When buying a car, it’s common practice to go for a couple of test-drives before making your purchase decision. Whether you’re in the market for a brand new Gallardo or a third-hand Multipla, you want to make sure your hard-earned money isn’t wasted on a lemon. Even though all the test-drives in the world could never make the Multipla anything but a sour piece of fruit. But even if the ugliest car ever built somehow made it to your wish list, you’d still want to make sure there’s nothing – mechanically – wrong with it. (more…)

I find myself doing a lot of PR jobs lately, which has made me realise two things. One, what exactly it is PR agencies do, and two, that advertising as we know it is officially dead. In the analogue age – or more specifically in the days before Facebook – reaching your target audience was a straightforward numbers game. You had a bag of money out which you would invest 25% in concept development and production, while the remaining 75% would go to your media agency that would use it to purchase a woefully unimaginative media mix for it, consisting of TV, radio and print. If the media guys felt a little crazy, maybe they would even throw in some outdoor. But however boring, this standard media palette would get you a guaranteed number of GRPs and therefore potential customers reached. You could play with the ratio of TV, print, radio and outdoor a little depending on your target audience and objectives, but in general the formula would work every time without exception. And if sales unexpectedly failed to increase in spite of your campaign efforts, either the sales department screwed up or the product was simply crap to begin with. But either way, the Math of Reach would always hold. (more…)

For us Europeans, last Sunday was just a Sunday like any other. We visited family, went to the movies or spent the entire day hung over in bed – as you do. Apart from the fact that it was minus 273 degrees across the entire continent, the 5th of February could have been any given Sunday. On the other side of the Atlantic though, it was a completely different story. Because last Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday, which means 100 million Americans were glued to their TV sets with a bucket of buffalo chicken wings in one hand and a Bud in the other. It’s easily the biggest American sports event of the year and yet due to our cultural differences it’s a sport most of us couldn’t possibly care less about. To the majority of Europeans, watching a game of American Football is about as exciting as watching a glacier move. I’m sure it’s all very captivating if you actually know the rules. But as we haven’t been brought up with it, we have no clue what it’s about and so as far as we’re concerned, American football is right up there with curling.

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