the 1970s, a friend in my dorm told me that he had a motorcycle that he had left in North Carolina. He was going to ship it up to Philadelphia but it was expensive to ship it. I had only recently come to the East… Read More »
Every place, person and thing has a name, mostly applied locally and then eventually agreed upon my everyone else. When the US thought of appropriating and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, it was trying to change a centuries old agreed upon name. It didn’t work. It got me thinking about how we call places and… Read More »
It is true that you have to have enough money to produce the desired commercial well. But how much is enought? We are often asked how much of the budget should be spent on production versus media. There is no simple answer but there are some clear guidelines. The cost of production is the overhead… Read More »
In the time of mass media, the cost of entry was very high. To make a TV commercial could cost thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Airing on network TV was also prohibitive, even if you already had a commercial. This meant two major things: marketers had to take time and be careful what… Read More »
Names are funny things. They are the nouns of our lives. Without them there would not be language. They create expectations and label us. They become our brands. We are often asked why we named our company Calexis and what it means. The truth is, we made it up. Our business is creativity. We create brand… Read More »
After many cocktail parties, I realized that most consumers see advertising and criticize it as if they knew what went in to creating it. They never think about the process, only the end result. When we look at an iceberg, we remark on its beauty without realizing that nine tenths of it are below water.… Read More »
One example that randomness can bring order is the theory that an infinite number of monkeys hitting keys at random on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. The odds of this happening are obviously infinitely small. There have… Read More »