True today as it ever was

I always liked John Webster's work - although I never found the Cadbury Smash Martians to be all that endearing.

If you look at the date on the lower right hand side of the clipping in the picture you'll see it was January 1988. I tore it out of Campaign magazine when I was a copywriter, working at an advertisng agency called Rialto. My office had a panoramic view of the Auckland harbour. When I wasn't looking out of it I was tearing things out of Campaign.

The interesting thing about the viewpoint by Mr Webster (sadly now deceased)is that almost everything he said back then, 20 years ago, is just as true as it ever was.

"Whoever it was that created the human mind designed it to respond to a set of basic emotions: love, fear, pride, envy, humour-things like that. Anyway, in the list of of priorities it's fair to guess "scratch video" came pretty low"

"Faced with the onslaught of computer-graphics, paint-on-film animation, grain and pop-promo look-alikes, how did the human mind respond? It switched over, as a man, to EastEnders, consistently the most popular programme of the year and not a laser in sight."

Perhaps the web changes that, rebalances things - Web 2.0 at least. Can't remember when I last visited a Flash animated site.

I like the crusty old artifact - which fell out of a book by that other crusty old artifact David Ogilvy, Blood Brains and Beer, his autobiography.

Comments

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Shoulders of giants

"A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the experience." "Life is just one damned thing after another." (Both from Elbert Hubbard - look him up on the wikipedia . If it's wrong - change it)

ThoughtSpurs

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