Keep a twist in the headline or in the visual.

'If the idea in the ad is being carried by the headline, it means the headline will contain a twist, a shock factor. Therefore the accompanying visual must play a subservient or straight role. And vice versa.’– Jim Aitchison, The Ball Partnership

Should you be rational?

‘Anyone who thinks you need a rational benefit is ignoring 90% of the human brain, which is irrational. There is no rational benefit to Coke and Pepsi.’
– Neil French, WPP

Look for an idea.

‘People are hard to shock with execution. You tend to remember execution for a short while. You tend to remember ideas for a long time.’
– Gary Goldsmith, Lowe

‘I think in the best execution routes there is an idea. In a lot of it there isn’t, and unless the image is truly outstanding, it isn’t as memorable.’
– David Abbott, Abbott Mead & Vickers.

Avoid the obvious.

Find out what everybody is doing in the category and do the opposite.

‘Research said that all beer must be light coloured these days, so we decided to make ours black. It must be light in alcohol, so we made ours 12% alcohol. The ads must have photographs of girls, so we decided not to have any photographs of girls. They must have status symbols, so we said, no status symbols. They must have crowds of blokes having a jolly good time in a pub. We said we’ll have none of that either. Every rule we could find about beer advertising, we decided to break.’

– Neil French on XO beer -

Find a unique feature in the brand

The feature could be in the brand name, packaging, shape, design, or price. It could be a little detail in the production or history of the product. For this you must learn as much of the product as possible.

‘In the absence of knowledge, you will be doomed to rely more and more on adjectives; always a mistake.’

– Bob Levenson, Doyle Dane Bernbach-

Print advertising changes superficially...

Print advertising changes superficially.We go through fashions– borders, typography, colour type, etc. Techniques change, but I don’t think the enduring principles of good communication will change that much. Because it’s about human behaviour and reaction.

– David Abbot, Abbot Mead & Vickers -

POEM - ANYWAYS

Life as a leader, Life as a dreamer

People are unreasonable, illogical, self-centered

Love them anyway

If you do good

People may accuse of selfish, ulterior motives

Do good anyway

If you are successful

You will win false friends, and true enemies

Succeed anyway

The good you do today

May be forgotten tomorrow

Do good anyway

Honesty and frankness

Make you vulnerable

Be honest and frank anyway

People favor underdogs

But only follow Top-dogs

Fight for some underdog anyway

What you spend time building,

Maybe destroyed overnight

Build anyway

People who really need help

May attack you if you help them

Help them anyway

Give the world best you got

And you may get kicked in the tee

Give the world you got anyway

NOTE: Never realise who wrote this poem... but i liked it a lot.

Slowdown and the fear of loosing your job

Last few weeks have been discomforting. Got news from my previous company, that some 500 people were asked to leave, on grounds of non performance and cost cutting under slowdown... some people had been hired less than 12 months ago. The aftermath saw about 10 more people quitting almost immediately, the reason 'I will quit before I am asked to leave'. over the past one month had heard atleast 20 other stories of people being asked to leave from various media companie, TOI, HT, IT, Outlook, Reliance Retail, Subhiksha and a few more...
Some of the companies were actually doing quite well or so it seemed, and then it makes you wonder, whether this is happening because of the slowdown or are the companies firing under cover to undo some of their past sins.
A company I know, showed about 30 crores of loss in the last quarter. the official news was that the loss was on account of firing some 300 people and the pink slips cost them that amount. The fact was that they had to write off about 30 crores of accumlated bad debts over the past 5 years. some retail companies again fired a lot of people, maybe because of their over exposure to taking risks in rampantly opening retail outlets in every nook and corner they could find to have the first movers advantage rather than actually studying the viability of the outlet in that area.
But whatever the reason for firing, there is a sense on uncertainty and insecurity with employees.

Corporate Blooper

This is how technology dependance usually results in corporate bloopers. My company has an internal portal for employees. As a part of this site, there is a section that encourage employees by congratulating them when they complete a specific tenure... well ... and so it seems they take the data, not from the HR data but from the date on which their email ID was created.... probably for one, it was easier for the programmer to access that info and two because the data might not be way off the mark on the DOJ because a email ID is created within 1 week of joining....

but then things go wrong from there on.... one day I see the following screen

A person by the name "Application testid9" has completed 7 years in the organisation and tops the employee list for that day...

the error was later on corrected after some manual intervention...

The Million Dollar Homepage

The Million Dollar Homepage ( www.milliondollarhomepage.com ) How many people smacked themselves on the head for not thinking of this? About a million? Alex Tew made an initial investment of £50 on the domain name and a basic web-hosting package. Then, he proceeded to sell a pixel on his page for one dollar. The rest is history. He reached his goal of earning one million dollars and then some. Now, he’s selling 1000 limited edition poster prints (signed by Alex himself!) and offering an opportunity to “own a print of Internet history.”

The then 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England to help raise money for his university education. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website is said to have generated a gross income of $1,037,100. The site's Alexa ranking as of 4 February 2009 is 46,523, having peaked at around 127.

The home page of the site consists of one million pixels in a 1000×1000 pixel grid, on which image-based links were sold for $1 per pixel, in minimum 10×10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which they were linked, and a slogan displayed when hovering the cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator.

On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels left were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100.00, bringing the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income.

visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage for more info....