We’ve noticed more and more promotional campaigns for places in the UK recently. The other day we were on our way from London Liverpool Street to Norfolk to visit our parents. Every time the train stopped, it seemed, there was a poster paid for by the local tourist board or investment council, correcting misperceptions about the place or urging us to set up a business. We didn’t know where to get off! Perhaps our favourite was the county-wide campaign for Suffolk (headline: ‘Isn’t it time you Suffolk-ated your family?’). But there were lots of great ideas and it was heartening to see the region’s creativity bubbling through. Here is our journey in full, told in tag lines:

Shenfield. The jewel of Essex.
Ingatestone. Will your business be the first to thrive in Ingatestone?
Chelmsford. With a leading polytechnic university, two cinemas and four nightclubs, it’s no wonder the Romans settled here.
Witham. Have you rejected Witham too hastily?
Marks Tey. The furthest viable commute from London.
Colchester. You’re wrong about Colchester.
Manningtree. Will somebody visit Manningtree!
Ipswich. What will your IP address be?
Stowmarket. There’s plenty of room in Stowmarket.
Diss. You’ll be shocked by the changes taking place in Diss.

From Salman Rushdie to Fay Weldon, copywriters who go on to write novels are two a penny. But what about planners? Their intellectual mastery of human nature should make them great novelists. That’s why we were so excited to hear about the debut novel by Robin Poynglass, Director of Warm and Fuzzies at a leading London agency. ‘The Wedding Murder Code’ is so titled because according to research, books with ‘Wedding’, ‘Murder’ or ‘Code’ in the title are more likely to be bestsellers. Poynglass argues that all three words together should create a blockbuster. But can The Wedding Murder Code live up to the hype and avoid ‘plannery’ language? We think the answer is a resounding yes – but judge for yourself with our exclusive excerpt… Click the link below to read.

 

 Read an excerpt of The Wedding Murder Code (PDF)

Placements are the pits, say commenters at Scamp and Gordon Comstock. But if you think it’s tough for talent to break into the UK industry, you should watch Placement Island, the brainchild of Malaysian tiger agency Pumani-18.

The hugely popular reality show sees dozens of keen young teams dumped on a remote island where they must literally fight for briefs. As in a real agency, they have to be tough to survive. The island has plenty of latte machines and fussball tables but food is scarce – and in addition to Pentel signwriters, every team receives a weapon to attack their rivals with.

At time of posting, the island’s ‘Top Team’ is Li and Gok, who hide out in coastal caves with their crossbows. “It’s brilliant to have a cave to work in,” they say. “At night, one of us always stays up to keep the fire going and guard our portfolio.”

Sometimes, for a change of scenery, the team stroll along the beach with a frappe: “Getting out of the cave for a few hours can really help your thinking when you get stuck on a tough brief,” says Li, “but once we were just on the verge of a big idea when an enemy art director shot Gok in the ankle with a poison dart. He’s been scared to push ideas into other media ever since.”

To increase the challenge even further, bored middleweight creatives from the agency’s mainland HQ have taken to flying over in helicopters, strafing the island with machine guns. The violence pauses only when flamboyant bitch creative director Jackie Hu makes a rare visit to lecture the survivors about creativity.

For juniors in the UK, watching Placement Island may be a comfort, but they face a battle, too. Increasingly, the only way to get a placement in London is to first do a placement placement, where a placement team does unpaid work experience with another placement team, warming the toilet seat and pressing T-shirts for them like boarding school ‘fags’. And when the placement placement placement teams start queueing up to lick the placement placement teams’ boots, we’ll know that advertising is a glamour industry once more.

More on Pumani 18

In this cash-strapped age it’s vital to make the most of precious airtime – and that’s why the marketing strategy of the Energy Saving Trust is so clever. By allowing their current 60-second TV ad to repeatedly grind to a halt the Trust have made it seem to go on forever, making the most of their media spend. We were at an informal gathering with friends when it came on TV, but the sensational, jerking narrative made our conversation falter to a stop and, after watching the rest of the ad in silence, none of us could quite look each other in the eye. That’s powerful!

View the ad

These days, we see a lot of scripts that crackle with witty dialogue and flow. But as the Energy Saving Trust teaches us, the creative community could save these valuable resources for the future, and instead focus on extending perceived length.

We’re often asked to make mood films for clients but recently we’ve also begun making them for ourselves. It’s not only a nice creative warm-up exercise, it’s also a great way of documenting our mood on a particular day. For example, this morning Rob woke up feeling extremely angry towards tropical birds (don’t ask, it’s a long story). He wouldn’t stop shouting “Multicoloured motherfuckers! Multicoloured motherfuckers!” So we spent a few hours making this to help him calm down:

What’s your mood today? Are you excited about crisps? Envious of a man looking through a microscope? Committed to jihad? Let us know by making a mood film of your own. Or just tell us your mood and when we get a spare moment we’ll reflect your mood right back at you in the form of a film, so you can hang on to your transient emotions forever!

To be perfectly honest, we didn’t get this ad when we first saw it. We thought: When did Beijing change its name to London? What is ‘Wagon train to the stars’? If it’s the old name for ‘Star Trek’, why doesn’t it have capital letters? We were baffled – but then we realised what was going on. The new Avibo organisation doesn’t just treat customers as adults – it flatters them as geniuses, capable of solving cryptic riddles as they rush by. The fact that we couldn’t make head or tail of it just reflects poorly on us. The bottom line is: Vivunion has real respect for us as readers – and now we have real respect for Norvivian. And we can’t wait for them to release more Star Trek DVDs!

If we’re a bit late commenting on this one, that’s because we couldn’t quite believe it. You think you know who your heroes are and then they go and do something like this.

Swiftcover.com has been one of our favourite brands since it was formed in 2005 – they always featured heavily whenever we made advert compilation tapes. But now they’ve taken the dollar to promote multimillionaire Iggy Pop. In doing so they go the same way as Country Life butter, a brand whose posters we displayed proudly on our bedroom walls, but who are now nothing but shills for punk rocker John Lydon. If they really needed the money, couldn’t these once-great brands just have put up their prices a bit and stayed true to their fans?

It sounds harsh, but we really hope whichever member of Swiftcover signed the contract gets chucked out of the brand.

How do you know if you’ve come up with that killer line that will define a brand and live on in the language? We have a theory that tag lines need to have an incantatory quality. On first listen, meaning fixes them in the mind, but afterwards it’s the way a line sounds that is all important. For example, “Kakaphoonos Humpton Fox” would make a strong line for a bank, if only it meant something.

Everyone has a different approach to judging the lines they come up with – sometimes it’s just a matter of sleeping on it. But over the years we’ve discovered five techniques that always work for us.

1. Write your line on a banana – is it still powerful?

2. Say it three times in front of a mirror – does anything happen at all?

3. Whisper it to an old person. Can you see sad memories and lost loves flit across their eyes? We tried saying ‘EA Games. Challenge everything’ to a woman at the post office and she was so moved that she wrote it on the back of the letter she was posting to her middle-aged daughter. (She may have been confused at the time.)

4. Simulate time passing by changing the date on your watch. Does your line still sound fresh?

5. Try swapping the order of the words. Tesco’s ‘Every Little Helps’ was originally ‘Helps Little Every’. ‘Every’ was an orphan that the creative team concepted to show how Tesco’s fair pricing could make life better for society’s most vulnerable. Just before the campaign went to print, legendary CD Jack Jesus Junior popped his head round the door and suggested that if they didn’t reverse the slogan he would chew everyone’s balls off. A winning line was born.

If you have any top tag line tips of your own, why not share them?