Category Archives: Advertising

Commercials That We Don’t Believe

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 »

How Mustaches Can Screw Up Commercial Shoots

In honour of November being Mustache Month for Prostate Cancer, here are two stories about how mustaches have screwed up commercial shoots for me. First case was a Mr. Clean commercial we shot. It was a typical Procter & Gamble commercial. Lady of the house uses Mr. Clean to leave her house looking bright and… Read More »

Me and Koolio Down in the Jungle

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 »

Narcissism of Small Differences

How many times have clients asked us to change fonts, change colour shades, change layouts… I couldn’t count every time this has happened.  Small adjustments get deemed important by those suggesting them.  And in conversation become more and more important.  Sometimes it allows people to think they have made some impact on the project. It… Read More »

The Day the Junos Went Public

The Juno Awards was an annual private music industry awards ceremony for insiders, wearing tuxedos and gowns, until 1995. The organization that put it on was the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS). They had this crazy idea that they should be making money from it rather than losing or at best breaking even. Enter Jacques… Read More »