Hillary's Dilemma

Nothing Hillary is doing or saying is having any traction against Obama. The Clinton campaign must have tried out 5 different strategies in the past month alone, and nothing is working. There is a lesson here for advertisers about the heirarchy of message impact.Obama is clearly the emotional choice among Democrats. Hillary will never beat him at the emotion game and should stop trying.Her

Even More Creative Cliches

From guest blogger Roger Lewis:My favorites:1. It's award winning.2. Casting will make all the difference.3. Do you remember what the lady said in the focus groups in Houston?4. Let's review the creative strategy.5. Of course we aren't showing the product, the idea is to drive traffic to the web site!

More Creative Cliches

Guest blogger James Cabral weighs in on creative cliches. (See Five Worst Creative Cliches.)Irreverent - As in: "Our target LOVES irreverence. Do something irreverent." Irreverent, to me, means it either doesn't make sense to anyone or only a small group understands it. And the best part is, irreverent advertising doesn't sell anything but an inside joke to a few bozos. Beef jerky and .com

Five Worst Creative Cliches

Next time you make a creative presentation, if you would like to avoid eye rolls and sudden creative death syndrome (SCDS), here are 5 ways not to describe your idea:1. Aspirational: Sounds like it's having trouble breathing.2. Edgy: Edgy was edgy in 1998. Edgy no longer edgy.3. Hard-hitting: This means "We did exactly the kind of dumb-shit idea you wanted, Ms. Client. Aren't we good at kissing

Ad Contrarian Mantra

While on vacation, I will leave you with The Ad Contrarian mantra:We don't get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.I'll be back on the 25th.

Only The Fog Remains

I've developed a melancholy attraction to things that never were: the Old West of Hollywood movies; the 50's of early sitcoms; the San Francisco of Sam Spade.I sometimes find myself walking on the streets that Hammett wrote about. They seem brighter and cleaner -- less haunting. The world weary, corrupt officials have been replaced by incompetent hustlers. The dangerous yet oddly naive characters

Lame Excuses

I love to pick on the research industry. They're so full of shit. They make proclamations with such certainty. And then backtrack so timidly.The researchers who were all so wrong in New Hampshire, wrong in California, wrong everywhere else this primary season are looking for reasons why they were so wrong. (Remember just a few months ago when Hillary and Rudy were locks to be the candidates? When

2012 Came Early This year

On October 23, 2007, TAC wrote an entry called "Baloney Sandwich." It said: ...Second was this piece of baloney from CNET:"A report by U.K.-based Datamonitor, titled 'The Future of Social Networking: Understanding Market Strategic and Technological Developments' predicts that growth in the number of people signing up to be a part of the

Who Cares?

All the fuss and hand-wringing in the ad business over whether "content" will be delivered over traditional broadcast media channels or over the internet, and whether printed publications are doomed by digital media, leads me to ask one question: Who gives a shit?Did the world end when the written word went from sheepskin to paper? When we went from film to tape, or from tape to 0's and 1's? Why

When Your Life Is All Wrong

1. My pathetic life in a nutshell: I turned on my computer this morning and the subject of the first email was Yogurt Overview.Can you imagine Churchill getting an email entitled Yogurt Overview? I can't even imagine George Costanza getting one.2. If you haven't seen it yet:




3. The dreadful effect of "hostile workplace" hustlers on free speech: I thought twice about posting this video. (Also

Super Bowl Vigilantes Strike Again

As we predicted in Super Bow Vigilantes, guardians of the public order have taken down a Super Bowl spot for being offensive.The New York Times reports that SalesGenie.com has announced that it will no longer run a spot with a talking panda bear that had a Chinese accent.The spot is offensive on many levels. Not least of which is how dreadful it is. Exactly the kind of free speech that needs

Scots On The Rocks

Not long ago, when you arrived at an airport in Scotland, you were greeted by signs and posters announcing that you were visiting “The Best Small Country In The World.”According to the Times of London "...this was the slogan of Jack McConnell, the previous First Minister, and it was derided by Alex Salmond when he was elected First Minister in May. In the new era of nationalism, the time seemed

The 5 Eternal, Immutable Laws of Advertising

1. Whoever controls the research wins.2. When we say it’s an art, they say it’s a business. When we say it’s a business, they say it’s an art.3. The smaller the account, the larger the committee.4. The acquirer is always dumber than the acquiree.5. The worst account person in your agency will someday be your client.

Big, Dumb, Expensive Super Bowl Ads

As advertisers get conned by agency and media hype into believing that their Super Bowl buys are just a promotional platform, they are forgetting something -- if the spots are no good, the rest is irrelevant.Continuing a dreadful trend, Super Bowl commercials got bigger, more expensive and stupider than ever this year. Production once again trumped concept.The majority were witless and unoriginal