Category: Uncategorized

And how can Catherine Deneuve, a flamingo and a bottle of scent help us understand the answer? Ok I lied about the flamingo.
Image from the V&A

“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think” Dorothy Parker I think aphorisms rock and make any strategy, presentation, brief, conversation go…

“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless imitative style”. George Orwell

You see it all the time – Client briefs, agency presentations, awards papers – the great cop out.
This is a low interest category.
It’s the universal panacea, the ultimate excuse, the dog ate my homework of the marketing world.
No wonder the work is dull, the thinking is lame or the creative is vacuous it is after all a low interest category and we might as well all go home.
Image from ‘far from dull’ by Dominic Greyer.

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative” Oscar Wilde – Aphorist par excellence

My Grandparents were farmers in Somerset. They never really saw the necessity for television and indeed only got one in the early ’90s when my grandfather got ill. Consequently childhood visits were rather delightful since in the evenings we were required to make our own entertainment just as they had all their lives – the last vestiges of an Edwardian upbringing full of tennis parties, journal writing and the vigorous consumption of slim volumes of poetry.
And it rather tickles me to think that our sources of entertainment are coming full circle – back to ourselves and a world my grand parents might have been familiar with. But instead of keeping diaries we blog, instead of amateur dramatics we have You Tube and Googleidol and instead of dusty slide shows of people butchering endangered species with gay abandon we have flickr.
In my day we make our own entertainment.

None of that Lucozade nonsense here. I am trying to gather together set of utterly legendary repositionings from any part of culture or society. There are bonus points for total originality and deductions for mentioning the Fourth Emergency Service (tell me something I don’t know).
The World’s first planner?

…if google has its way.

A house ad for HHCL from the early 90’s proving that we have always known that ad avoidance is as endemic in the UK as avian flu.

So here is a rubbish idea. I am going to call it pimp my proposition. You give me and the rest of us a brand or category by posting a comment and I give you a proposition at best or a brilliant insight at worst. You decide I am way off the pace and ignore it while everyone else thinks i am an arrogant tosser. Eventually someone out there comes up with the goods three months after you needed it. Job done. If its a brand outside the UK I’ll definitely need the category.