Goodbye Piccadilly: It’s lights out for the Circus January 16, 2017 It's lights out for Piccadilly this morning, as the patchwork of billboards adorning the Circus is switched off for the last time, to be replaced with the biggest, most technically advanced, screen in western Europe. In its century long life, the advertising space has rarely been switched off during peacetime, bar a handful of notable [...]
The Friends of the Earth fracking ruling is exactly why Adland self-regulates January 9, 2017 If this newspaper made wild unsubstantiated claims, presented as fact, that fracking would purify the vilest depths of the Thames, or seep a cancer curing chemical into the water table, we’d rightly have questions to answer. So when Friends of the Earth (FoE) produce leaflets claiming that fracking could cause cancer, contaminate water supplies, increase [...]
How full service agencies have come full circle: Meet The&Partnership January 9, 2017 After a scurry following a room change I meet Nick Howarth, managing partner at The&Partnership, in one of the countless buildings it is “slowly taking over” in Fitzrovia. “I think it’s called ‘Noho’ now,” he chuckles. “If you say you work in Fitzrovia people think you’ve gone back in time about 250 years.” The&Partnership is a [...]
Yahoo would be liable to pay a $198m fine were GDPR already enforced December 19, 2016 At the dawn of the internet, Google and Yahoo were in stiff competition for search dominance. Many think the former’s success was due in part to its name becoming a ubiquitous verb for searching online. But decades on, semantic development has finally caught up with Yahoo. Its name is now synonymous with bad data practice. [...]
Protein’s Will Rowe talks early adopters, audience insights and brands “doing good” December 19, 2016 "I was a really bad web designer… that’s how it all started,” chuckles Will Rowe, founder and chief executive of Protein. We’re in his Shoreditch office, a space resembling the bedroom of my teenage dreams; a well trodden cow hide is stretched over the corrugated steel floor below shelves laden with volumes of glossy magazines. [...]
Kellyanne Conway: Lessons from the woman who won the election December 15, 2016 President Donald Trump. You can’t deny it has a ring to it, however much you may dislike him. Liberal elites are looking for someone to blame. Was it belligerent white America showing two fingers to the elite; the Russian Bear, claws prying into the Democratic campaign? Fake news, trolls, the filter bubble, the alt-right? Many will [...]
Branding a sports star: How Wasserman create social media prodigies December 12, 2016 Sports stars want to be rock stars, and rock stars want to be sports stars,” says Lenah Ueltzen-Gabell, executive vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Wasserman. We’re sitting in its newly refurbished headquarters at Aldwych House, an ultra-modern, open space of reductive design, coated with memorabilia gleaned from years of representing [...]
Banning junk food ads won’t stem the flow of fat kids December 12, 2016 For anyone who grew up in the nineties, advertising and children’s television were one and the same – for every ten minutes of Power Rangers, there would be five minutes of ads for Sunny D and awful American cereal. Invariably some garish, multicoloured cartoon character would jump out of the television, screaming demands like an Isis [...]
AppLovin: Firing the 5G starting gun December 5, 2016 Dubbed the “Brexit Budget,” this year’s Autumn Statement was one of few surprises – other than that it would be the last. The chancellor certainly lived up to his “Spreadsheet Phil” epithet. But Philip Hammond gave a welcome nod to UK tech industries, all too aware that their impetus will play a prominent role in [...]
Brands need to grow a backbone and stop pandering to the left’s virtue signalling December 5, 2016 On both sides of the pond, a censorious precedent is being set in the name of “brand values”. It’s a petulant reaction to the moral posturing of internet losers. And I don’t mean “losers” in the perjorative, playground sense – I mean literally, those on the losing side of either Brexit, or the presidential election. [...]
