General Foods maintained a large testing kennel in Kankakee, Illinois. It was close to their dog food manufacturing plant. During the 70s when I worked on their dog food advertising, they had a very successful dog food business. GF sold dry food: Gaines Meal and Gravy Train both dry; semi-moist foods: Gaines-Burgers (in several flavours),… Read More »
You can be successful, and still fail. All it takes is a change in market conditions. We were rewarded for excellent work with P&G on Ariel and Camay in Venezuela by receiving the assignment for the launch of Pampers. There was virtually no competition except old fashioned cloth diapers. How could we miss? Pampers had… Read More »
We lived for three to four years in Caracas. We spent most of our time in the city, at work or driving to the nearby Caribbean beaches. This blog has many stories about our work life in the country. But what about the countryside? For work we did shoot commercials outside the city; but we… Read More »
Many times clients have asked us to change fonts, change colour shades, change layouts, even highlight lines. Small adjustments get deemed important. After discussion they become more and more important as people entrench themselves in a position. It allows people to think they have made some impact on a project. We had some devious techniques… Read More »
Box stores like Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s have expanded dramatically in the past twenty and more years. At these stores, customers buy in bulk and gain savings over regular retail stores through volume discounts. This provides a huge advantage to customers who have the financial ability to load up and have the space at… Read More »
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 by 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 »