Back when I was a student, there were a couple of songs that everybody seemed to go gaga over. The first was by a band called Stiltskin entitled ‘Inside’ and the other was by an act called Babylon Zoo whose song was called ‘Spaceman’.

Both of these songs are notable for the fact that they became so well known in the UK because they were first aired to the British public via Levi adverts. In the case of Spaceman, the interest in the track resulted in it going straight to number one, where it stayed for five weeks. The track also went to Number 1 in the single charts in twenty-three countries and at the time Babylon Zoo held the record for the fastest selling single for a UK debut artist.

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We love books at Red C. And we especially love books that contain great advertising case studies, just like ‘Advertising Works 18′, which features a case study on our award-winning work for the Swinton Mystery Tipper.

‘Advertising Works 18′ shows how marketing communications has helped organisations including UKTV, Swinton Group and Halifax, to translate big ideas into impressive results on small budgets. So it’s perfect for anyone wanting to produce effective campaigns or drive their business to greater success.

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I don’t think many copywriters enter the ad industry believing they’re going to be paid millions, never mind millions every year, but in 1907 one copywriter came along demanding just that… and he got it too!

That man was Claude C. Hopkins, a legendary copywriter who worked in the early 1900s on behalf of many companies, including: Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company, Swift and Company and Dr Shoop’s Patent Medicine company.

It was only after making some very successful ads for Schlitz beer that his fortunes grew astronomically. He was 41, and was approached by the advertising agency, Lord and Thomas. He agreed to work there full-time after being offered a wage of $185,000 ­– the year was 1907 – by today’s standards that comes in at a whopping $2 million. Nice if you can get it eh?

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When I was growing up in a quiet little town in the south of England, I was always jealous of people with accents. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful” I thought, “to be able to ask for jellied eels, or a sausage barm, without sounding like a ponce. Wouldn’t it be bloody brilliant if the sound of my voice alone communicated a deep-rooted link to the precise location of my upbringing.”

I do, of course, have vocal indicators that identify me as southern English. Many people are even able to place my accent in the south east. But am I from Basildon or from Basingstoke; from Berkshire or from Kent? My part-BBC part-Estuary English style of speech gives few pointers to a precise location. The fact is, millions of people across a large chunk of the country speak in much the same boring way as I do. My voice is a poor compass. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I dreamt of having a real accent.

And I wasn’t the only one. Quite a few of my schoolmates, acutely aware of our shared non-accent, tried to adopt alternatives – with varying degrees of success. Out of my best friends, Mark went Cockney, Dave became Brummie and Pete plumped for Pakistani: a particularly   ill-considered move that did little for his reputation among the local Asian community.

Now in our mid-twenties, I think we’ve all accepted we’ll never have real accents. We’ll always be simply ‘southern’. Yet I remain absolutely fascinated by cities or small regions with a unique style of speech. So when I was given the opportunity to move to Manchester in mid-2008 there was just a single thought that crossed my mind. Mint. Read more…

A couple of months ago, I booked a weekend break with cottages4you – one of the UK’s leading holiday property companies and, incidentally, one of my favourite Red C clients (because they let me write copy like this). Just before I was due to go away, it was suggested  that I write an account of my holiday cottage experience and post it here on this website. Naturally, I started to panic. What if it was a holiday from hell? What if I turned up to find a glorified tool shed decorated throughout with kitten vomit? Luckily for me, I needn’t have worried. Everything about the place was just about perfect… Read more…

Once upon a time, back when I was young and carefree, I dreamt of being an advertising creative. An art director to be precise. There was something about getting paid for drawing pictures at the pub that really appealed to me as a university student… I forget why.

It was during this time that I took a trip to the Tate Modern to get some inspiration for a Yellow Pencil winning idea. After an interesting half day I ducked into the gift shop and found myself  face to face with this weeks’ book; ‘No Copy Advertising’ by Lazar Dzamic.

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Anyone who has ever visited the Creative Department at Red C will know that we love our music… and there’s nothing more we like than discovering some new sounds to tap our little feet to during the working day… that is until Dawn makes our ears bleed by putting on some awful rave radio station like Energy 98.

The band Urusen have just supplied the music for our recent TV Commercial for Cottages4you, and as well as the track ‘Now that she has flown’, that features in the advert… they have some other great tunes as well… which is why we thought we’d do a little piece about that as we also quite like listening to them to help our creativity.

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When I was studying Advertising I aspired to write an ad as good as one of the classic Volkswagen Ads created by the creatives at Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). Starting with Art Director Helmut Krone and Copywriter Julian Koenig, together with Creative Director Bill Bernbach… DDB changed the face of car advertising.

Instead of fancy photography, mansions, sexy models and heavy retouching… they used an advertising style that utilised realistic photographs of the car together with copy that talked to the reader as if it were a close friend and was self-deprecating rather than self-congratulatory. This approach meant that Volkswagen was seen as the first car company to offer a friendly straightforwardness and disarming honesty.

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Do you like music? Okay, stupid question: I might as well ask if you like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, or Christmas Dinner. Everyone loves a good tune – with the possible exception of Andrew Lloyd Webber – and there’s nothing better than getting it for nothing. Remember how the holy grail of free music lured an entire generation into the open paws of that creepy Napster cat? Until the Recording Industry Association tied the bugger up in a burlap sack and chucked it in the Mississippi, of course.

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It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that in September an edition of Entertainment Weekly in the US will feature the world’s first video-in-print advert. Previewing programmes from CBS’s upcoming season as well as adverts for Pepsi… the video advert will work by having slim screens inserted into the magazine that are activated when the magazine pages are opened – kinda like what happens on greeting cards.

Each chip that feeds the screen can hold up to 40 minutes of video with the battery that powers the chip and screen being able to play for about 65 to 70 minutes. This battery can then be recharged by plugging in a mini USB cord and once you’ve got bored of the content contained in the chip… you can download additional content from the Web. Sounds clever, and expensive… so will it take off?

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