On our second day in Haida Gwaii, we continued south from the floating camp in the zodiac toward the very southern tip of the islands. We planned to stay at an abandoned whaling station called Rose Harbour on of the few places for shelter in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site which comprises most… Read More »
It is quite amazing how easy your job is. Just ask someone who doesn’t do it. At the same time, from your point of view, their job is amazingly easy. We get this every day in advertising because with digital tools it is not that challenging to make something that looks like an ad. But… Read More »
Have you ever felt like some company was buzzing around you, becoming so irritating and you couldn’t seem to bat them away. All they wanted was a little bit of your blood. Take the banks and cell phone companies. Somebody, please… take them… They are constantly sucking just a little bit of blood out of… 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 »
Which commercials do you believe? Too few! Many commercials are produced these days with little effort to maintaining the premise that their message is actually believable. Maybe we gave up trying to make them believable. But when commercials are more believable, they are more persuasive. There are three qualities that contribute to believability: expertise, trustworthiness,… Read More »
I was driving along on a city street in my car, speaking, hands free, to a friend in California. As we were talking an ancient Ford Model T pulled in front of me. The Model T was in amazing condition and it toodled along in front of me as we pulled up to a light… 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 »
We travelled to the farthest western edge of Canada. Past where the continent ends, there is an archipelago of islands out in the Pacific that used to be called the Queen Charlotte Islands. Now it is called Haida Gwaii. It is no easy task to get there. We drove from Vancouver up the Fraser River… Read More »