Well that’s that then. The fat lady is singing and we’re all as sick as a parrot. Following England’s early bath we’ve started the post mortem and the clichés have been spewing out quicker than Lionel Messi on speed. ‘We’re failing at grass roots level’. ‘We need to have a roots and branch investigation.’ ‘England needs an English manager.’ What is it...
The other day I asked my nephew what the capital of France is. He replied ‘F’. Yep, most of us know that capital letters are used for proper nouns and at the beginning of a sentence. But take a quick look at the intertubes and you’ll discover that the misuse of capital letters is now reaching epidemic proportions. So here’s a handy...
With exam season nearly upon us let’s take a look at how well last year’s 16 year olds did. (These are all genuine answers. Wrong, but genuine.) Q: Name the four seasons A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large...
I joined Twitter over a year ago for completely the wrong reasons: I opened a Twitter account because everyone else had one and it seemed like a laugh. Although I didn’t give too much thought as to why I was using Twitter and what I wanted to get out of it, I did think about what I was going to tweet. I...
Editor's note: This is a guest post by fellow copywriter Jamie Hudson. OK, so I’m generalising and being just a tad subjective. And I only used the word ‘crap’ because it made a nice headline. So let me be more specific. A great many straplines you see these days are irrelevant, forgettable and most unforgiveable, boring. It wouldn’t be so bad if...
I was chatting to the guys over at digital agency Datadial last week when I casually mentioned the (rather fab) flowchart I’d recently created to show the relationship between Search Engine Marketing, Online PR and Social Media Marketing. ‘We did an infographic similar to that last month’ they told me. Here it is. Take a look. It’s brilliant and way cooler than...
So last week I was trying to explain to a friend the difference between Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing using a napkin and a lip pencil. This is sort of what I drew. (Click to enlarge.) Do you agree? Is there anything else that needs including? Let us know in the comments....
I get loads of direct mail. I give most of it a cursory glance – more out of professional interest than anything else – before tossing it in the bin. And you probably do the same. It seems that Amnesty knows this. Because their latest direct mail piece has on its front cover: This flyer will ask you to make six choices....
If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably been inundated with marketing bumph from your parliamentary candidates in the last few weeks. They’re often garish, glossy flyers stuffed full of daft images of various political bods grinning gormlessly as they plant a tree. And they tend to go from my letter box to my recycling box with hardly a glance. But yesterday,...
When you book a holiday, buy a gadget or download an album, chances are, if you’re anything like me, you read all the reviews on Amazon, TripAdvisor and iTunes before parting with your cash. Once, much to the annoyance of the boyf, I changed our hotel booking in Marrakech – just because Enid Williams in Basingstoke hadn’t thought much of...
