168 Things

If your clients are fucking up the planet, what can you do?

Find someone who’s unfucking the planet – in the exact opposite way to your clients – and give them your time pro bono

Call it karmic offsetting.

The big brands have all the money, and all the power. They pay us to create desire. We know how to make people want more, more, more. The result is a planet on fire, oceans full of plastic, animals going extinct – ad people didn’t c...

Tom Gattos, founder of the Rainbow Lottery, talks to me about his long and varied career in advertising. He's won awards all over the world, and worked on four continents. And he's still working, as you'll hear - but his great project now is the Rainbow Lottery - if you don't know it, check it out at rainbowlottery.co.uk - and buy a ticket, too. Big prizes and good causes to support. It's an entertaining in...

After a short pause, we're back with a guest - Paul 'Nobby' Davies, a brilliant creative thinker, who's now a coach. We talk about how he got there, how to give yourself and your team a creative upgrade, and Nobby goes on to explain his concept of 'hyper-observation'. Our conversation is illuminated by many anecdotes, all of which serve a purpose, even if it isn't immediately apparent. If you want...

Breaking through the glass ceiling with Chalice Croke - in this episode, I interview my business and podcast partner about the book she's writing. In it she will tell how she went from a council flat in Battersea all the way to the top in a male dominated, and mainly middle class industry - and she hopes her experience can help and inspire other women following in her footsteps. In the podcast, she tells me about her early yea...

Vonnie Alexander was one of the four partners who founded Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw - one of London's best known agencies, in its day. But what did she do next? Here, she talks about how everything she'd learnt and done in her agency career helped her become a highly successful and sought after coach - though it's not quite as simple as that, as you'll hear. If you've ever found yourself wondering how to ...

If you're creative - for business or pleasure - how do you stimulate your creativity? Especially now, when all our movements are so circumscribed. 
You need to find your inner Winnie the Pooh, and resist Rabbit. Do what Archimedes did, or Mendeleev. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, listen here and I'll explain. I've made a living from being creative for over thirty years, and worked with many...

This is a short bonus episode to follow the one about briefs. I found the brief I wrote for this podcast series, and here we have a look at it. The briefing format is unusual, but rather excellent. It was shown to me by Lu Dixon, a creative titan, and I found it very stimulating. Listen and hear about the format, and then the actual brief I wrote - and let me know if you think we've delivered on the brief. Warning - as I wrote...

If you have to write briefs for creative people to work from - or if you're a creative person, who gets briefed - you will know what a battleground it can be. Is a brief ever good enough? How much blood, sweat and tears goes into writing them? Is it worth the effort? Yes, it is, because a good brief is the first creative act, and from it, brilliant ideas can flow. In this podcast, we share our thoughts and experience from many...

Winning a pitch is only the first step towards what will, you hope, become a wonderful relationship between client and agency. But have you ever analysed how to get there? How trust can grow, and be nurtured? What you all need to do to make it work? 
Angus Crowther and his team at Alchemists have. Their report for ISBA on this subject came out towards the end of last year. In this podcast, we interview Angus about it, and he gi...

I started out in this business as a trainee copywriter, and it was thanks to an introduction from a remarkable woman called Fiona Ross. We're going to make podcasts specifically to help people who want to learn more about how to be a creative thinker, a writer, an art director, a strategist, a leader, and more, but today I'm going back to my own beginning, to talk about a principle that benefitted me, and that I've t...

Everyone who works in marketing has met him - or her - the obsessive, tyrannical perfectionist who picks apart every idea, tells everyone they're rubbish and then burns the midnight oil reworking other people's efforts until they no longer resemble their original author's intents. But perfectionism isn't necessarily destructive and disempowering - it's a driving force for success and for some of the most me...

Lazar Dzamic is one of the leading strategic thinkers in digital marketing - or indeed, any kind of marketing. We worked together at Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw; from there he went to Google; and now he's home in Serbia, for a while. He recently published 'The Definitive Guide to Strategic Content Marketing', (with Justin Kirby, publ. Kogan Page) a book that fully delivers on its title. I spoke with him via a video l...

Storytelling is all the rage, and has been for a few years now. But how can your brand compete with all the other stories out there? Netflix and Amazon have built vast empires from selling stories - and then there are all your competitors, vying for people's attention. It's not enough to let your agency make up some nonsense and plaster it at great expense all over the media. You need to dig deeper to find a satisfying an...