Foreign restaurants are an absolute goldmine for bad spelling. Most of us have enjoyed a giggle at the ‘innovative’ dishes that pop up on menus in exotic climes… like the ‘friend eggs and tose’ I had for breakfast in Thailand, for example. Delicious it was too.

In this context, typos are funny, endearing and completely forgivable; they don’t negatively affect your opinion of the restaurant or the quality of the service you expect to receive. But what about when you visit a new business online? If you’ve got no prior knowledge of the company, how do you feel if you open their website and it’s full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar? Bet you’d be more suspicious than I was tucking into my friend eggs… Read more…

I received a text from my 19 year-old cousin the other week. It said, “Thx 4 bday gift gr8 2 cu lol. cu soon xxx.” I nearly disowned him on the spot. How, I thought, can so many grammatical errors be perpetrated in so few words? Of course I replied in three times the number of characters, without so much as substituting ‘and’ for an ampersand. That’ll teach him.

Until now I have viewed ‘text speak’ as a harmless lexicon of youth… so imagine my dismay to discover that LOL, FYI and OMG have made it into the canon of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. LMAO. Seems it might be time to reassess.

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He may be a Spuds Spurs fan, but Red C Account Director Steve White is not completely useless. He knows an awful lot about Email Marketing for one thing. So when he gave me a 700-page document from MarketingSherpa called Best Practices in Email Marketing I thought to myself, this is probably worth reading.*

MarketingSherpa is a research firm that specializes in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing (and what does not.) Their goal: to give marketers of the world the stats, inspiration, and instructions to improve their email marketing results.

According to their Research Manager Stefan Tornquist this guide was written “to provide one-stop guidance on building a ‘best in class’ email program, whether you’re managing an enterprise level marketing department or a small business.”

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I really like Andy Maslen. Next to Drayton Bird he’s probably the man whose books I’ve learnt most about copywriting from. I’d recommend his first, Write to Sell to anyone, and do quite frequently in fact.

He’s just released two new ones, the first of which I’ve just finished. It’s part of a series called 100 great ideas. Andy’s contribution is called 100 Great Copywriting Ideas.

It’s not a book you should read from start to finish. As the dust jacket says it’s “more tapas or dim-sum than three course meal. You can start anywhere you like and pick and choose whatever takes your fancy.”

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Salman Rushdie in 1989

What do John Milton, Salman Rusdie and Frank Zappa have in common? They’ve all written adverts.

Yep. It might come as a surprise to the purists amongst you, but there’s a whole raft of notable novelists, poets, scriptwriters and lyricists who cut their literary teeth as copywriters. So what could advertising have offered these talented writers, aside from a steady income?

There is a theory that John Milton, author of the epic poem, Paradise Lost, was also the writer of the first ever trade advertisement to appear in the UK press. In September 1658 in Mercurius Politicus, the progovernment newsbook of which he was editor from 1650, there was an advertisement for a ‘China Drink’ with purported health properties:

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