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 The world weary, corrupt officials have been replaced by incompetent hustlers.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