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As everyone knows, industrial relations in the London Underground tend towards the sensitive. Yet the people who keep the system running are among the most committed and long-serving in the country, which makes them the ideal source for suggestions as to how to make things work better and more efficiently. Suggestions boxes had been tried;…

Butchers from i2i on Vimeo. No-one else comes close. In 1995, a client agency asked me to help them create the TV launch for Butchers Dogfood, a long established supermarket product that had never been advertised before. The name, of course was a gift and it was only a short step to Fit as a…

Tell the whole story, before you can say ‘once upon a time’.  If an ad’s first duty is to be seen, the headline’s is a lot tougher. Your image and design have caught the eye; now the headline has to engage the interest and imagination, give the gist of what the ad’s about, and persuade…

Straplines come in all shapes and sizes and with every conceivable internal dynamic. Some work instantly, some burn slow, some last for ever and some, like jokes and fish, are best served fresh. So when BP went through the great change in 2000 it did seem appropriate, if a little obvious, that the new lower…

Amazing as it seems now, I had to promise my client that Stephen Fry was going to become well known, before the booking was approved. It was the late 1980’s. And it was a tough brief. Robert Conway, owner of the Covent Garden General Store, London’s most successful gift, toy and card shop had decided…

Cider company HP Bulmer, UK owners of Jamaican lager brand, Red Stripe, had a budget of £35K to do some press ads and a small poster to put in stores across the country, to see if the brand could appeal beyond its ethnic core market. You couldn’t do much nationally with that kind of money, but…

I was sent to Portugal, with a packaging designer from Michael Peters Associates, on a brief to come up with a name for Sandeman’s White Port. We were booked for a week – the agency were charging my time  at  £2000 a day so were happy to let me out of the office. Our schedule…

In 1986, the London agency I was working in was bought by a group representing News Corp and I found myself working on The Sun newspaper, which was never going to last; so I left and went to Ireland to stay with friends. While there I came across the most extraordinary group (I use the…

At first glance, the banner space at the bottom of your local paper may not look like the perfect spot to launch a successful business-building campaign. But regular fortnightly slots in the Maidenhead Advertiser helped our family lawyer client grow more than 300% in just three years. You can’t fault the logic. When a marriage…

Rosser Reeves and Ted Bates came up with the concept of the Unique Selling Point or Proposition to meet the challenges presented by the proliferation of parity products and services in the 20th Century. When there was no Unique Selling Point to be made, its equally important sibling, the Unique Selling Personality, came into play.…