Recent work.

Along with Art Director Doug Cook and Copywriter Martin Hartley (Sixtythree Creative) we created this campaign of 24 brand press press executions, 8 radio and one tactical subscription ad for Scotland’;s The Herald.

Targeted at existing readers the press ran in-paper and aimed to both complement their wise choice in reading their paper and encourage  deeper relationship with it by increasing purchasing frequency.  It dramatised a vast array of surprising facts about Scotland that we hoped readers might share with their peers.

(Photo research supported by Think Hard’s Head of Doing, Jeana Gorman.)

(Photo credit: Doug Cook)

The creative work I’m most proud of this year

I worked on this with STV Creative at the end of the year and the ad aims to protect children who are the secondhand victims of Domestic Abuse.

I’m really happy with how lean and stripped back it is and I hope it conveys its core message powerfully and meaningfully.

Mad men?

If the TV series Mad Men positions the ad industry as one of the great bastions of style in the 50’s and 60’s, what on earth happened in the 80’s?

This is what happened in the 80’s.

One of Scotland’s leading creative directors turned up for a Bass Ale shoot in the Crown Bar, Belfast, looking like…

Actually, words fail me.

Certainly some sort of Kajagoogoo reject.

I mean, where to start?

The shorts probably.

The T shirt?

The haircut?

The come to bed expression?

The boots?

And I then went on to form a business with this Gok Wan nightmare.

Caption competition. There may be a bottle of fizz in it for the person who posts the best comment to this picture.

The latest from down 60 watt way

The latest instalment of 60 Watt’s Austerity campaign.

I’m very fond of this execution.  But…it reminds me of my childhood.

Toiling in my father’s allotment for what?  I’ll tell you for what!   Broccoli.

Twenty frigging tons a year of broccoli.

I hated broccoli, it gave me the frickin’ boak.  We had broccoli stew, broccoli pasta, broccoli salad, boiled broccoli, roasted broccoli, summer broccoli, winter broccoli, spring broccoli, purple sprouting broccoli.  We even had Cubby bloody Broccoli.

We had broccoli salad, broccoli soup (that was Ok), broccoli and eggs, broccoli and broccoli, raw broccoli, microwaved broccoli, broccoli tart, broccoli ice cream (actually I made that one up) and last but not least, leftover broccoli.

I HATED BROCCOLI.

This ad gives me nightmares.

New work

I’m really happy with this new campaign we’ve been working on at 60 Watt.  It appears as full pages in The Scotsman and it really taps into the current zeitgeist (a good German word for a war inspired ad). We call it the “austerity campaign”.  Hope you like them.  Let me know what you think.