One of my friends sent me something a while ago called Rules Of The Air, from the Australian Aviation Magazine.
As it was funny and relevant, I sent it to my ex-partner Glenmore, who was ejected from the RAF when young for doing something dangerous in a fighter jet over the main freeway from London to the North of England.
Then I noticed Read More »
Here’s a strange story for you.
A while ago I wrote an e-mail for a firm selling investment advice.
They took forever to get the damn thing out and never told us how it did, but one day sent us an e-mail asking us to adapt it for another firm’s list with whom they had a deal.
But by accident we saw two revealing insights into why so much marketing is bad. Read More »
Not long ago I was speaking at an event here in London run by Perry Marshall, the Adwords wizard.
Not surprisingly, nearly all the attendees were on-line marketers.
I asked them some questions: “Do any of you watch TV? Go to the movies? Read newspapers? Magazines?” Read More »
This will be short and sweet – but could save you a sack of woe and a ton of money.
I have a partner called Al. I hate him, because he does what he does in the country in Devon – far from the filth and smoke of the metropolis.
What he does is help people get better results online; and what never ceases to amaze me, and him, is that out of all the dumb things you can do, practically everyone seems to favour seven in particular. Read More »
If you don’t know what you’re talking about you can get into terrible trouble, because if what is said is not what is meant you end up doing the wrong thing.
One great curse in this respect is jargon. All professions and industries have special jargon to confuse and impress outsiders whilst giving insiders a comforting feeling that they belong to some special group and are doing something important.
At the same time it confers an air of mystery to proceedings, enabling those in the know to charge more money for doing what are usually quite routine and simple tasks. Read More »
After an Ogilvy & Mather board meeting in Frankfurt, 18 years ago, David Ogilvy told me over dinner that “Rosser Reeves and I were talking one day, and we agreed that everything we knew we had learned from John Caples.”
Rosser Reeves, who was Ogilvy’s brother-in-law, coined the initials USP that everyone now uses with such gay, and often inaccurate abandon.
John Caples, besides being a very good copywriter – They laughed when I sat down at the piano is one of the most copied lines ever – popularised systematic testing, though not enough to penetrate the thick skulls of most corporate drones. Read More »
Marketing is often compared to war, and there is much pretentious talk about strategy, conquests, territory and so forth.
That is one reason why I have spent years reading about great generals. IT has taught me a lot.
Many people think the Duke of Marlborough – an ancestor of Winston Churchill – was England’s greatest ever general.
He was obsessed with minutiae. Before his greatest-ever victory, Blenheim, he made sure all his men had fresh boots and a meal of bread and soup. Read More »
