Fire up the Quattro

My name is Steve White.  I’ve had an accident and I’ve woken up in 1982.  Am I mad, in a coma or have I gone back in time…. or has the advertising world gone nostalgia mad!?! Well, although my wife will certainly vouch for madness.  I can confirm that the latest trend in advertising is leading me to have my very own ‘Ashes to Ashes’ moment.

It simply can’t have escaped your attention as to just how many big British retailers have gone ‘nostalgic’ with their campaigns over the last year or two.  M&S, Persil, Virgin, Hovis, Milky Way and John Lewis have all used campaigns that hark back to their past.  But why are so many brands going down this creative route?  Why are so many brands looking back and not looking forward?

Read more…

Choosing a director is a tricky business. You are putting a lot of trust in someone to bring your concept to life and this time we needed it to be extra special.

Working on the concepts for the Marisota spring summer 2009 DRTV advert we had to go back to basics, introducing the girls and focusing on the research and size messages. So to bring all this to life means taking care of the little details.

Once the storyboards were signed off the real work started. Firstly finding a Director who can understand the concept and add something special was needed. I was introduced to Andy Saunders through Sharon Gunnel and her production team at Velvet. The first pre-production meeting went really well, Andy brought lots of ideas to the table to bring the ad to life… and I was sold on him straight away.

Read more…

Have you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four? It’s about an everyman living under an oppressive totalitarian regime. The ‘proles’ are kept in a controlled state of poverty, living under almost constant surveillance and being ‘educated’ on a daily basis to believe in the inherent good of their government and the inherent evil of others. All in all, it’s a terrifying fiction. Well, if you can call it that. In fact, the regime in the novel closely resembles many real-life regimes of the twentieth century. And, much like the citizens of George Orwell’s dystopian world, the billions of human beings living under these govenments were mostly genuine and wholehearted believers. Their corrupt leaders successfully brainwashed  them into thinking they were living the good life, even while terrible things (war, poverty, oppression) happened all around them. There’s no denying it’s an impressive feat. Yet you can’t help but wonder: how on earth did they do it?

Consider Adolf Hitler for a second. Just how did a small man with a silly moustache convince a nation of perfectly ordinary people to revere his Nationalsozialist Party, to give erstwhile chums up to concentration camps and to greet the promise of aggressive war with arms wide open?

Through manipulative, powerful advertising campaigns – that’s how. He may have been a cold-hearted, hate-filled Nazi git, but Hitler was an undisputed master of propaganda.

Read more…