The Web Copy Blog

The G spot Café answers their phone with “hello” so the caller has to ask, “Is that the G’spot?” The response is: “Ob, yes, yes, my God, you’ve found it.”
Advertising is an expensive business. That’s why the Crime of Being Earnest is so common. So much is at stake, it’s hard to stay loose.
Yet, spend [...]

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Originality is a boon to the advertising industry –I don’t mean intrinsically, in its own right, as some kind of artistic outlet for otherwise unemployable, young creative people.
Fact is, human beings respond faster to something original. Freshness and lightness have immediacy. Immediacy is attractive.
We are hard-wired to look for “the new.” The novelty of new [...]

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If Al Ries’ Positioning was probably the most influential Law of advertising in the 70s, then Jean Marie Dru’s notion of Disruption has been powerfully successful in the noughties.
His philosophy reached back to the great campaigns of VW, Nike, Apple, Heineken, among others, to look what they had in common; he realized there was always, [...]

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One of America’s most successful exports has been canned laughter. It’s the staple diet of the world’s sitcoms, home video shows, comedies, and is now even used in children’s shows.
I’m amazed it’s not used in TV commercials (other than ironically). After all, telling the audience at home when something is funny would be useful in [...]

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I know some clients accuse creativity of occasionally committing the crime of irrelevance.
However, the reality is that your advertising message is competing with, well, reality. Your ad must not only be more interesting than other ads. It must be more immediately compelling than the editorial or programming surrounding it.
Way beyond that, your ad must also [...]

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Most creative people, in agencies throughout the world, have an encyclopedic knowledge of who wrote and art directed great ads of the past, going back almost half a century. Ask about the VW ads from the 1960s, Hamlet ads from the 1970s, Apple ads from the 1980s, Nike ads from the 1990s, etc.
Ask who created [...]

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Love conquers all.
Do you remember the love Bug computer virus that swept the world a few years back? It proved that even the most hard-bitten business professionals will instantly open up an e-mail attachment simply because it came with cuts straight through alertness, cognitive processes, training, security protocols and, yep, good old common sense.
“Oob, someone [...]

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As far back as the 1990s, world-renowned neuroscientist, AR Damasio, showed that no decision we humans make is based wholly on rational thinking.
Our highly developed neocortex equips us to perform wondrous feats of reason and analysis, but it is still wired up through our older, emotionally driven, biological brain.
Which means, no matter how hard we [...]

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 “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it,” said Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock.
Advertising is a means to an end. We are here to ring up sales not win gongs. Trouble is, too much advertising has become adept at drawing too much attention to itself for [...]

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The law of Consistency has a natural-born enemy. The Crime of the New Broom. A change in the marketing department usually ushers in sweeping changes to agency, campaign and brand direction.
Problem is, the public often tires of a campaign at a much slower rate than marketing executives.
The history of advertising is littered with abandoned campaigns, [...]

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