You might like to hear this story in Podcast version for (14 minutes) or read on.   In 1977, The Allen Brady Marsh Advertising Agency (ABM) pitch for British Rail’s advertising, was for scheduled in their ABM London offices, for 11am. A new business pitch is a nervous day for any Agency, but then the […]

Brands are, therefore, things you must Trust. You build trust by truth. Pants on Fire. Building Trust in a Brand. To convey trust, early brands had personal names or amalgams of them. They stood for real people because you trusted real people (or you used to!) rather than ‘nameless’ companies. Hershey, Arthur Andersen, Wal-Mart, Hewlett […]

Designing & Implementing the Brand Design the brand. The most obvious first place to start is a logo and it’s the most obvious first place to fail. What we’re all guilty of is to pick/design a logo we like rather than one which helps communicate the brand proposition. We’ve talked in other articles here about […]

A brand should have one clear message above all others. Creating a Brand. This is a short piece but perhaps, the most important of all. Who are you and what do you stand for? In our experience, it’s the place where most Advertising fails. Once you’re clear on the customer segment of the market you […]

To make a brand work, you have to apply the proposition. https://admatic.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Applying-the-Proposition_1.jpg Nike early advertising is a case in point. They recognised that to sell running shoes to a wider audience, they needed to convince that audience to get out there and do things like running. At the time, it wasn’t about fashion. It’s simple […]

The consumer isn’t a moron, she is my Wife! David Ogilvy said that and he was spot on. Brands are for real people. What he meant was, that when we talk about generalities like “ABC1s, deciles, audience clusters” it’s not that, it’s real people like, Ogilvy’s wife. They’re not morons, they’re actually you! We even […]

Developing a brand strategy starts with the customer. If the company founder developed a successful product, they did so for a reason. They fulfilled a customer want or need which was the reason they started the business in the first place. Apple thought people would want computers on the desk or in their home and […]

The Advertising expertise was needed at the turn of the century to promote Brands. That’s when it all started circa 1900. ‘Advertising businesses’ (as they were known) had in fact sprung up to act as middlemen between the advertiser and the newspapers in the late 1700’s and 1800’s. Albeit limited, because advertising activity was low, […]

How Products became Brands. What therefore originally drove the need for Advertising professionals, was the development of products and then as brands, which had exploded and accelerated in The Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s. It was during the Industrial Revolution that products became mass produced and therefore, had to be mass marketed. The mass production […]

Media drives Advertising. One needs the other. The on-going establishment of Newspapers at the tun of the 20th century, albeit with their new weekly sophistication, meant advertising was still really a one-horse media pony. But that said too, effective in reaching the customer who had no other media choices. When there’s only one media choice […]