One minute I was playing squash with my friend Alan, the next minute I was totally in the dark. I could see nothing. Just blackness. Nothing. What happened? The weird thing was that Alan saw the same thing. We had been playing squash on the fifth floor of a club in New York City on… Read More »
As Super Bowls, Stanley Cups and other championships roll around, it is interesting to see so many people wearing the jerseys or replicant jerseys of their favourite teams and players. It is a new thing. Even putting names on the backs of jerseys is a relatively new thing and not all teams even add them.… Read More »
My grandmother would be about 125 years old today. She was born in a country that didn’t exist when she was born. Now it is called Belarus. English was her third or fourth language. I don’t know if she spoke any of them well, but she got her message across. She died before smartphones were invented,… Read More »
In the mid-1970s, my parents arranged for a condo in Florida when I was living in New York. We had a family summer vacation, joined by my brother-in-law and sister and their small two girls, aged 5 and 6. One day we were going to go to dinner with some people and had an hour… Read More »
When we were kids and wanted to play baseball, more than often we had too few players to play a full game with two teams. There were two options: scrub and ping-pong. For scrubs, when the bell rang for lunch or the end of the school day, the boys would make a run for the… Read More »
Once upon a time, when I was working as a prospector, I arrived by helicopter at a camp northwest of Lake Babine, 80 kilometers or more from any highway. Just two of us were there. It was an almost completely forested area, flat, with many mountains nearby; it was just south of the Netalzul Mountains. I… Read More »
We were pleased a few years ago when our Media Director advised us that she had negotiated a free promotion activation from the CBC. She got a promotional tie-in with Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) for our Subway client and, even better, it was to run during the highly rated Stanley Cup Playoffs. All… Read More »
It was the middle of the summer of 1978, I had just taken a job working with Grey de Venezuela, an advertising agency in Caracas, Venezuela. The appeal to me was for some control. I had been working in massive agencies in New York City where I was just another brick in the wall. In… Read More »
People in the U.S. like to treat their Constitution, and its associated Declaration of Independence, like religious works of biblical importance. Immutable. Virtually written by the hands of gods known as founding fathers. The high priests, the U.S. Supreme Court, spend a lot of time interpreting these documents for their laity. What is meant by… Read More »
Everybody thinks they know advertising and can provide us with a critique of what’s good and what’s not. Rarely do I hear criticism that shows consumers understand the strategies we employ to get messages across. More often than not people evaluate commercials based on entertainment value. We don’t. I recall shortly after we had begun… Read More »