Dirt is good

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I took part in a panel discussion at the IAA European Advertising summit this week along with Jim Carrol and Rita Clifton and chaired by the great John Grant (who gave me a copy of his excellent new book ‘The Innovation Manifesto’). We had to talk about our favourite European campaign. I chose Persil’s ‘Dirt is good’ despite the tragic creative work in the UK. I feel that this bit of thinking really hasn’t had the fame that it deserves which saddens me. This is the kind of thing that I said.
Image courtesy of KoAn

There is no such thing as a low interest category

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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.

In my day we made our own entertainment

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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.